| One area that I think the symposium has really been intriguing is the sense of historical critique: i.e. there's a kind of catharsis in living through the past as a kind of reflection site for future permutations in african identity--in the present. There's an artist named Keith Piper based in London who works in this vein, and of course, people as diverse as film makers Isaac Julien and Marlon Riggs, and the writer Gayl Jones. But what made John Akomfrah's Last Angel of History intriguing (I'm in it by the way), is that the kind of non-linear type of psychological engagement that seems to be a part and parcel of african american culture has become a visual trope that film makers like Stan Brakhage and Harry Smith were dealing with as well: it's a stream of consciousness, but what shape is the current? Akomfrah speaks about some of his work as a reaserch into how people continuously explore the wounds of the past as a kind of loop circuit or a kind of transubstantiation: "I think necrophilia is at the heart of black filmmaking. Not in a literal sense, but in a postmodern sense in which people are invoking figures... there is a level of morbidity which I think people have to realise in the quest for identity. Identities are a morbid business." Or as Wilson Harris said a long time ago in his essay "The Caribbean Artist Movement": "with the mutilation and decline of the conquered tribe, a new shaman or artist stryggles to emerge, who finds himself moving along the kife edge of change. He has been, as it were, cross-fertilized by victim and victor. And a powerful need arises to invoke the lost generations in a new creative visionary light." What links Akomfrah and artists like Piper in the Afro scene in the U.K. is the kind of playfullness in self affirmation that African American culture seems to have somehow transmuted into musical theater. The juxtaposition of the two cultures, and the way they have borrowed back and forth from one another is what really intrigues me. Maybe music acts as a kind of soundtrack for an absent film--a cinema verité that somehow got lost in translation, and is being reconstructed as me move into the early 21st century. Call it Generation Y, I guess.
Perhaps this is the major difference between African American and other members of the African diaspora (and it's a crucial aspect of the relationship of part to whole, no doubt!) It's all about the "remix." Let me elaborate: of most of the diaspora that went through the crucible of the middle passge, what demarcated African Americans against the grain of the culture that surrounded them and made the slavery conditions in the U.S. a "peculiar institution" as Kenneth Stamp liked to call it a while ago, was the "discrepant engagement" of the rhetoric of the U.S. versus the everyday conditons of living in a psychological field of deep compression: i.e. all characteristics that contrasted the established norms of slave culture had to be suppressed and somehow transmuted into other social codes, at the risk being completely destroyed by the surrounding culture of a virulently racist and hypocritical society. Real illusions, true lies. It all makes for a mirror chamber of reflections--some more wholesome than others. Anytime people are presented with a "totalizing" concept of identity, fracture points occur, because no one can assume that sense of occupying a space created for you by someone else. Maybe this is why I think African American identity is globally popular these days. It's a franchise identity that allows for different modes of thought and behavior to "act out" the Other in any society, anywhere. Individuality HAD to come out of systems, and the emergent dialogue we are creating now, is part of the process of healing, perhaps.
This is what leads me to the idea of black culture as an emergent systems culture--i.e. whenever people are on-line and create dialog as a way of finding common themes of interest, there's always a kind of push and pull for narrative formation: that is how new ideas are forged in the world of digital media. But when you look back at the kind of society diaspora culture was forged in--these ideas of mutual interest, shared values and ideas, were atomized--the only common "language" of the diaspora became music. When people communicated over the distance communicating with drums and smoke signals, or in the case of the Maroons, both, the shared sense of danger or disruption created a psychological atmosphere where everything was charged with mythic resonance. Maybe that's the strange thing when I see people look at black musicians and think that All black people (should) act like whatever. Or as Keith Piper says in his CD-Rom project "the exploded city" as he quotes Harris in a remix "for centuries there has been a peculiar function associated with the imagination, whether priest, poet, odd sort of man whatever he is. This man who tires, who is tested from all angles, who has correspondence with the devil and everything else, because he is profoundly immersed in the ruined fabric... he is compensating for losses. That kind of man has up to now expressed the only tradition of freedom that we know of." A rejoinder by way of Derek Walcott: "history is sea." Like I said earlier, it's a stream of consciousness, but which way do the currents flow?
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