Three important notes about this file

Middle Passage

The collective trauma of slavery is the founding moment of modernity – this forever renders modernity suspect – we must continue to indict imperial modernity as we look toward the future

Eshun 92 [Kodwo Eshun MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College ,Further Considerations of Afrofuturism) Page 3 //liam]

Imagine a team of African archaeologists from the future—some silicon, some carbon, some wet, some dry—excavating a site, a museum from their past: a museum whose ruined documents and leaking discs are identifiable as belonging to our present, the early twenty-first century. Sifting patiently through the rubble, our archaeologists from the United States of Africa, the USAF, would be struck by how much Afrodiasporic subjectivity in the twentieth century constituted itself through the cultural project of recovery. In their Age of Total Recall, memory is never lost. Only the art of forgetting. Imagine them reconstructing the conceptual framework of our cultural moment from those fragments. What are the parameters of that moment, the edge of that framework? In our time, the USAF archaeologists surmise, imperial racism has denied black subjects the right to belong to the enlightenment project, thus creating an urgent need to demonstrate a substantive historical presence. This desire has over determined Black Atlantic intellectual culture for several centuries. To establish the historical character of black culture, to bring Africa and its subjects into history denied by Hegel et al., it has been necessary to assemble counter memories that contest the colonial archive, thereby situating the collective trauma of slavery as the founding moment of modernity. In an interview with critic Paul Gilroy in his anthology Small Acts, novelist Toni Morrison argued that the African subjects that experienced capture, theft, abduction, mutilation, and slavery were the first moderns. They underwent real conditions of existential homelessness, alienation, dislocation, and dehumanization that philosophers like Nietzsche would later define as quintessentially modern. Instead of civilizing African subjects, the forced dislocation and commodification that constituted the Middle Passage meant that modernity was rendered forever suspect. Ongoing disputes over reparation indicate that these traumas continue to shape the contemporary era. It is never a matter of forgetting what it took so long to remember. Rather, the vigilance that is necessary to indict imperial modernity must be extended into the field of the future.

Reframing the middle passage in an afro-futurist narrative helps preserve the memory of past atrocities and prevents future ones from occurring.

Yaszek 5 [Lisa, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Georgia Tech School of Literature, Communication and Culture, TANDF 57 (Volume 25, No. 3)“Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future” http://sdonline.org/42/afrofuturism-science-fiction-and-the-history-of-the-future/ //liam]

In conclusion, I want to propose two reasons why it is important to recover the history of Afrofuturism as it has unfolded over the past two centuries. The first reason is a scholarly one, and has to do with our understanding of literary and cultural history. The past two decades have been marked by an explosion of interest in literary representations of science and technology. These studies tend to follow a very specific and very raced trajectory: they tell us that white authors including T.S. Eliot, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gibson are the real founders of modern technocultural narrative and that authors of color did not engage in this kind of storytelling until identity politics exploded in the 1960s. Thus it seems that white authors got there first, and that people of color have been mere respondents to the new literary forms of twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But this just isn’t true! By recovering Afrodiasporic future story telling traditions we gain a better understanding of the important intellectual and aesthetic work that these authors have performed on both national and global cultural fronts. In doing so, we also learn more about how Afrofuturism transforms science fiction and other modes of technologically engaged literature today. My second reason for wanting to direct attention to Afrofuturism is political. From the ongoing war on terror to Hurricane Katrina, it seems that we are trapped in an historical moment when we can think about the future only in terms of disaster — and that disaster is almost always associated with the racial other. Of course, there are many artists, scholars, and activists who want to resist these terrifying new representations of the future. As a literary scholar myself, I believe that one important way to do this is to identify the narrative strategies that artists have used in the past to express dissent from those visions of tomorrow that are generated by a ruthless, economically self-interested futures industry. Hence my interest in Afrofuturism, which assures us that we can indeed just say no to those bad futures that justify social, political, and economic discrimination. In doing so this mode of aesthetic expression also enables us to say yes to the possibility of new and better futures and thus to take back the global cultural imaginary today.

Performative Pedagogy

Performative pedagogy locates power in the body and asks questions that are the condition of possibility for the radical challenge of white hegemony

Warren  and Fassett, 2004 [The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power. Deanna L. Fassett is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam]

Performative pedagogy, as a method and theory of the body, can ask questions in a way that points to the structure and machinery of whiteness. It can put flesh to the concept of whiteness. It can point to whiteness’s perceived absence. It can name the norm. Performative pedagogy, in this way, can serve as a pedagogy of the oppressor—it can ask those in positions of power (via sex, race, class, or sexuality) to question their own embodied experiences by demanding that they encounter the other through the mode of performance. For if whiteness functions in dominant discourse as the unmarked center of cultural power, then a performative pedagogy can and must ask how we can create a ground for subversion. Performative pedagogy, as a method of enfleshment that brings theory to the body, can question the normal, stable, inevitable actualization of race, nurturing subversive possibility. Thus, in order to foreground and engage such constitutive performances, we designed a series of workshops that serve to create space for students to take up and take apart whiteness in their bodies, to make discernable what is already physical by adding heightened critical reflection to that embodiment. These workshops are a means for participants to consider whiteness, to consider the role they play in the making and unmaking of cultural oppression, and to begin subverting the invisibility of whiteness.

Performance Allows Alternate Means to Rethink the System Outside of Current Boundaries

Yaszek 5- [Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (Lisa, June/September 2005, Rethinking History. Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 297-313. “An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man”//liam]

In essence, then, the invisible man’s basement home becomes a kind of time- and spaceship that carries him outside of the known world, providing him with a new perspective from which he can see both the multiple aspects of the Afrodiasporic experience and its complex relations to the ‘many strands’ of American reality. Much like Kodwo Eshun’s ideal Afrofuturist subject, then, Ellison’s protagonist begins to experience the kind of multiple consciousness that is itself the first step towards the creation of a new and more egalitarian multiracial futurity. Significantly, the invisible man’s ability to multiply his consciousness directly correlates with his increasing mastery over new technologies. As Alexander G. Weheliye notes in his discussion of sonic Afromodernity, the ‘hegemony of vision’’ and visual technologies is a distinctly raced one in which the privileged ‘look of white subjects deduces supposed inferior racial characteristics from the surface of the black subject’s skin’ (2003, p. 107). By way of contrast, sonic technologies that enable the recording and mass distribution of sound both transform and extend what Weheliye identifies as ‘the two main techniques of cultural communication in African America’: orality and music (ibid., p. 102). These technologies are useful for both musicians and other artists who incorporate sonic elements into their work because they ‘open up possibilities for thinking, hearing, seeing, and apprehending the subject in a number of different arenas that do not insist on monocausality’ (ibid.). In many respects, ‘the sonic’ functions like ‘the science fictional’ in Afrodiasporic art: both provide alternate means by which to rethink history and subjectivity outside of dominant visual and discursive structures.