We have, in the past several decades, seen the terms Afrofuturism, Afrosurrealism, and Afropessimism proliferate across aesthetic and academic works to discuss the relationship between “blackness” and the future, or more specifically, the possibility of black sovereignty. Within a largely American context (though of course having international resonances), these forms of black aesthetic creation and academic interpretation have brought new questions and issues to the forefront of popular culture and have pushed the boundaries of art and subjectivity itself. This paper seeks to read the congruences, tensions, and relations between Afrofuturism, Afrosurrealism, and Afropessimism in their understanding of the possibility and structure of “utopia,” or liberation. I ask, generally on the relation between creation and interpellation: What does it mean to be a “creative force” in a hegemony defined by interpretation? Further, on the difference between futurism and surrealism in light of pessimism: How are we to understand creative agency, ie. a bringing of the future into the present, under a historico-theoretical condition which would argue that “blackness” and “agency” are antithetical concepts? Lastly, along the lines of reading: How might retheorized subjectivities within the black aesthetic canon challenge how we conceive of the relation between creation and interpretation?
In order to fully understand the stakes of such a question, an exploration of Afrofuturism, Afrosurrealism, and Afropessimism must take place. Gabriel Solis has articulately theorized Afrofuturism as a polygeneric form of black aesthetic production which disrupts typical conceptions of the linearity of time and the distinction between humanity and technology. Focusing on the concept of arrival in the work of George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic, Solis argues that Afrofuturist music portrays a “diasporic culture that travels in both directions across the Black Atlantic—in ships in the sky rather than the sea—suturing the fissures rent by the middle passage.” Similarly, the work of Sun Ra produces a general “time dysphoria” where future and past begin to play “with” and “off” each other; “technotopian” works not only promise justice and reparation, but deliver them by appropriating the material of the past (ie. the ship) and re-entering it into a different context (i.e. from sea to space). To put this in even more explicit terms of utopia, I turn to Jose Muñoz’s work in queer studies: the notion that utopia may be rooted in a historical consciousness, where aesthetic creations serve as indications of the future being delivered to the present, resonates deeply with this futurism. It also highlights a fundamental “queering” that is characteristic of futurism, or rather, a necessary hybridity. Aesthetically, this manifests itself as “polygenericism”; Deborah Che, for example, argues that techno music and its association with utopia serves as a point of both racial and generic mixture and cohabitation, drawing from musical traditions across the globe. Symbolically, this manifests itself most paradigmatically in the figure of the cyborg. Drawing from feminist thinker Donna Haraway, Solis argues that the cyborg (for example, in the work of Janelle Monae) embodies a hybridity which “queers” not only typical conceptions of gender, but of humanity itself. Similarly, Deborah Kapchan draws on the work of Karen Barad to shift from an episteme of causality to one of codependence by considering how the natural body and technology produce each other. Most directly, Francesca Royster, discussing the work of Stevie Wonder, argues, “Rather than playing into the Western splits between mind and body, and technology and human, Wonder demonstrates the facility of technology to move us to new relationships with the body, voice, time, and organism.” Thus, futurism uses technological material to signify a more essential, atemporal hybridity which would deconstruct any notion of a self-contained, natural individual (paradigmatic for the Enlightenment tradition).
Much of this bleeds into the project of Afrosurrealism. However, the key differences between futurism and surrealism (even if they are terminological, or merely matters of academic interpretation) further elucidate the role of creativity in the project of utopia. Afrosurrealism is often traced back to the Negritude movement and thinkers/poets like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. These authors used literary techniques of absurdism to challenge dominant political positionalities in colonial/postcolonial conditions, from the Caribbean to Africa. In the 1980s, Amiri Baraka inaugurated the term Afrosurrealism into black critical thought, arguing that the “language” (or more generally, the artistic expressions) of Afrosurrealists “tells as well as decorates. [It signifies] as powerfully as [it] directly communicate[s]. The symbols sing, are cymbals of deeper experience.” Surrealism seems to disrupt the relation between symbol and reality itself. This, in contrast to the symbolics of the ship in futurism, leads to an interesting formulation from Baraka: “It is as though the whole world we inhabit rests on the bottom of the ocean, harnessed by memory, language, image to that ‘railroad of human bones’ at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.” In contrast to the utopia of futurism, it seems as if surrealism does not reappropriate historical material as absolutely as futurism might endeavor to; in surrealism, historical material seems to simultaneously be that “graveyard” of bones and the promise of liberation. In other words, one need not enter space (or the “beyond”) to envision liberation; it lies at the bottom of the ocean, or rather the precise context in which it was once the crux of oppression. Thus, there is, both terminologically and conceptually, a certain “realism” in “surrealism” that futurism is unable to grasp. However, it is a realism imbued with absurdity, or the unreal: “Real and unreal, it would seem, defining the disintegration and the ‘crossed Jordan’ of wholeness or liberation, are contending themes and modes [of Afrosurrealism].”
More recently, D. Scot Miller has articulated the temporality (or atemporality) of surrealism in contrast to futurism: “Afrosurrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow’s tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened… The future has been around so long it is now the past.” Instead of reaching temporally for a”‘symbolic” of liberation which then brings it into reality, Afrosurrealism “presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is [the creator’s] job to uncover it.” The methodology of “uncovering,” compared to that of futurism’s “deliverance” is crucial; it inscribes creation more clearly within a practice of interpretation. Surrealist discursive mimicry does not de/re-contextualize symbols nearly as much as it reinterprets the symbols in their same context, which then reflexively necessitates a reconfiguration of said context: “We reintroduce ‘madness’ as visitations from the gods, and acknowledge the possibility of magic.”
This, in turn, may resonate more strongly with the feminist and queer theory discussed above. After all, in Muñoz, the present exists as a “realm of blueprints” only insofar as queerness, despite its being-towards-the-future, has already arrived. Essentially, the paradox of “arrival” in Afrofuturism is resolved by the atemporal “nowness” of surrealism. What remained speculative now becomes critical; surrealism both understands and encompasses its own limit. This also has consequences on how we conceptualize hybridity; whereas futurism fixates on the cyborg, surrealism notes that the “nature” side of the nature/technology dichotomy itself is fragmented between human/non-human. Discussing “plant positionality,” Royster writes, “In his infusion of ‘funk’ into this depiction of the life of plants, Wonder suggests that black music is synchronous with the roots of all life.” Here, the association of black and non-human life occurs in the same context (plant/animal and black subject) yet is “reintroduced” (to use Miller’s terminology) by Wonder as a hybridity which challenges all human subjectivity. Thus, creation finds a more fundamental connection to interpretation in surrealism, relying on a practice of discovery instead of decontextualization. It is, however, important to note that critics like Baraka have thought of creators like Sun Ra, George Clinton, etc. as both Afrofuturist and Afrosurrealist – the two are not mutually exclusive. However, there are key differences, say, in the project of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (decidedly, though not absolutely, decontextualized) compared to Donald Glover’s Atlanta (very much surreal), which highlight the tension of the two art forms.
We now turn to Afropessimism, a largely academic movement, which more visibly stands in contradiction to any promise of utopia that futurism and surrealism may elicit. Conceptualizing the “intellectual protocols of unconscious identification accountable to structural positionality,” Frank Wilderson defines Afropessimism as a mode of thought which understands “the structure of the entire world’s semantic field” as one which is “sutured by anti-Black solidarity.” Writing, “Unlike the solution oriented, interest-based, or hybridity-dependent scholarship so fashionable today, Afro-pessimism explores the meaning of Blackness not… as a variously and unconsciously interpellated identity or as a conscious social actor, but as a structural position of non-communicability in the face of all other positions,” Afropessimism (at least for Wilderson) does not seem to pay regard to any fundamental hybridity which would complicate the very possibility of self-declaration and instead focuses on the specific socio-political structures which deny this self-declaration specifically to the condition of blackness. The fact that, as Dick Hebdige comments, societal structures inform the unconscious allows culture to reproduce its own ideology ad infinitum; in other words, for hegemony to arise and enclose. For thinkers like David Marriott, this means that there is a certain impossibility of liberated creation; the black subject is in a double bind where an affirmation of blackness would efface their particularity, while a refutation would simply feed into the preexisting “negrophobic” structure.
I look at Marcel Camus’ 1959 Black Orpheus here to demonstrate. One could certainly read this film pessimistically (as Wilderson reads a variety of films and texts in Red, White, and Black). The closing scene, after all, depicts a young boy inheriting both the name and guitar (signifying the “destiny”) of Orfeu, our protagonist who just died in the scene before. However—and the suggested cyclicism of the closing scene reinforces this reading—I reference Hortense Spillers in a pessimism which would read Orfeu’s falling off the cliff as but one death amidst a process of being “‘murdered’ over and over again.” The boy’s fate is set before he plays a note on the guitar; he is to become what came before him, and he is to be “murdered” (oppressed, interpellated) in the same way. There are material manifestations of this fatalism: the lack of proper care in the favelas, the culture of excess, the futility of artistic creation, the symbolics of death throughout the entire film, etc. These would be the institutional mechanisms (or creative impossibilities) which constitute a hegemonic pessimism. On the next level of abstraction, one could also read the making of this film with a certain pessimism in its director being a white, French man who profited, and in fact, retains his notoriety (sovereignty) via his appropriation and consumption of black excess, suffering, and death.
Where do we go from here? What good can futurism and surrealism bring us in this barren landscape of impossibility? While there are many entry points by which one can challenge Afropessimism, I want to examine how the hybridity which creative expression can manifest emerges precisely as the site where subjectivity and ontology may be reconstituted and rearticulated beyond the bounds which would render black sovereignty impossible. Thus, a return to the cyborg (futurism), the plant-human (surrealism), and, indeed, the ship (futurism, surrealism, and pessimism). In light of the onto-political and historical plasticization of the black slave, Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism do not shy away from this horror but rather reconceive of the very notion of the body, regardless of race, as—and I use Kapchan’s work on the ‘sound body’ here—“a site of recognition, an evanescent materiality, a pliant ambiguity.” Circumventing, and in fact deconstructing, the conventions of Western epistemology, and thus the entire set of problematics which Afropessimism confines itself to, Kapchan writes, “Contemporary subjects are moving from a paradigm of relationality (intertextuality, intersubjectivity, intersensoriality, intercorporeity) to an intramodal ontology, a paradigm of imbrication, cohabitation, and coextension wherein the limits of the subject cannot be assumed.” A body without limits; once used as a method of understanding the slave, it may be re-expressed as the fundamental condition of all subjectivity. This is the project of surrealism.
What might we have missed in Black Orpheus that such an onto-epistemology of malleability would tell us? Firstly, that the abstraction of Orfeu’s life into a cyclical and structural violence effaces the radical particularity of his creative expression; pessimism forces us to render the majority of the film meaningless in light of his death(s). Instead, how may we think of the favela and carnival not solely as a site/scene of excess, oppression, and social death, but of the absurd, surreal, and atemporal (in its radical singularity) expression of sovereignty? This is not merely a self-expression, for that would efface the necessary interdependence of creativity. Instead, the question of sovereignty may be conceived of as: How may the young boy contribute to his community given the life, creation, and death of the Orfeu who came before him? In short, sovereignty has no singular subject. We may take this structure and abstract to the level of the film itself as well. Instead of thinking of the director as the proprietor of the film who independently profits from his appropriation of black excess, what does it mean to read the film as the collective output of a multiracial, largely black, group of artists and actors?
Malleability (futurism, surrealism) and pessimism thus seem to be two contradictory modes of interpretation. It would nonetheless seem as if the creator, and their intent, remain effaced. However, a closer look at what is happening in the “modality of malleability” disrupts any clean distinction between interpretation and creation. As Kapchan writes, “Sound knowledge… becomes both a method and a state of being and awareness in this regard, a way to break free of the discourses (of capitalism, of culture and education, of neoliberal politics) that make and remake the body in their own images.” Simultaneously an interpretive method and a creative state of being/becoming, malleability (sound knowledge, surrealism, etc.) encounters pessimism and laughs; it renders the confinement to a single modality of subjectivity absurd, and in fact, impossible. Surrealism sublates and re-encompasses itself in this same gesture; it is the real and unreal, the past and the future, the creative and interpretive.
What does this look like concretely? Put simply by Royster, “Music questions the boundaries of the body itself.” While she focuses particularly on how Wonder’s “blindisms” reveal a conception of nonlinear space and his “groove” with plants falls beyond questions of blackness or masculinity, creative expression in general – in its inherent polygenericism, hybridity, and surrealism – asks us to participate. It is this participation, as creator/interpreter, which itself reconstitutes subjectivity in the form of a promise: that of liberation.
…
I have ended this essay with a “promise.” The structure of the promise, and its relation to both possibility and impossibility, is very important to this whole argument. To me, it is what allows us to think of the importance of pessimism in our current historical moment—i.e. a vigilant criticality in the face of an identity politic which would consider representation to be the final step in racial justice—and at the same time put pessimism aside in the embracing of a more radical surrealism. The beauty and hope I find in surrealism, and what I consider to be its “atemporal” promise is, in many ways, the hope of reading (both as a creative and interpretive act). It suggests that in a single moment, we may both be determined by our hegemonic social conditions and be basking in the utopia of hybridity. This means that as listeners/consumers/readers, the promise of liberation would exist in the fact that we may interact with cultural productions through any and all such modalities, and it is this fundamental malleability which I argue ultimately arises as the declaration, deliverance, and discovery of the promise.
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