REVIEW-ESSAY
Caroline Edwards
Black Possibility: A Metaphysical Space of Power and Wild Imagination
Ekow Eshun, ed. In The Black Fantastic. MIT, 2022. 304 pp. $39.95 hc & pbk.
Ekow Eshun’s In the Black Fantastic is a brilliant addition to the contemporary explosion of interest in Black sf/f. Written as the companion volume to his recently curated exhibition of the same title at London’s progressive Hayward Gallery (29 June-18 September 2022), this beautifully produced volume offers a visual history of the Black fantastic. The capaciousness of the Black fantastic is summed up by the poet Elizabeth Alexander, who invites readers to envisage “a metaphysical space beyond the black public everyday” informed by the “power and wild imagination that black people ourselves know we possess” (13). Eshun responds to Alexander’s call with a reverence for the breadth and diversity of African diasporic artworks whose polyphonic articulations of complex shared histories propel us into confident Black futures.
Eshun’s show was the UK’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Black artists who use fantastical elements in their work to address racial injustice. The Hayward Gallery has been the site of several significant exhibitions dealing with the work of Black artists over the past four decades. “The Other Story” in 1989 was the first group exhibition in a major public space in the UK that exhibited the work of artists of color and “Africa Remix” in 2005, which featured 84 artists from 25 different countries, was the largest ever exhibition of contemporary African art in Europe at the time. In the Black Fantastic introduces and contextualizes the artworks of the eleven contemporary artists featured in the exhibition: Nick Cave, Sedrick Chisom, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke, Wangechi Mutu, Rashaad Newsome, Chris Ofili, Tabita Rezaire, Cauleen Smith, Lina Iris Viktor, and Kara Walker. These artists incorporate elements of folklore, science fiction, and diasporic African spiritual traditions, and engage with the legacies of Afrofuturism. Their use of the speculative mode is not, as Eshun writes, “the escapism we might associate with fantasy. It is an indication, rather, that a world built on racial inequality is itself fractured” (55). Eshun insists on a conceptual distinction between Afrofuturism and the Black fantastic, citing art critics who lament the “hackneyed tropes” of Jive-talking aliens, martial arts prowess, and mandatory references to Sun Ra and Janelle Monáe, although Eshun himself cannot avoid such references, as his inclusion of Sun Ra and Janelle Monáe album art demonstrates (12). The Black fantastic, he suggests, “is less a genre or a movement than a way of seeing shared by artists who grapple with the legacy of slavery and the inequities of racialized contemporary society by conjuring new narratives of Black possibility” (12; emphasis added). As Eshun described to me in a conversation hosted at Birkbeck, University of London, in February 2023, the use of the preposition in the show and book’s title In the Black Fantastic, rather than the more pronounceable The Black Fantastic, was quite deliberate. “I was insistent on keeping ‘In’ because I wanted to have the sense of exploration and being physically immersed in the fantastic. But also because ‘In the Black Fantastic’ doesn’t trip off the tongue as easily. I wanted to do something that didn’t open itself up quite so easily. That seemed necessary to me” (qtd. in Edwards, “Ekow Eshun in Conversation”).
Collage features heavily in many of these works, as do mixed media sculptures bedecked in exquisitely detailed costumes. Nick Cave’s original soundsuits (which greeted visitors to the exhibition in the first main chamber) were made in response to watching television footage of the beating of Rodney King, which led to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. As Sylvia Wynter reminded her white colleagues in an open letter published that year, young Black Angelinos like King were not even granted human status by the police department, who used the acronym N.H.I. (“No Humans Involved”) to refer to incidents of police brutality against Black men and women. With their oversized cowled hoods and headless, plant-like tunics, Cave’s soundsuits gesture towards this nonhuman, or posthuman, status of Black life. Scholars such as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson have argued, somewhat controversially, that the historic bestialization and thingification of Blackness can be reframed into a “dissident ontological and materialist [mode of] thinking in black expressive culture” (4), developing a contrapuntal potential that owes its potency to the insights of critics such as Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, Aimé Césaire, Achille Mbembe, Frank Wilderson III, Christina Sharpe, and Alex Weheliye. The diverse works of these key figures in Black cultural production move beyond the demand for inclusion in the category of the human, understanding this to be a fundamentally antiblack project. Indeed, as Joseph R. Winters writes in Hope Draped in Black (2016), we need only recall Hegel’s racist ideas about African pre-history to realize that key tenets of Enlightenment thinking denied the existence of African culture, spirituality, aesthetics, and technologies altogether (9).
Cave’s soundsuits reveal a studied insistence on the right of Black being to exist “free of a white gaze” and “walk through the world on one’s own terms,” as Eshun puts it (qtd. in Edwards, “Reflecting” 67). This sentiment is powerfully conveyed by the British Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor, whose paintings from 2018 to 2022 were featured in the exhibition along with totemic sculptural creations hewn out of volcanic rock. The richness of Viktor’s works is hard to convey in the color photographs reproduced in Eshun’s book, but visitors to the Hayward may recall the lustre of gold leaf and sumptuousness of the specially chosen deep vermillion wallpaper against which the paintings were displayed. Reimagining Liberian geography and history, Viktor’s artworks feature a high fashion aesthetic that, at first glance, belies the artist’s dissection of the utopian dream of Liberian return—a migration that mirrored the settler hierarchies of the European colonization it sought to escape. Similarly, Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke’s sculptural installation The Ambassadors (2021-2023), which is currently on display at The Lowry in Salford, UK, featured four horsemen of the Apocalypse who dazzled viewers as they encountered the sculptures in the Hayward. Their intricately detailed costumes sparkled in the light; only on closer inspection could viewers see that the ceremonial rugs and formal dress were stitched out of racist memorabilia—slave pennies, colonial medals, pistols, and guns. As Eshun writes, “we might imagine [Locke’s] characters being loosed on the world by the spirit of misrule that governs Caribbean carnival. Alternatively, they could have stepped out of diaspora fables of witch doctors and obeah men” (21). Perhaps the most literary of the artists featured in the Haywood exhibition was Cauleen Smith, whose BLK FMNNST Loaner Library 1989-2019 (2019) contained 30 drawings of texts that will no doubt be familiar to readers of SFS, including novels such as Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), and Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man (1994), as well as critical works such as the Combahee River Collective’s Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties (1986), Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (2016), and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful discussion of Indigenous wisdom, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013).
Organized into sections exploring extraterrestrial migration, spirit work, feminist activism, and the aesthetics of Black revolution, In the Black Fantastic reaches beyond the 11 artists exhibited at the Hayward to provide readers with an extensive canon of contemporary artworks and significant precursors in Black visual arts. The range and breadth of the volume is stunning, at times overwhelming. We have the recognizable, yet utterly reimagined, terrain of Astrofuturism and extraterrestrial travel in a number of the artworks considered. Zas Ieluhee’s Afropunk-inspired Channeling (2018) draws on their extensive research into astrophysics, astronomy, ancient symbols, and spirituality. Suturing arid desert into relation with chunks of ice, the foreground of the digitally rendered image reveals its science fictional (im)possibility, while the multiple visible moons hover above a lone Black figure surveying the scene like an extraterrestrial Robinson Crusoe. Galactic (im)possibility is explored in a very different emotional register in William Villalongo’s pairing of President Obama with the Egyptian Queen in Barack and Nefertiti in the Vela Supernova Remnant (2009). Set against lurid nebulae and resplendent cosmic dust, the collage references Gustav Klimt’s Art Nouveau masterpiece The Kiss (1907-1908) in a much more playful, and less allegorical, pairing. This playfulness is also evident in Stacey Robinson’s Afrotopia 1 (2016), with its planetoid glitter ball and LGBTQIA+ rainbow ring system projecting the pleasures of queer disco into space. Robinson, an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, uses sf motifs to conjure into materiality a visually explosive set of decolonized Black futures that reminds us of the power of the Black imagination to craft its own conditions of liberation.
Some of the works discussed in In the Black Fantastic, such as American photographer Imani Dennison’s series Afrofuturism, a love story (2017), feel science fictional not because of their use of Astrofuturist iconography but rather because of their assertion of what Eshun calls “Black aliveness” (qtd. in Edwards, “Reflecting” 68). Featuring intimate portraits glowing with easy friendship and desire, Afrofuturism, a love story answers Eshun’s question “what does it feel like to live an unencumbered, unconstrained life outside the dominance and the terror of a white gaze? What might black sovereign being look like?” (qtd. in Edwards, “Reflecting” 68). The obvious pleasure of Dennison’s photographs, the untied shoelaces, gentle caresses, and soft unfocussed gazes of the subjects quietly assert this sovereignty and dignity which, under contemporary conditions of antiblack racism, is denied to Black subjects. Similarly, the sinuous melding of identical lovers in Nigerian American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola’s charcoal and chalk drawing, A Parting Gift: Hers and Hers, Only (2019), is entirely unselfconscious. Recalling the myth of a prehistoric world ruled by women waited upon by their subservient male laborers, the undulating movement of these science fictional lesbian twins contours alien-like skull scarification into coherence with contemporary fashion jewellery.
Many of the artists and artworks Eshun has chosen to feature in In The Black Fantastic are characterized by an undeniable political energy. Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh’s works from the “Water Life” series (2018) raise awareness of the difficulties of access to water through a distinctively Surrealist sensibility, collaging women dressed in vivid magenta and azure dresses onto bleached-out desertscapes. The figures in Fabrice Monteiro’s The Prophecy Series (2016) have a similarly commanding political presence. Monteiro, an Agouda photographer descended from Brazilian slaves who lives and works in Dakar, Senegal, draws on his background as a fashion model to produce portraits of mythical characters striding across garbage dumps and oil slicks. Draped in rubbish (such as recycled VHS tape or plastic refuse), Monteiro’s masked West African archetypes remind us of impending ecocatastrophe while possibly hinting at more-than-human hope for the future; their avian, bestial, and arboreal silhouettes recall the protagonists of Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Marlon James’s “Dark Star” trilogy (2019-), or
N.K. Jemisin’s BROKEN EARTH trilogy (2015-2017). Other works draw our attention to the violence of boundaries. Photographer Marc Asekhame and stylist Daniel Obasi’s The Face (2020), from their “Chaos and creation in Lagos pre-lockdown” series, challenges Lagosian gentrification by reclaiming Nigerian public space in a series of dramatic stills; while London-based artist Yinka Shonibare’s sculpture Refugee Astronaut II (2016) trudges contextless through empty gallery space. Dressed in a patterned batik spacesuit, with their worldly possessions slung over their shoulder, Shonibare’s astronaut looks like a climate refugee from our not-so-science-fictional near future. Austrian- Nigerian photographer David Uzochukwu’s stunning, catastrophic photography offers another perspective on the climate emergency. Reproduced as a full- page image in the book, Wildfire (2015) is a digitally manipulated photograph of a young Black woman whose hair has transmogrified into putrid black smoke. Unlike the wildfires after which the image is titled, however, the billowing plume is more reminiscent of a toxic, heavy fuel fire than rural bushfires, underscoring humanity’s role in generating synthetic, polluting materials whose production, transportation, and consumption are contributing to the rising temperatures causing increasingly intense wildfires as far north as the Arctic Tundra.
One of Eshun’s most important influences and interlocutors is Tina M. Campt, Professor of Humanities at Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology. Reading Campt’s new book A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2023), alongside In the Black Fantastic, underscores the theoretical significance of Eshun’s and Campt’s shared project. Rather than advocating for increased representation of Black subjects within the art world (important as this work continues to be), they have turned their attention to what Campt describes as shifting the Black gaze from “the optics of ‘looking at’ to a politics of looking, with, through, and alongside another” (8; emphasis in original). As Eshun explains:
You can have all the Black representation you want. The point isn’t just yet more images of Black people. The point is how we see those figures. [Tina M. Campt] talks about the Black gaze as about how those artists that she references in her book are changing our frame of reference. Instead of looking at the Black figure we’re standing beside and looking with the Black figure. This is where we can think beyond the issue of representation, of thinking “oh, I can see myself in this image or I can see Blackness in this work,” and actually engage with Blackness as a site of possibility and a site of complexity. (qtd. in Edwards, “Reflecting” 70-71)
This sense of Black possibility speaks to a growing critical literature on Blackness that explores temporalities, queerness, utopianism, and the question of hope. Given the powerful anticipatory function of the speculative imagination, Black sf/f is a crucial part of this scholarly dialogue but should not be defined or restricted in terms of genre. Campt’s analysis of the grammatical structure of the future real conditional—that which will have had to happen for Black imagination to flourish, a temporal analysis of Black possibility that she begins in Listening to Images (2017) and continues in A Black Gaze—is a good example of this kind of utopian Black thinking. Another is Jayna Brown’s analysis of Black music in Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021), which takes a curiously elemental approach to rethinking forms of Black liveliness as “elements in a cosmic effluvium” (2).
This sense of Black possibility might seem to reach its limit in Kenyan- born, US-based artist and sculptor Wangechi Mutu’s The End of Eating Everything (2013), one of two animated films featured in the Hayward exhibition. The film begins with a Black Medusa figure, her snake-like tendrils of hair whipping about, and slowly widens the frame over the course of 8 minutes. Her back arches into a mountainous behind that keeps growing until, finally, the grotesque globular form is revealed. Floating like a graveyard
Laputa in a toxic sky, she is an assemblage of decaying body parts and putrid, pock-marked flesh. As Eshun writes, if we look beyond the horror and species-defying weirdness of Mutu’s short film, however, we can embrace its cyborg possibilities as Donna Haraway imagined them, invoking “the diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and forces ... with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from waterfull Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A’akuluujjusi, and many many more” (qtd. in Eshun 28). Like the Black Fantastic, Mutu’s hybrid beings confront us with their genre-defying strangeness and return our (default white) gaze. There are fear and terror in these works, unbearable histories, and enduring structural violence, but hope, too. This paradoxical assemblage of the surreal with the all-too-real conditions of antiblack racism; the monstrousness and gore of leaking bodies that have been penetrated and pulled apart by more-than-human networks of fecund reproduction meeting the sublime possibilities for post- capitalist ways of being: these are difficult and exciting works with which to to engage. But their energy and occasionally rancid decomposition convey the generative creation of new life that is taking place below our feet in the earth, all the time, hidden from the human gaze. This is the fertile territory of the Black fantastic.
WORKS CITED
Alexander, Elizabeth. TheBlackInterior:Essays. Graywolf, 2001.
Brown, Jayna. Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Duke UP, 2021.
Campt, Tina M. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. MIT, 2023.
─────. Listening to Images. Duke UP, 2017.
Edwards, Caroline. “Ekow Eshun in Conversation.” Interview held at Birkbeck, University of London, 24 Feb. 2023. Recording online.
─────. “Reflecting on the Black Fantastic: An Interview with Ekow Eshun.”
Foundation 52.2 (Summer 2023): 64-79.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York UP, 2020.
Winters, Joseph R. Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress. Duke UP, 2016.
Wynter, Sylvia. “ ‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1.1 (1992): 42-73.
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