To Win the War, You Fought It Sideways: Kojo Laing's Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars

The essay provides a close reading of the Laingian text that provides the conceptual levers of intervention required to undertake the desedimentation of the categories of magical realism, science fiction and Afrofuturism in order to think through the recursive capacities of the text to act upon the object of literature from the future of 2020 in the present of 1992

The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis Short Guide

The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis Short Guide consists of a curatorial introduction, moving image schedule, exhibition floorplan, one newly published interview and three previously published essays

The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis Short Guide

The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis Short Guide consists of a curatorial introduction, moving image schedule, exhibition floorplan, one newly published interview and three previously published essays

Thinking with the Generative Capacities of a Black Aesthetics of Abstraction

Participants — art historians, artists, and curators — are invited to reflect on their respective modes of engagement with the historical legacies and contemporary potentialities of abstraction within African and Black diasporic art practices and cultural production

A sonic theory unsuitable for human consumption

The past decade has seen the proliferation of scholarly work on audio culture by philosophers, sociologists, ethnographers, musicologists, anthropologists, and others. There is now a range of histories and ethnographies on listening and on the soundscape, and a proliferation of epistemological, methodological, and cultural investigations of the sonic. At the same time, as John Kieffer notes, sound art is fast becoming “the new kid on the cultural block” (2010). Different writers have engineered different conceptual approaches for studying the sonic. These voices are symptomatic of a body of work that has developed as a way of reacting against the primacy of Cartesian reason, looking for ways of escaping the Western tendency to measure, calculate and represent everything. They offer strategies for defending and resurrecting the nullified senses, like hearing, which must no longer surrender to the tyranny of ocularcentrism. However, the belated recognition of sound as a valid academic object of study and art discipline, often risks fetishizing the sonic and repeating the same ideological separations between sound and image, body and mind. Moreover, refreshing as they may be, they are too often confined within a human-centred position and interested in predominantly addressing the phenomenal experience of sound. This article wishes to discuss alternative schemas daring to go beyond the audiophile anthropocentric angle. It mainly draws on Kodwo Eshun’s unconventional method of ‘sonic fiction’ (1998), in order to argue for the value of developing a sound theory that brings together speculative philosophy, science fiction, and experimental audio art. Ultimately, it attempts to explore how such ‘a sonic intervention into thought’ (Goodman, 2010) can drag us away from the sociopolitical and historical organisation of sound and toward the vicinity of a more ‘unreal state’, where the boundaries between fiction and theory are provisional and utterly permeable

The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography

The special issue of Third Text maps out a relational geography which takes as its nexus the radical politics and filmmaking practices of revolutionary decolonisation since the late 1960s and 1970s. The essays investigate the archives and afterlives of liberation struggle and revolution, with the aim to bring into productive proximity a series of dialogues between scholars and theorists, filmmakers, artists and curators thinking through what Okwui Enwezor has called 'the transnational public sphere' of militant, non-aligned and Third Cinema. The special issue includes a number of texts by filmmakers including Solanas and Getino, Eduard de Laurot and Margaret Dickinson that have not been published in English before or have been long overlooked, accompanied by scholarly contextualising essays. The Militant Image contributes to an important emergent body of work by artists, filmmakers and curators (Hito Steryl, The Otolith Group, Renée Green, Florian Zeyfang) re-assessing militant avant-garde work so that it might function as a resource for contemporary artistic and anti-capitalist activity. It brings together new international research on the aesthetics and cine-cultural politics affiliated with the non-aligned liberation struggles and revolutions of the late twentieth century. It includes new translations and reprints of key texts and manifestos, and theorises how the digital afterlives of militant films can re-animate moments of political intensity, renewing their relevance to contemporary art. The Militant Image constructs an alternative cartography of cine-cultural practices associated with the liberation struggles and revolutions of the late twentieth century. It thus calls into question the political constitution of the present through critical analysis and artistic responses to the aesthetics of Tricontinental liberation. Following on from the work of Okwui Enwezor, Kristin Ross and Nicole Brenez, among others, it produces new theoretical vocabularies through which to analyse and articulate the subjectivities, aesthetics and strategies of militant filmmaking so as to map out a transnational public sphere constituted through affliliation to Tricontinental politics and experimental film language