So now we present Kojo Eshun. He's a lecturer in contemporary art theory at Goldsmith University in London. visiting professor at HAT giving the seminar theory fiction at the CCC master program, and co-founder of the Ottolid group. He will talk about the science fiction of Gananian novelist Koyo Bernard Lane from the year 2020, called Major Gent and the Akimota Wars.
Late conflictual vision of the year 2020 poses problems and possibilities for the future thought of the science fiction futurities. Kocho Eschum will ask in what ways does Lang science fiction from the year 2020 pressurize the predicates that support the futures narrated by science fiction. Thank you. Okay, well, of course I'd like to thank Jean-Pierre Greve, Delphine Genere, everybody at CCC for inviting me, for making this possible. on my way to this presentation
I was observing everything and been fascinated by many aspects of today's presentations and as is my want I'm a compulsive note taker and at a certain point I thought maybe I should frame today's talk and to cut a long story short I ended up writing another presentation, a presentation which kind of sets up the conditions for the presentation I was going to give so I don't think there's going to be time to give what effectively is now two presentations I think there's going to be time to give one especially because of translation issues
hello to the translator so I'm going to go through this at a kind of steady pace so that the translator can follow and let's see where we get to so as I said I was going to talk about the work of the Ghanaian novelist and poet Bernard Kojo-Lang whose work especially his third novel Major Gentle and the Achimota Wars has, I think, major relevance for this, for the kind of the set of arguments that were opened up by Yussi and by Vanessa. But as I said, I'm not sure if I'll actually get to that.
Okay. So I'll begin. So in the last decade, many artists and many critics have criticized the fact that the prefix of Afro, the prefix of Africanity, the prefix of Africa in the term Afrofuturism takes little or no account of the futures produced in and from and by way of the artistic practices of the continent. Those critics, these critics argue that Afrofuturism remains focused on the cultural practices of the Afro diaspora in the UK, in the USA and in Europe.
And so this critique argues that Afrofuturism effectively ends up excluding the histories and the futures and the theories and the practices produced by artists and theorists working in East, West, North and South Africa, the Caribbeans and South America. This means the Afro in Afrofuturism is America-centric and Anglo-centric. What's more, it's America centricity attempts to monopolize the global diaspora of blackness. African-Americanism globally encloses all blackness. It becomes the master term. That's the critique.
And even more problematically, many people argue, the conceptualization of blackness is invariant. That means the problem with it is not the yearning or the desire to imagine a blackness in the future, in the near future, in the far future. It's the presupposition that that blackness will persist in that near future in the same way that it does now. So according to this critique then, Afrofuturism has difficulty understanding what the future will do with blackness. That's to say, it finds it difficult to envision the ways in which blackness will transform itself over time. It finds problems understanding how to narrate its ongoing transformation.
By blackness, we mean what one critic calls a modern condition that cannot be conceptualized apart from the epical changes in travel, in trade, in communication, in consumption, in industry, technology, taxation, labour, warfare, finance, insurance, government, bureaucracy, science, religion and philosophy philosophy that were together made possible by the European systems of colonial slavery. And due to this complexity, we will never be able to say with certainty whether blackness starts
before or during the sugar revolution, whether slavery follows from racism, or whether racism follows from slavery. It is not so much a matter of what Afrofuturism will do with the future, it is a matter of what the future is doing with the human as an unfinished project. More precisely, it is a matter of what temporality or contingency does with race, understood as a continually reformatted division within the human species. It is a matter of an appreciation of what the future does to and with and from race, understood as an intra-human technology. That's one critique.
A second critique argues that the futurism in Afrofuturism fails to take account of spiritual and indigenous practices and technologies. And that's not only a critique of the European genealogy of futurism, it's more a yearning for a decolonization of futurism. And a third Afro-pessimist position argues that Afrofuturism is overly utopian and it's insufficiently attuned to the afterlife of slavery, as theorized by Sadeer Hartman, who says, if slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it's not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory.
it's because black lives are imperiled and devalued by racial calculus and the political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. So these three critiques indicate the stakes that emerge from the claims for the future and for futurity that are narrated by futurisms. And these terms maybe need a bit of distinction. So one critic schematically distinguishes between futurity and the future. Futurity, he says, can be defined as the qualitative notion of the future as difference. And that would relate to what Mark Wigley was saying earlier today about the future as that which is unexpected,
that which is strange, that which science fiction critics call the novum, the new. The strange or we could say the weird, the weird and the eerie, of course characterized by Mark Fisher as that which would be an opening towards the strange and it would be those writings or writers that developed an opening towards that strangeness and this would be Kojo Lang, he would be a key figure in what we could call a kind of contemporary African weird. Now the critical distinction between futurity and the future is overly schematic. If futurity can
be defined as the qualitative notion of the future as difference, then the future would be defined as the qualitative aspect of the quotidian passing of time. Time that is reduced by the conditions of capitalist realism to the merely quantitative notion of the extension or intensification of the conditions of the present. And the futurism would then be the attempt to intervene into capitalist realism's reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative. It would be an attempt to intervene in the future in order to maintain its qualitative aspect, to maintain its futurism, sorry, to maintain its futurity. So according to this schema then, the futurity and the future should be reserved for those processes that operate at a spatiotemporal scale that's beyond human experience.
Some critics call this the speculative time complex, the speculative constitution of time, which opens up the future rather than the present as the condition for a societal order. So the futurisms then can be understood as an intervention that try to narrate the stakes, the ontological and epistemological stakes of the futures and futurities at the human scale of the phenomenal. Futurism is a downscaling. Or better, it's an interscalar vehicle that tries to move between the systemic and the phenomenal. And it has to invent its own vocabulary to do so. It has to invent a certain syntax,
a certain grammar, a certain organization of time through tenses. So under pressure from these critiques, there's a tendency to abandon Afrofuturism in order to fashion new terms, terms that can grasp the scale and the scope of the futurisms practiced throughout the West, the East, the North and South of the continent. But much more important than the search for a new name to replace Afrofuturism is to maintain the critique of Afrofuturism that puts pressure upon the presuppositions of futurism. that puts pressure upon the assumptions of what futurity is and the assumptions of what the future is. And what is critical then would be to open up a disenchantment of the valence of futurism,
a disenchantment of the value of futurity, a disenchantment of the value of the future. In many fields, many philosophical and artistic and literary fields, this distrust is a given. It's a reflex. Nothing could be more obvious. But in Afrofuturism, the project to insist upon the right to the future, the claim to narrate the future, has an interrupted and discontinuous historical tendency, which can be narrated as part of what people call the black radical tradition, and which requires affirmation, reaffirmation, as part of a wider project of what some critics call black speculative thought. and this accounts for why Afrofuturism tends to think of itself
and understand itself as a resistant futurism, as a futurism that is in and against older futurisms, a counter-futurism, a futurism against futurism, an insurgent futurism. And this insurgent futurism automatically assumes the value or the virtue of futurism in the face of a racial capitalism that intended black people to survive on condition of social death. The futurism that affirms the novum of futurity in the face of the project of racial capitalism's attempt to foreclose a black futurity. And what this makes for is a faith in futurity in the face of the future of anti-blackness.
and that's and that's the hinge at which both the faith in futurity of Afrofuturism meets something like the force and the power of Afro pessimism which lives without a faith in futurity it lives in faithlessness it inhabits hopelessness as a structural position it lives without the consolation of futurity in order to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. So what I'm suggesting is that the value or the valence of Afrofuturism does not come from
the pre-supposed virtue of being a counterfuturism, but instead from an appreciation of the predatory capacity of techno-capitalist and capitalogenic attempts to not only convert the qualitative into the quantitative, to not only capture and mine futurity, but to mine, like a blockchain, to mine ontogenesis as such. And what is important is that this appreciation of the hostile an inhuman scale of computational futurisms, of the infrastructural platforms that generatively entrench futures in the way that Liam depicted earlier today, none of this entails abandoning the necessity
for inventing futurisms just because futurisms are not inherently progressive. On the contrary, it is precisely because futurisms are not inherently progressive that it's precisely because of their potential regressiveness, their potential neo-fascism, their potential collusion, and their potential complicity, this is precisely why certain artists and theorists of color should conduct themselves as futurists. The collusions, the complicities, the regressions, the neo-fascisms of futurism are part of the seriousness of the stakes of the present as future. To conduct yourself as a futurist entails entering into a complicity
with extra-human processes that are ongoing at a planetary scale. This is a practice that entails what one critic calls a more complex accommodation between technique and epistemological concerns, between ways of telling and ways of knowing, especially where knowing is less the claim than the nervousness about it. And this extends to newer futurisms such as Sino-futurism as practiced by Lawrence Leck and Steve Goodman such as Gulf futurisms as practiced by Sophia Al-Maria and Fatima Al-Qadiri. The theory and practice of new futurisms is a practice of collusion and complicity with the anonymous materials of the planetary.
Contemporary futurisms entail an understanding of the way in which neo-reactionary thinkers understand themselves as futurists embarked on what they call a project of highly advanced drastic regression. What is critical is to situate this practice within the wider chronopolitical field, which some people call the speculative time complex, in which futures trading, algorithmic Algorithmic trading, seven-year plans, development proposals, military simulations, securitized preemptions, economic forecasts, all seek to extract, mine and trade on the future. And what emerges from this is the understanding that the continent, by which I mean the 54 countries that assemble the continent of Africa, have never not been the object of what we could call the futures industry.
an industry whose apparatuses, whose networks, and whose devices aim to coerce consent for its preferred future. This is a laboratory for the production of predatory futures, hostile futurities, and complicit futurisms. Okay, I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you.