Afrofuturism

Objective

By the end of this volume you know Kodwo Eshun's theory of sonic fiction and the reversal it rests on. You know why he refused to read Black music as an expression of experience, and what he found in it instead. And you know the question this volume brings into the course, namely who needs anti-humanism and on what grounds.

Exposition

The term Afrofuturism was coined in 1993 by the American cultural critic Mark Dery in an essay proceeding from a puzzlement. So few Black Americans wrote science fiction, though the history of the African diaspora itself looked like material for that genre. People were abducted, dragged across an ocean, robbed of their names and languages, and set down in a world whose rules nobody explained to them. Dery put this to writers and music critics and found his answer in the music, in a line from Sun Ra through George Clinton to Detroit techno, in which the future played a role left vacant in the rest of American culture.

Five years later the book appeared that turned that observation into a theory. Kodwo Eshun published More Brilliant Than the Sun in 1998, subtitled Adventures in Sonic Fiction, and in it he took on two opponents at once. The first was music criticism, which had read Black music as expression for decades. In that reading the blues tells of suffering, jazz of the search for freedom, soul of community. Music counts here as a mirror of an experience, and the critic as someone who reads out what was already there. Eshun called that expectation a burden. The Black musician stands under the compulsion to represent their group and make its reality audible, and what they actually build vanishes behind what people want to recognise in them.

The second opponent lay in the same expectation, at its upper end. Read music as expression and you look in it for authenticity, for the genuine, for the unbroken voice. Eshun was interested in the opposite, in everything that estranges the voice, takes it apart, sends it through devices. In vocoders, reverb, echo, distortion, in the accelerated breakbeat and the bass that sits beneath hearing. Those means count for expression theory as falsification, as a veil over the essential. In his optic they are the thing itself, and what is supposed to lie behind them doesn't exist.

In place of expression he set a concept borrowed from science fiction. Sonic fiction denotes music that maps no reality but designs one. It doesn't report from a present, it builds worlds that don't yet exist, and it does so not in words but in sound. Whoever hears it enters those worlds for the duration of a track and comes out changed. You recognise the movement from Volume 12, though displaced. The CCRU wrote theory that constructs instead of describing. Eshun claims that the musicians he writes about have long been running that procedure, for decades, without ever needing a theoretical term for it.

His canon reaches from Sun Ra, who claimed to come from Saturn and merely to be visiting earth, through George Clinton and his spaceship landing in the middle of the stage show, through Lee Perry's Jamaica and the electric phase of Miles Davis, to Detroit techno and London jungle of the nineties. What connects these musicians is the refusal to treat their origin as a programme, and the readiness to give themselves another.

The case where his thesis grows densest comes from Detroit. Two musicians performing under the name Drexciya, who concealed their identity for years, invented a prehistory for their records. On the slave ships across the Atlantic, pregnant women were thrown overboard. Their unborn children, so the story goes, did not die but learned to breathe underwater, and out of them grew on the ocean floor a civilisation that persists to this day. The records supply the maps, the wave reports, the dispatches of that world.

Note what this myth is built from. The starting point is no invention. People were thrown from slave ships, it happened in large numbers, and the numbers stand in the insurance records of the period. What Drexciya adds is a continuation of that fact in a direction where it doesn't end. Where the historical record notes an erasure, the myth sets a going-on. That's no trivialisation, because the violence stays standing in the narrative, it's its origin. What gets changed is only what comes after.

With that the reversal is reached that concerns Eshun, and it touches the centre of this course. The humanist answer to slavery runs that here human beings were treated as things, and it demands the recognition that was denied them. Eshun holds that demand to be a dead end and grounds it in the history itself. Whoever was, over centuries, listed as merchandise, sold, insured, and written off has no relation to the concept of the human that could be repaired by admission after the fact. Humanism was valid at the same time in the same world in which the ships sailed, and the two did not disturb each other. An offer not redeemed in four hundred years has become uninteresting as an offer.

What he proposes instead, he finds already there in his musicians. Sun Ra doesn't claim he should be recognised as a human being. He claims to come from Saturn. Drexciya doesn't petition for admission to humanity, it describes a population underwater that needs none. The figure of the alien is in this music no metaphor for feelings of strangeness but a position you take up because it offers more room to move than petitioning does. And the abduction by technologically superior beings, which science fiction knows as an anxiety fantasy, is in this history no image but a thing that took place.

Here the anti-humanism of this volume parts from that of Volumes 10 and 16. In Land it's a decision. A European philosopher, to whom humanism was open, rejected it on intellectual grounds and found the rejection interesting. In Eshun it's a finding. For the people he writes about, humanism was never an available option whose refusal would have been a choice. The two positions sound alike and have nothing to do with one another. One is a luxury, the other a reckoning.

Eshun's language follows his object. He invents terms by the dozen, presses them into compounds, refuses explanation, and writes in a tone that runs faster than understanding can follow. Search his book for theses and you find few. It's built to produce the same effect it describes, and in that respect it stands closer to Land's prose than the distance in content between the two would suggest.

After the CCRU, Eshun founded with Anjalika Sagar The Otolith Group, a collective working in film and visual art that was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010. In 2003 he returned to Afrofuturism in an essay and shifted his own approach in the process. The future, so his consideration there, is by now a business. Corporations, consultancies, and governments produce forecasts by the yard, and those forecasts orient the present. Design a future under such conditions and you're working in an occupied field and have to ask first who owns the futures already there.

Core Claim

In More Brilliant Than the Sun, Kodwo Eshun refused to read Black music as an expression of experience and described it instead as sonic fiction, designing worlds rather than mapping existing ones. His canon from Sun Ra through George Clinton to Drexciya and jungle shows musicians who give themselves another origin instead of petitioning for recognition. His anti-humanism differs from Land's in that it's no resolution but a reckoning, drawn by people to whom humanism was not open across four hundred years.

Bridge to the Next Volume

Eshun remained a writer. His closest companion in the group's milieu went further and made the music itself. Volume 22 turns to Steve Goodman, who produces under the name Kode9, founded the label Hyperdub, and developed in Sonic Warfare a theory that sets in beneath meaning, where vibration meets the body. With him the fourth module closes, and the course turns to the aftermath that set in once the group dissolved.