Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 FIGURE 1. Woman and two young boys on the boat. Blitz Bazawule, Diasporadical Trilogía (2016). Frame grab.
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 iasporadical Trilogía (2017), a short film by A Liquid Africa Samuel Bazawule, is the story of a woman D who has lived three different lives on three dif- Fluidity as Practice ferent continents in different time periods. We meet its protagonist across three chapters: first as a young and Aesthetics in woman in Accra, Ghana, in 1957; then as a little girl Diasporadical Trilogía in Brooklyn, 1997; and finally, grown more mature, in Salvador Bahia, Brazil, in 2017. The film is dreamlike in tone, and what opens in independence-era Ghana develops into an expansive search for shared ties of EKOW ESHUN identity, memory, and spirituality across the African diaspora. With its pancontinental locations and time- crossed storyline, Diasporadical Trilogía proposes a cosmopolitan African sensibility as a shared cultural identity for Black people across the Atlantic world. As Bazawule puts it, his project was born out of the “rad- ical notion that no matter how fragmented the African diaspora is, the influence of rhythm and spirituality remains largely the same.”1 The director’s choice of Salvador Bahia as the setting for the third chapter of the film, for instance, is telling. Salvador was founded in 1549 and is still known today as “Black Rome” due to the fact that its African-descended population is one of the oldest and largest in Latin America. Even as African-Bahians themselves remain a marginalized racial group within the state, their cultural practices, such as capoeira, samba, and Candomblé, have become foundational components of Bahian regional identity. To talk of a sensibility founded in “rhythm and spirituality” risks conjuring an essentialized African
liquid blackness ■ ■ 5:1 ■ ■ April 2021 DOI 10.1215/26923874-8932595 ■ ■ © 2021 Ekow Eshun This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 A LIQUID AFRICA IS PROTEAN AND SYNCRETIC. ITS INFLUENCE FLOWS ACROSS BORDERS AND TIME PERIODS, TAKING SHAPE IN NEW ENVIRONMENTS WHILE CONTINUING TO CARRY THE MEMORY OF PAST EXISTENCES.
identity, its characteristics set in place by biology and closer to Achille Mbembe’s description of Africa as a history. But I’d suggest the film is making exactly the “geo-aesthetic category.”5 For Mbembe, the conti- opposite point. It is true that Africa is the governing nent is best envisaged as the meeting point of flows presence at the heart of Diasporadical Trilogía. But of commercial, cultural, and migratory exchange, the version of the continent offered by the film is mu- both forced and voluntary, that stretch back hundreds table, not fixed in form. It is, to coin a term, a liquid of years and continue to unfold into the future. Africa Africa. An Africa that is protean and syncretic. An Af- “is by definition a body in motion, a de-territorialized rica whose influence flows across borders and time body constituted in the crucible of various forms of periods, taking shape in new environments while con- migrancy . . . born out of overlapping genealogies, at tinuing to carry the memory of past existences. the intersections of multiple encounters with multiple I suggest the idea of a liquid, formless Africa here elsewheres.”6 in distinction to the continent’s frequent representa- This evocation of Africa and “Africanness” as an tion as a homogenous landmass.2 I also propose the innately cosmopolitan condition, shaped by the tidal concept as a way to resist popular accounts of Af- wash of local, regional, and international cultural in- rica as a site of giddy economic advancement, as ad- fluences, is echoed in Emmanuel Iduma’sA Strang- vanced by the flawed narrative of “Africa rising”3 or er’s Pose (2018), a drifting, contemplative travelogue by the conceit of Afropolitanism, which, as Stephanie across the continent, whose pages — equal parts Bosch Santana rightly observes, has “come to stand memoir, poetry, and photo essay — together form “an for empty style and culture commodification.”4 atlas of a borderless world.”7 And it also underscores What I have in mind with the term is something Felwine Sarr’s notion of “Afrotopia,” which envisages
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Africans as the inheritors of compound, hybrid identities: “We are the result of what has per- Practice sisted, the result of the syntheses that took place in First, in curatorial terms, liquid Africa is useful as a ourselves.”8 means of denoting a shared versatility of practice Africa as a convergence point of diverse ideas among the filmmakers whose work I’m exploring. For and influences is not, in itself, a new concept. Chika example, prior to filmmaking, Bazawule was better Okeke-Agulu and Okwui Enwezor, among others, known as a musician — the hip-hop artist Blitz the Am- have written of how the interplay of pan-Africanism, bassador. The three chapters of Diasporadical Trilogía nationalist independence movements, and a grap- were originally released separately as videos to ac- pling by individual artists with “the complex drama company tracks from his fourth studio album, Dias- of their postcolonial subjectivities”9 ignited the con- poradical (2016). Following Diasporadical Trilogía, tinent’s “short century”10 of creative flourishing in art, he made his debut feature, The Burial of Kojo (2018), literature, and music from the 1940s to the 1990s. which became the first Ghanaian film available on In this essay, I explore how Africa today has ac- Netflix after being acquired by ARRAY, the distribu- quired renewed cultural resonance, as evidenced by tion company of Ava DuVernay. a number of recent films shot on the continent and In his journey from music to moving image, and made mainly by creative practitioners of African ori- from Ghana to his current base in New York, Baza- gin. I look primarily at Diasporadical Trilogía and At- wule has followed a similarly peripatetic path to the lantics (2019), the Cannes Grand Prix – winning feature other filmmakers with whom I am concerned. Like him, by French-Senegalese director Mati Diop. Addition- their practice is fluid. They move effortlessly between ally, I look at La Maison Noir (2018), a “visual album” genres and mediums, from music video and short film by Southern Africa – based musician Petite Noir, a.k.a. to cinema screens, art galleries, and streaming plat- Yannick Ilunga; and the British short filmsAllumah forms. Based in Europe and Africa and traveling freely (2020), by Curtis Essel, and Practice (2017), by fash- in pursuit of creative goals, they use their work to ion designer Grace Wales Bonner and photographer speak to the notion of a liquid Africa as the generative Harley Weir. With these works in mind, I mobilize the source of an artistic sensibility across the diaspora.11 concept of a liquid Africa in two separate but com- The connection between liquidity as a way of plementary ways: as a curatorial and an aesthetic working and a way of seeing is typified by the way category. Bazawule developed his project simultaneously as album and film, with the two works both testifying to the notion of the diasporic as a zone of borderless encounter.
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 The driving horns and guitar that accompany 2 Make Ups” (1999) by Method Man featuring D’An- the Salvador Bahia–set chapter of Diasporadical gelo. Throughout the film, music animates depictions Trilogía are garlanded by a call-and- response refrain, of diaspora. Scenes are cut to the beat. In Accra and “Ago — Ame,” a traditional greeting in Ghana that New York and Salvador, they’re dancing in the street. translates from the Twi language as “Listen — We The effect is utopian. But an undercurrent of sorrow is are listening.” The chant is an articulation of kin- never far away. The joyous legacy of a shared culture ship across the Atlantic world. Throughout the film, of music across the Atlantic world has come at a ter- Bazawule weaves a tapestry of auditory affinities. rible historical cost for people of African origin. This The Brooklyn chapter is set to West African djembe knowledge haunts the film. It unites the individual drums and Malinke guitar. Bazawule raps over the stories in each chapter in a larger, longer narrative
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 FIGURE 2. Two figures standing in an arid landscape. Petite Noir,La Maison Noir (2018). Frame grab.
Bouki (1973), which was directed by Diop’s uncle, Dji- red, through life, death, and finally, rebirth in robes bril Diop Mambety. of shimmering white (fig. 2). Often in the films, linear structure gives way to In a scene in Allumah, three young women sit languid sensoria: scenes speed up, slow down, or talking around a small table in a dark room, their run in reverse; characters are filmed upside down or faces illuminated by a single candle. Essel’s lighting suspended in water; skies turn vivid pink; lightning emphasizes the angularity of the women’s cheek- slashes the nighttime horizon. Color is deployed to bones and the “reflectance and specularity” of their symbolic purpose, as in the opening scene of La Mai- skin.13 Conjuring such a radiant image of black beauty son Noir, which features a line of figures trekking obliges him to grapple both with the legacy of racial across an arid, rocky landscape dressed in blood- bias built into color photography and with the long red robes. Across the film’s four parts, their clothes history of “white scopophila” that casts blackness as change color, signifying their journey through the four the antithesis of beauty.14 As Thomas Jefferson ar- sections of the Congolese cosmogram, from birth in gued, the “eternal monotony” of black skin made a
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 FIGURE 3. Dancer performing in front of the mirror. Grace Wales Bonner and Harley Weir, Practice (2017). Frame grab.
poor subject for aesthetic scrutiny.15 Essel counters to how, through the personal perspective of black such a canard with tableaux that reference the imag- queerness that Sepuya brings to portraiture, he offers ery of Chris Ofili and Malick Sidibe, among others — a way to look at and love the frequently imperiled ter- African-originated artists renowned for their masterly, rain of the black male body (fig. 3). sensual depictions of the black form. Liquidity is further evoked in the films through the When, in Wales Bonner’s Practice, we see a repeated use of water as a thematic device. It is a re- young male ballet dancer filmed under an array of peated motif as a source of creative regeneration in lighting conditions, his image flickering in and out Practice. And in La Maison Noir (see video 5), water of darkness, captured in monochrome and color, in effects spiritual uplift — literally so, as figures rise from negative and positive exposure, the mind turns to a lake at the end of the film and hover, suspended in photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s deconstructions the air. And from its title onward, the sea is the gravita- of traditional portraiture by way of collage, layering, tional force that shapes lives and events in the Dakar- fragmentation, and mirror imagery. (See video 4.) And set Atlantics. In its first few minutes, we find the film’s
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 FIGURE 4. The sea as the gravitational force. FIGURE 5. Ada walking along the ocean. Mati FIGURE 6. Sunset. Mati Diop, Atlantics (2019). Mati Diop, Atlantics (2019). Frame grab. Diop, Atlantics (2019). Frame grab. Frame grab.
two lovers, Ada and Souleiman, on the beach, their forbidding than this fierce being. As the camera lin- backs to the camera: “You’re just watching the ocean,” gers again over its surface, we contemplate the water Ada chides Souleiman. “You’re not even looking at as repository of countless stories of desire and depar- me.” Nor can we seem to turn away. Guided by Diop, ture, loss and mourning. our gaze returns time and again to the water, lying dark beneath a low red sun or, shot at night, a crescent Geography moon glowing over silver waves (figs. 4 – 6). The proposition of Africa as the antithesis of moder- Yet the ocean remains an unknowable presence, nity is a longstanding trope in Western discourse. As sometimes benign, sometimes raging and monstrous. Olu Oguibe observes, “History is constructed as a val- During Senegal’s “pirogue migrations,” or “boat idating privilege which it is the West’s to grant,” with migrations” of 2005 – 6, some thirty-eight thousand the result that Africa and its people are consigned young West African men attempted the fraught cross- “into inconsequence.”17 This is a falsehood that Black ing by small boat to the Spanish archipelago of the writers and scholars have perpetuated along with Canary Islands. This event, with its manifold tragedies, their white counterparts. forms the backdrop to Atlantics. Diop’s working title “What is Africa to me?” Countee Cullen famously for the film wasFire Next Time. The words belong to asked, conjuring a land of “strong bronzed men,” a pre – Civil War spiritual that invokes an Old Testa- “regal black women,” and “quaint, outlandish hea- ment deity both tender and righteously severe: “God then gods.”18 The back-to-Africa narratives of writers gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, but fire such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Alex next time.”16 In Atlantics the sea is no less complex or Haley tell a similar story to Cullen’s. Books like Haley’s
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Roots (1976) and Wright’s Black Power (1954) draw a “temporal continuum” from the Middle Passage to THE OCEAN REMAINS AN modernity, with Africa frozen in time, untouched by progress.19 When Haley journeys to the Gambian vil- UNKNOWABLE PRESENCE, lage of his forebears, he discovers a place apparently SOMETIMES BENIGN, so untroubled by civilization that it remains “very much as it was two hundred years ago.”20 SOMETIMES RAGING The trope of African underdevelopment contin- AND MONSTROUS ues to the present day. For instance, Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), a movie that purports to pres- ent an image of African overdevelopment, still re- plays the same clichés. Although the fictional nation Phillips and Saidiya Hartman, respectively, stage a of Wakanda is a country of flying cars and advanced “return” to Africa by visiting Ghana for the first time. science, its citizens carry spears and wear animal skins But their journeys are fraught with misunderstand- like high-tech noble savages. ing and contradiction.24 The Africa they discover is Even a signal work like Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic shape-shifting and liquid. It is a “body in motion.”25 In (1993) has “a surprising blind spot” in its treatment of both books, a visit to the Door of No Return — Gha- Africa.21 As Charles Piot observes, the focus in Gilroy’s na’s exit way to the Middle Passage during the slave landmark book on black modernity is largely on the trade — does not provide hoped-for catharsis but only Caribbean, the United States, and Britain as zones further disquiet. Yet this surely is the point of their of diasporic exchange. Where Africa is mentioned, it travels. A state of unsettledness is preferable to the tends to be with regard to countries of African Ameri- too-neat denouement of Roots. Better to continue can or European settlement like Liberia, Sierra Leone, grappling with the complexities of identity than to and Southern Africa. The consequence of that omis- be satiated by dubious claims of authenticity.26 Ulti- sion is to leave “unchallenged the notion that Africa mately, as Suzanne Schepers suggests, it is only possi- is somehow different — that it remains a point of ori- ble for Phillips to find a “resolution for [his] alienation gin and purity, uncontaminated by those histories of by accepting a migrant, fluid identity.”27 the modern that have lent black Atlantic cultures their distinctive character.”22 Temporality Two works of counter – travel writing offer an al- In Atlantics and Diasporadical Trilogía we find a way ternative to this temporal continuum.23 In The Atlan- to finally break free of the “linear progress narrative” tic Sound (2000) and Lose Your Mother (2008), Caryl that consigns Africa to perpetual primitivism.28 For
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 “culture of mobility” in Senegalese society, their at- BETTER TO CONTINUE tempted journey to Europe can be read as a willed act of liberation, a casting off of their subaltern status GRAPPLING WITH THE in pursuit of fulfilment through “social realization,” COMPLEXITIES OF “a desire for knowledge,” and the attainment of “a future self away from home.”30 Water, which plays a IDENTITY THAN TO BE totemic role throughout Atlantics, functions here as SATIATED BY DUBIOUS the border to new states of being and possibility. The men’s return from the sea marks the film’s transition CLAIMS OF AUTHENTICITY from a drama told in the tradition of European realism to a hauntological fable replete with ominous occur- rences: mysterious fires and gesturings to the mythic both films, liquidity is a key symbolic and structural and mystic, chiefly through the figure of the djinn, an device that serves to reframe notions of progress, Islamic spirit that is able to take the form of humans modernity, and cultural identity. or animals. Atlantics opens on a group of laborers in Dakar There is a similar interplay between the mimetic who have been denied their wages after months of and the fantastic in Diasporadical Trilogía. And like- work on a building site. Broke, they set out for Eu- wise in this film, water beckons the way to the super- rope by boat only to disappear at sea, presumably natural. The ocean is where spirit figures emerge. It drowned. Yet in the latter half of the film they return is the site of communion with the ancestral past. The to Dakar as spirits that inhabit the physical bodies of means by which folklore and ancestral beliefs are their female partners by night. Their nocturnal pres- shared across continents and centuries. ence inverts the “inequalities of temporality” that Bazawule calls his filmsmagic realism. But if we governed labor relations on the building site.29 understand that term to mean a genre that operates Now it is the men who exert power over their ex- along polarities such as “history versus magic, the ploitative boss — speaking to him through the bodies pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial present of their partners, they demand their missing wages. and life versus death,” then that is surely an inaccu- Their supernatural resurrection is proof that there is rate description.31 With its repetitions and reverses, nothing natural or inevitable about capital’s desire its nonchronological structure, and its visitations from to assert dominance over labor. Indeed, as specters, otherworldly figures like the water deity Mami Wata, the men are perhaps freer than they ever were in life. Diasporadical Trilogía envisages an unceasing ebb When set within what Riccio and degli Uberti call the and flow between the modern and the mythic, the ev-
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 eryday and the extraordinary. There is no dichotomy year Ghana becomes the first sub-Saharan country here between Western progress and African stasis. in Africa to gain independence. On the radio, Nkru- Cultural traditions and spiritual beliefs are understood mah hails the birth of a new republic to the cheers of as hybrid forms. Shaped by history and migration, a crowd. The mood is euphoric. But as the film ex- they are “dynamic and mutated and transformed . . . pands its gaze across the Atlantic world, we are also both prior to and also after, colonialism.”32 This state confronted with the ways that Black people are de- of flux and exchange is depicted with none of the nied advancement and agency. In New York, a man ironic detachment typical to magic realism.33 The dis- becomes entangled in the criminal justice system. In tinction is an important one. It speaks to a conviction Brazil, the machinery of gentrification and redevelop- that African beliefs and cultural practices deserve to ment threatens to strip a woman of her home and her be recognized on their own terms as valuable sources dignity. of knowledge, insight, and creative inspiration. Watching the film’s characters as they struggle This is a sentiment further emphasized when in the New World, we reflect on how Enlightenment Bazawule, rapping, pays homage to a panoply of Af- values of progress and modernity feel like a bitter rican and Abrahamic deities in one verse, from such myth for people of African descent, built as they are Yoruba gods as Eshu and Ogon to Allah and Jah. on “centuries of the moral and ethical corruption of This while, on screen, the woman at the center of the chattel slavery and the equally corrupt logic that at- film is visited and protected by a pair of otherworldly tended its constant justification.”35 We wonder, how twins, known as ibeji in Yoruba belief. can we live if we are denied humanity as Black peo- Better, then, to categorize Diasporadical Trilogía, ple? What does the idea of modernity mean when we along with Atlantics, under the heading of specula- are treated with such barbarity? What does progress tive fiction. To use Marek Oziewicz’s description, these mean for people of African origin? are works that are nonmimetic in form and that affirm In Afrotopia, Sarr calls for African nations to en- “the existence of ethnic traditions of science and spir- gage in an “epistemic decentering,” a rethinking of ituality” as a means to first “interrogate normative no- the notion of progress that rejects the narrow mea- tions about reality” and second, subvert “the Western sures of economic development prescribed by the dichotomy between the real and unreal, natural and West.36 Africa and its people can take their own path supernatural, scientific and unscientific.”34 to the future by fashioning the continent’s cultural It is by embracing fantasy as a liberatory form that heritage, its vast cosmology of myths and ancient tra- Diasporadical Trilogía mounts a decisive challenge to ditions, into new ways of seeing and being. ideas of African underdevelopment. The film opens Diasporadical Trilogía feels like a film made with with a conventional depiction of progress: 1957, the that exhortation in mind. If Western modernity is just
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 another form of myth, the film proposes the inverse as EKOW ESHUN is chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commis- a route forward for Africa: myth made real. Instead of sioning Group and the former director of the ICA, London. the West’s “stifling vision of reality — with its correlates He is the author of Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Pho- of ‘truth,’ ’facts,’ ‘power’ and others,” why not a future tography Reimagines a Continent and Black Gold of the that takes inspiration from ancient traditions?37 Sun, which was nominated for the Orwell Prize. He has con- At particular intervals, the exuberant polyrhythms tributed to several books, including Masculinities: Liberation of the film’s soundtrack suddenly give way to sparser, through Photography; Seen: Black Style UK; and Between more somber passages: a cappella vocals, a lonely Worlds; as well as to catalogues on the work of Chris Ofili, horn, the ambient noise of the street, or the music Kehinde Wiley, John Akomfrah, and Duro Olowu, among itself thrown into reverse like a needle dragged back- others. Eshun’s writing has appeared in publications includ- ward in a grove. On screen, there is uncertainty. A ing the New York Times, Financial Times, Esquire, GQ Style, woman vanishes into the waves. A girl lies sprawled the Guardian, Aperture, Wired, and L’uomo Vogue. He is and possibly dead on a New York street. Two men run the recipient of an honorary doctorate from London Metro- in panic through the narrow streets of a favela. politan University. Such moments do not signal the film’s rupture. Rather, they imply yet further resistance to the con- Notes ventions of linear narrative and, in a larger sense, to This article includes audiovisual content that may be accessed notions of Enlightenment progress. We might think of at doi.org/10.1215/26923874-8932595. them, then, as moments of “refusal.”38 Or better yet, 1 Blitz, “Diasporadical.” Jakarta Records, jakartarecords-label as invocations of renewal. Footage runs in reverse. .bandcamp.com/album/diasporadical. The sound of the harp and the horn spin backward. 2 As addressed by, among others, Hassan, “African Modernism.”
The girl, once collapsed on the street, now dances 3 A detailed takedown of the concept is offered by McKenzie, down a white corridor with a masked spirit. Is she “Africa Rising Narrative.”
promenading to death? To afterlife? To rebirth? Be- 4 Santana, “Exorcizing Afropolitanism.” fore the film’s next chapter begins the screen goes 5 Mbembe, “Africa in the New Century,” 95. black. All that’s present is the sound of water beating, incessant, against the shore. ■■ 6 Mbembe, “Africa in the New Century,” 96. 7 Iduma, Stranger’s Pose, 10.
8 Sarr, Afrotopia, 113.
9 Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 15.
10 Enwezor, Short Century.
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 11 A similar breadth of approach is demonstrated by a number 31 Cooper, Magical Realism, 1. of African contemporary visual artists such as Dawit L. Petros, Ki- luanji Kia Henda, and Mohau Modisakeng, whose practices oscil- 32 Cooper, Magical Realism, 39. late between photography, film and video, installation, and live 33 Takolander, “Theorizing Irony.” performance. 34 Oziewicz, “Speculative Fiction,” Oxford Research Encyclo 12 Enwezor, Short Century, 13. pedia of Literature, online ed., 2011, oxfordre.com/literature 13 Young, “Times of Strife.” /view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore -9780190201098-e-78. 14 Blight, Image of Whiteness, 13. 35 Wright, Physics of Blackness, 14. 15 Jefferson, Notes, 148. Also see Magnis, “Thomas Jefferson.” 36 Sarr, quoted in Citroen, “We Should Justify.” 16 Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 106. 37 Oziewicz, “Speculative Fiction.” 17 Oguibe, “In the Heart of Darkness,” 3. 38 “Refusal: a rejection of the status quo as livable and the cre- 18 Cullen, “Heritage,” 36. ation of possibility in the face of negation i.e. a refusal to rec- ognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and 19 Diedrich, Gates, and Pedersen, “Middle Passage,” 8. unintelligible; the decision to reject the terms of diminished sub- 20 Haley, Roots, 873. jecthood with which one is presented, using negation as a gen- erative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the 21 Piot, “Atlantic Aporias,” 155. possibility of living otherwise” (Campt, “Black Visuality,” 83).
22 Piot, “Atlantic Aporias,” 156. Works Cited 23 Lourdes and Ropero, “Travel Writing.” Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage Interna- 24 Phillips, Atlantic Sound; Hartman, Lose Your Mother. For a fur- tional, 1993. ther narrative of thwarted return to Ghana and the African conti- Blight, Daniel. The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photogra- nent, see Eshun, Black Gold. phy and Racialization. London: SPBH Editions/Art on the Un- derground, 2019. 25 Mbembe, “Africa in the New Century,” 95. Blitz the Ambassador. “Diasporadical.” Jakarta Records, Decem- 26 Dugdale, “Roots of the Problem.” ber 16, 2016. jakartarecords-label.bandcamp.com/album /diasporadical. 27 Schepers, “Slavery.” Campt, Tina Marie. “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal.” Women and Performance 29, no. 1 (2019): 79 – 87. 28 Wright, Physics of Blackness, 4. Citroen, Laetitia. “We Should Justify Ourselves No More: 29 Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity,” 253. Felwine Sarr’s Afrotopia.” Review of Afrotopia, by Felwine Sarr. Journal of the History of Ideas (blog), February 1, 2017. 30 Riccio and degli Uberti, “Senegalese Migrants,” 221. Their jhiblog.org/2017/02/01/we-should-justify-ourselves-no-more journey can perhaps be said to form part of the “new African mi- -felwine-sarrs-afrotopia/. gratory flows” (Hassan, “African Modernism,” 461). Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye. London: Routledge, 2004.
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