Futures and Fictions Read online

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  Mackay, Robin (ed.) (2015), When Site Lost the Plot. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

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  — — — (2015), Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, trans. Alyosha Edlebl. Minnesota: Univocal.

  Singleton, Benedict (2011), Subtle Empires: On Craft and Being Crafty. PhD thesis. University of Northumbria.

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  Vernes, Jean-Réné (1982), Critique de la raison aléatoire. Paris: Aubier Montaigne.

  — — — (2000), The Existence of the External World: The Pascal-Hume Principle, trans. Mary Baker. Ottowa: University of Ottawa Press.

  AFROFUTURISM, FICTION AND TECHNOLOGY

  A Conversation between Julian Henriques and Harold Offeh

  Harold Offeh: I wonder if it would be useful for us to start by outlining the presentation that you gave as part of the Visual Cultures “Futures and Fictions” Public Programme. It might help to frame the rest of our conversation.

  Julian Henriques: Yeah, certainly. The title of the talk was Afrofuturism: Technology and Fiction. We could start by just addressing each of those two last words: Fiction and Technology. Starting with fiction then, my experience of doing academic research into sound, and sound systems in particular, began as a researcher initially for television and then for my own films. Writing the scripts for these gave me an insight into how to structure stories in a popular medium. And it is really through my ongoing research on a particular project — which is the Eko project — that I found my way to Afrofuturism. So it was as a storyteller that I approached the Goldsmiths talk, trying to apply what I have learned about storytelling to describe the development process for Eko and also, more generally, to the fiction of Afrofuturism itself. And then in terms of the technology — technology for me has to do with sound, even more particularly to do with reggae sound systems — this is something that I have spent quite a few years researching. This has involved fieldwork, listening, hanging out talking to people who own and run sound systems, the engineers and selectors and so on. That was primarily in Jamaica with a sound system called “Stone Love Movement”, which is one of the longest established — I think it must be celebrating its fortieth anniversary by now. I have also researched in the UK with the “Saxon Studio International” with whom I made the film We the Ragamuffin. They are based very near to us at Goldsmiths, in Brockley in fact. I’ve also done events with Ras Muffet’s “Roots Injection” from Bristol, and more recently “Young Warrior”, again, from around here.

  All the research I have done is very much related to the stories that I have always been telling as well as to the fiction and feature films I have made. In a way, it was through the films that I got to technology, especially needing to understand the technology of the sound systems. And so I have learnt more or less everything I know from the guys, mostly men, actually, and some women — there are quite a few women on the sound-system scene — and in particular the audio engineers. They are the ones who actually design and build these sound systems and who fine-tune them as well. This is engineering in the fullest sense of the word, producing what the sound sounds like for the audience. So you have got these two elements, you have fiction, and you have technology in the sound systems. They came together for me in Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is a science-fiction story, a story about the future, which very often involves technologies yet to come alongside technologies that are already here. And the “Afro” part of Afrofuturism basically makes the whole enterprise grounded in a particular, I would say, mythical — or fictional — place of Africa. Afrofuturism is a quest both to return home and for a new diasoporic future in space.

  Figure 1. Channel One Sound System (UK), with five-way frequency split from tweeters to scoops.

  HO: Your talk included a first showing of the new fiction work you just mentioned, a kind of graphic novel — Eko — can you say something more about that project and how it relates to Afrofuturism?

  JH: The development of the Eko project — which is still very much work-in-progress — was the motivation for my ongoing exploration of technology and Afro-culture. And in that development process it was very interesting how the fictional character sort of fed into the more academic type of research, published as a book or in journal articles, and how these have also fed back into the fiction. I describe Captain Eko and her Sonic Warriors: Episode 1 The Clash (to give it its full title) as a “sonographic” novel, as distinct from a graphic novel. The work includes a soundtrack which, obviously, is not normally the case with graphic novels (though there are apps that do this now). Also the still images are projected, as with a film or slide show, rather than read on a page. This must reflect my background as a filmmaker, I suppose.

  Figure 2. Images: Heidi Sincuba, sound: Ben Hauke, concept and story: Julian Henriques. (2014), a frame from Captain Eko and her Sonic Warriors: Episode 1 The Clash, 10 min, single screen.

  The images are drawings, mostly in charcoal. All the artwork was created by Heidi Sincuba, who is a Goldsmiths MFA alumnus. I gave her the outline of the story, the key events and some reference material from the sound-system scene in which it is set. So the images are by an artist, rather than a graphic artist who would normally do the drawings for a graphic novel or comic strip. They are really powerful, as I thought they would have to be in order to sustain interest and depth when projected on a cinema screen. In fact there is another three-screen version of the piece. The soundtrack that gives an atmosphere or vibe to the piece was specially composed by Ben Hauke. The music reference I gave him was Burial, a dubstep producer from South London. The soundtrack is not in sync with the story as such; the dialogue appears on the screen between the images as inter-titles, as with the silent movies, rather than in speech bubbles.

  HO: And how does this relate more specifically to Afrofuturism?

  JH: Through sound. I relate everything through sound. With the reggae sound system you are talking about a specific sound-making technology: mechanical, electromechanical, electromagnetic, electronic and digital. All these technologies make up a sound system. And you are also talking about a kind of aspired-to future, which is, if you like, Africa outside Africa. The reggae sound system on which the Eko character plays as the MC is quite steam-punk actually, with vinyl turntables. The future that Captain Eko is exploring is a sonic one, a sonic space-time, a sonic Afrofuture. Like every MC and selector in whatever genre of music they are playing, Eko has to guide the crowd into this better place. But the “consciousness” of reggae lyrics and the idea of Africa or Zion as an idealised destination (like Nirvana in that respect or what Foucault calls a heterotopia [see Foucault 1986]) lends itself the kind of forward projection that Afrofuturism also expresses. To find a better place, escape Babylon. This future is also expressed in the music itself, especially dub, literally the echoic space within the music, with everything but the drum and bass taken out, that gives room for the listener to inhabit with their imagination. For me, dub played on a sound system was an Afrofuture decades before the term was ever coined.

  HO: Eko is clearly fictional, how does this project connect to your more academic research work?

  JH: I was a storyteller before I was an academic, first as a journalist, then as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC and after that I founded my own company — and I did get to write and direct a feature film, entitled Babymother. A lot of this work has a music theme, in fact Babymother was a reggae musical, so I have spent a lot of time working things out about musical sound, lyrics and story-telling, and how they can come together to take us to new places and engage us at a feeling level. This is a side of myself I like to keep going along with academic research. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, they feed into each other. It was th
e research for the films, here in the UK and in Jamaica, that I kind of repurposed into academic research, initially as a PhD.

  All of this different research — and especially what I have learnt about how sound works on the body and mind from the Jamaican sound engineers (some of which is in my book Sonic Bodies [Henriques 2011]) — helps ground Eko’s story. Also what I find is that Eko’s imaginative world gives her a lot more freedom — to have new crazy ideas — that quite inspires some of my research thinking. The two, fiction and research, work very well together for me. And so that whole way of academic research ideas being kind of informed by creative processes and vice versa was an interesting one, which I continue to pursue. And as her name would suggest, Eko is a sort of fictional interlocutor, someone who answers back. And someone I can tell my thoughts as I am writing them down: “OK Eko, look, how about this?” And she responds and tells me certain stuff and so on.

  HO: Are we going to see some more of Eko?

  JH: Yes, that was just one episode. It’s really important to break a big project down into a process of smaller steps, which have value in themselves, to test it out and get feedback.

  HO: You mentioned that you had been thinking more about Afrofuturism since the talk…

  JH: Yes, there was some really useful feedback. The “Afro” in Afrofuturism figures very differently in the imagination of those outside the continent than, let’s say, of contemporary Nigerians, for example. Now that point was brought home to me when discussing Louis Chude-Sokei’s recent work as he was writing about Lucky Dube from South Africa, who in the 1980s was one of the first and maybe biggest African reggae artists (Chude-Sokei 2015). What is interesting is how Rastafarian beliefs that emerged from a New World or disaporic African experience were able to imagine a future Africa. This mythical future was then projected back onto Africa — through reggae rhythms and lyrics — to give Africa itself its future in one sense. This is not unlike the idea of Pan Africanism being born in the metropole with the 1945 Pan African Congress being held in Manchester, for instance. And so this is the kind of mix of cultures and technologies and storytelling that came together for me to motivate my research into Afrofuturism as content for, but also a method of, storytelling.

  HO: You mention The Sound of Culture, Louis Chude-Sokei’s book. Interestingly he is interrogating notions of what the diaspora means, breaking down those constructs into constituent parts. One of the things I really found useful about the book — and where it has some crossover with your talk — is an exploration of the term Afrofuturism, attributed to writer Mark Dery in the 1990s, and how it is often seen as being very much associated with that period. The Sound of Culture promotes a much longer history. So, really thinking about going back in time and through history, thinking about industrialisation in relation to modes of technology. There is an interesting and obvious kind of parallel between the Industrial Revolution and slavery, the latter provides labour and capital to support the former. Their interconnectedness is perhaps lost today, but Chude-Sokei fleshes out that link. I think that link to history is very important: it is African labour that fuels the technological and industrial advancement.

  JH: Yeah. You have highlighted one of the major points that I think is very useful about the book. I certainly hadn’t read it before the talk; it was only very recently published. What he does in effect is to mount a critique of Afrofuturism. Previously I had been thinking the conventional kind of thing about modernism and tradition — African tradition meeting modern technologies, jazz being the primary example. That is fine as far as it goes, but what Chude-Sokei does in quite a lot of detail is to show how modern technologies are imbricated in basically racist, racialised relationships. Technology is not a neutral thing; it cannot be understood outside the social and political circumstances of its development. Similarly, as is now being more broadly recognised, the industrial revolution was basically funded from the slave-wealth generated in the colonies. As you alluded to, this was Eric Williams’ basic argument in Capitalism and Slavery (Williams 1964).1 So it is not the case of our understanding of technology having to be supplemented with some sort of detour through Africa, it is that this is entirely necessary to understand the nature of technology itself.

  In this vein Chude-Sokei discusses how the so-called stereotyped naturalness of Africa and Africans was used to introduce new technologies to the modern world, with nineteenth-century recording apparatus and so on. So, the threat value of technologies, you know, the Frankenstein kind of thing — that they may turn against us — was mediated or modulated, or sort of ameliorated by the fact that the content very often — literally in terms of recording devices — made use of African speaking voices. A one-time minstrel Bert Williams became a star through this. And so all that is embedded within the idea of modernist technology, basically the master-slave relationship. Chude-Sokei makes use of Ron Eglash’s work on this; Eglash has studied when and where the terms “master” and “slave” become part of engineering discourse (Eglash 2007). And so what that is doing is naturalising an artificial medium of the technology, power relations. And, so, the futurism of Afrofuturism takes its name from, basically, from Italian Futurism. Right?

  HO: Yes.

  JH: Okay. And that was a very uncritical acceptance of the powers of technology; technologies of war, machine. Right?

  HO: Yes.

  JH: And so, the technology that is embedded as part of Afrofuturism actually has a, well you could say, a racialised, racist and power-oppressive dynamic in it already. Now, I don’t think that this has been fully recognised. But it certainly causes us to have a more critical relationship to Afrofuturism. The neutrality of technology, which often Afrofuturism gives us as a de-racialised or a non-racialised world in the future, is actually the means to that end. But this is in fact going to prevent the achieving of this end, because the very idea of technology itself is embedded in a racialised development process, which I don’t think most Afrofuturists would be willing to sign up to.

  HO: Absolutely. I often think of problematising that link between Italian Futurists, Marinetti et al and their just very obvious links to fascist ideology and how that is now co-opted linguistically and through technology really, even within the Afrofuturist project.

  JH: And what is interesting about this is that we are using the African and Africanist or a decentred sensibility to critique the very modernist project itself. And what I find is that Chude-Sokei makes it even more sophisticated and subtle through this understanding of the Caribbean as new world culture, as a creolised, creolising culture, bringing in thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter and the novelist Wilson Harris. So you have a level of sophistication of understanding, a sort of nuanced understanding that is very, very helpful indeed.

  HO: One of the other things that I found really useful from the book — in terms of the relationship between kinds of fiction and technology — was the example he cites of the robot, and how as a re-occurring narrative within science fiction, there is a very unsubtle metaphor of the relationship between slave and master that is played out in the role of the robot, with early science-fiction writers problematising that kind of slavery. Some are coming from an abolitionist perspective, but still there is that ongoing, you know, dialogue about the robot’s rights, politics, humanity and so on that are often embedded within debates of emancipation.

  JH: Yeah. And in the analysis of where the robot as a sort of trope is standing there is a less dangerous way of understanding the master-slave relationship. I just think that’s got a lot of substance to it. But let’s talk about your work.

  HO: I guess there is an intersection with the body of work that I have been making most recently, which is called Covers. Essentially it’s focused on a series of performances where I re-enact or re-create album covers from a period of the late 1960s to the early 1980s. And, for me, the project has been a way to think about the album cover as a kind of popular archive really. So, as opposed to thinking about or starting with the music, the musical con
tent of the album, I have been very much led by the images and it has been interesting to think about the album cover as a kind of functional illustrative medium, so something whose sole purpose is to promote, advertise and represent an artist’s identity, to promote the musical kind of content. So within that kind of function I am interested in how the album cover operates in terms of representing particular artists.

  Figure 3. Harold Offeh (2013), Covers: After Betty Davis. They Say I’m Different, 1974. Photograph 30cm x 30cm.

  I have a particular focus on this period of the 1970s and 1980s in relation to a sense of the African-American artist. So, some of the works I have been looking at are relatively well-known, George Clinton in Funkadelic/ Parliament guise for example, but there are also other less well-known artists, people like Betty Davis and Marlena Shaw. I am always very much led through this idea of an articulation and representation as embodied through the album cover. It is a way of being reconnected with a particular narrative. Prior to doing this work, I have done a few projects that looked at Sun Ra as a kind of model, particularly of myth. I mean, you mentioned myth (or the mythical) at the beginning of our discussion. I think for me that is really important, that notion of self-mythologising. Within this kind of practice and that particular period, there is this notion of a kind of interrogation of identity through an adoption of myths and narratives, often rather playful, but sometimes more overtly politically positioned than others. The primary strategy for me has been this use of embodiment, this idea of actually interrogating these images, these subordinate images through these kinds of re-enactments.

  JH: Do you always just use yourself as model then, I mean, in these different re-enactments?

  HO: Yes, but this practice has evolved. Initially I would restage the album covers in my studio, apartment, or other domestic spaces. I would try to recreate things like the Grace Jones’ Island Life pose as a photograph. I then translated them into durational moments, recorded as videos. Recently, I’ve presented them as live works where I’m performing the images for an audience. I was thinking about iTunes cover flow and how a performance could be presented like a playlist. I assume the pose for the length of the title track while the album cover art is projected. It’s about inviting the audience to look at the image. To look at me and look again at the image.