African Afro-futurism: Allegories and Speculations

In his seminal text, More Brilliant Than The Sun, Kodwo Eshun remarks upon a general tension within contemporary African-American music: a tension between the “Soulful” and the “Postsoul.” While acknowledging that the two terms are always simultaneously at play, Eshun ultimately comes down strongly in favor of the latter. I quote him at length: Like Brussels sprouts, humanism is good for you, nourishing, nurturing, soulwarming—and from Phyllis Wheatley to R. Kelly, present-day R&B is a perpetual fight for human status, a yearning for human rights, a struggle for inclusion within the human species. Allergic to cybersonic if not to sonic technology, mainstream American media—in its drive to banish alienation, and to recover a sense of the whole human being through belief systems that talk to the “real you”—compulsively deletes any intimation of an AfroDiasporic futurism, of a “webbed network” of computerhythms, machine mythology and conceptechnics which routes, reroutes and crisscrosses the Atlantic. This digital diaspora connecting the UK to the US, the Caribbean to Europe to Africa, is in Paul Gilroy’s definition a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure,” a “transcultural, international formation.” […] [By contrast] [t]he music of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, of Underground Resistance and George Russell, of Tricky and Martina, comes from the Outer Side. It alienates itself from the human; it arrives from the future. Alien Music is a synthetic recombinator, an applied art technology for amplifying the rates of becoming alien. Optimize the ratios of excentricity. Synthesize yourself. […] From the outset, this Postsoul Era has been characterized by an extreme indifference towards the human. The human is a pointless and treacherous category. (Eshun 1998, 00[-006]-00[-005]) The debate that Eshun outlines—along with its rich lexicon of terms— has a formidable history, both preceding More Brilliant Than The Sun, and following that book’s publication. Taking a cue from Eshun, in this paper I examine a related—although not identical—tension within Afro-futurism, namely the tension between allegory and speculation. While these terms correspond roughly to the Soulful (humanism) and the Postsoul (posthumanism) respectively, shifting the discussion to allegory and speculation enables me to detect a crypto-humanism within posthumanist discourse. And it allows me, furthermore, to offer a somewhat different take on the Postsoul—a speculative version that pushes the Postsoul to its limits. In order to situate the discussion and render it less abstract, I examine the allegory/speculation tension through selected examples from Africa. I will argue that African-based Afro-futurist production heightens the tension while veering towards the speculative pole. But in order to understand how and why that is the case, it will be necessary, first, to more carefully theorize how allegory and speculation function within Afro-futurism and then, second, to more fully contextualize Afro-futurism in Africa

The Musical Work Reconsidered, In Hindsight

Certainly, the concept of the musical work has not always existed. Yet deciphering precisely when the work emerged has proved an immensely difficult task for musicologists. In particular, the publication of Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works—in which she famously argued that the work–concept crystallized around 1800—has provoked an endless litany of modifications and outright rebuttals. In many cases scholars have retained the gist of Goehr’s argument but have sought to push the date backwards, often to the period of their own specialization. Several scholars of Baroque music have argued that musical works existed in the seventeenth century (although not before) while several scholars of the Renaissance have argued that the musical work emerged during that era (although not earlier). Indeed, there have been attempts—although somewhat muted—to locate the advent of the musical work in the Medieval period. In particular, the question of whether J. S. Bach composed musical works has received a great deal of attention. Although he died a full fifty years before 1800, several scholars have argued that Bach did compose musical works and have used this argument as a refutation of Goehr’s 1800 hypothesis

The Musical Work Reconsidered, In Hindsight

Certainly, the concept of the musical work has not always existed. Yet deciphering precisely when the work emerged has proved an immensely difficult task for musicologists. In particular, the publication of Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works—in which she famously argued that the work–concept crystallized around 1800—has provoked an endless litany of modifications and outright rebuttals. In many cases scholars have retained the gist of Goehr’s argument but have sought to push the date backwards, often to the period of their own specialization. Several scholars of Baroque music have argued that musical works existed in the seventeenth century (although not before) while several scholars of the Renaissance have argued that the musical work emerged during that era (although not earlier). Indeed, there have been attempts—although somewhat muted—to locate the advent of the musical work in the Medieval period. In particular, the question of whether J. S. Bach composed musical works has received a great deal of attention. Although he died a full fifty years before 1800, several scholars have argued that Bach did compose musical works and have used this argument as a refutation of Goehr’s 1800 hypothesis

Kapwani Kiwanga : spéculations extraterrestres

Cet article étudie le travail de l’artiste Kapwani Kiwanga (née au Canada en 1978 et vivant à Paris) qui combine de manière innovante des techniques issues des arts visuels, de la performance et des sciences sociales. Je m’intéresse tout particulièrement à la performance de Kiwanga intitulée Les Manuscrits de l’espace profond (The Deep Space Scrolls), qui met en jeu les concepts de l’humain et de l’extraterrestre à travers une approche spéculative de l’histoire africaine. Je soutiendrai qu’en repensant les histoires de l’exploitation et de l’oppression en Afrique, Kiwanga évite la voie facile — c’est-à-dire l’affirmation d’un humanisme sclérosé — et s’embarque au contraire pour un voyage vers l’extraterrestre et l’inconnu. Tout en portant une grande attention aux détails de la performance de Kiwanga, je postulerai que son travail ne peut être perçu de manière adéquate qu’en prenant en compte des discours théoriques multiples et distincts, allant de l’Afro-futurisme au réalisme spéculatif et à l’Afro-pessimisme

Historicizing Kwaito

In the standard narrative, kwaito is described as a form of electronic dance music that emerged alongside the democratization of South Africa between Nelson Mandela’s release from prison (1990) and the democratic elections of 1994. In most cases, scholars have claimed that kwaito emerged as a direct response to the end of apartheid and the birth of the South African “rainbow nationâ€. While there is certainly some truth in such a claim, the present essay is an attempt to complicate this rather simplistic and monolithic historical narrative

After apartheid: Kwaito music and the aesthetics of freedom

Kwaito, a genre of electronic music that emerged alongside the democratization of South Africa in the early 1990s, is commonly understood as the voice of the black youth in the post-apartheid period. Kwaito is an expression of celebration and freedom in a democratic South Africa, but its practitioners also challenge the very meaning of freedom in the twenty-first century. If music during apartheid was the struggle for freedom, then kwaito is the struggle of freedom. How does one struggle, not for freedom, but with freedom and in freedom? How is this type of freedom expressed through music? ^ Based on fieldwork in the greater Johannesburg area, this dissertation approaches kwaito\u27s relationship to freedom on multiple registers. Kwaito was born in Soweto, South Africa\u27s largest urban ghetto and the key site of the anti-apartheid struggle. Although there are no restrictions on movement alter apartheid, musical praxis in Soweto nonetheless occurs in the context of radical immobility. Due to the perniciousness of crime and a layout that was designed to make internal circulation difficult, Soweto musicians spend most of their lives at home, musicking with a finite cohort. Political freedom is thus constrained by a number of conditions that both disable and enable various aesthetic practices. ^ Although kwaito is often considered a form of black identity politics, on the national level its audience rejects the possibility of identitarian representation. As a formal democracy, the South African nation is emptied of positive contents and constitutes a community that is not based on racial or ethnic ties. By disavowing the ability to represent the nation, kwaito frees citizens from apartheid separatism. On the international level, kwaito musicians are continually denied the status of cosmopolitan subjects capable of contributing to global popular culture. The West perennially forces gifts (cultural, economic, and otherwise) upon the non-West, but refuses reciprocation. Kwaito musicians struggle against this form of global violence, demanding a reconfiguration of the threshold of the audible. Through ever widening circles of context, this dissertation examines kwaito as a set of sonic practices that transforms and challenges the very idea of what it means to be free.

Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition. Challenges, Insights, and Recommendations

Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and definitions of “music” and “culture.