Review: Ekow Eshun, ‘In The Black Fantastic’
Review of Ekow Eshun’s In the Black Fantastic (MIT Press, 2022), 304 pages
Abstract
Through the months of June to September 2022, London’s Hayward Gallery exhibited several works of art mainly by black artists, titled In the Black Fantastic. This volume, also titled In the Black Fantastic, is not only a follow-up to, or a summary of, but a complementary analysis of the many themes that inspired that exhibition. The questions this review explores are these. What exactly is the Black Fantastic and what does it include and exclude? Is it an artistic movement or a collection of works by black artists? Finally, is the Black Fantastic a theory of black art or is it merely a description of an art movement?
Reviewed by Gabriel O. Apata
Nearly half a century ago, Naseem Khan published a report titled The Art that Britain Ignores (1976) which focused on the many vibrant creative artworks that ethnic minority artists in Britain were producing, but which remained largely invisible to the wider public. These works were inconspicuous because their creators lacked institutional support and media attention and when support did come, it came in the form of contribution to local community groups operating on the fringes of society. Alice Correia’s recently edited anthology What is Black Art? (2022) has sought to bring to prominence the marginalised voices of black British artists. Also, Kobena Mercer in “The Longest Journey” (2021) traces not only the long history of travel, the contours, the circuitous routes of passage, the travails, the hybridization and transformation that Black artistic creativity has undergone over time. In the Black Fantastic, Ekow Eshun provides an update to this narrative. He tells the story of the emergence of black artistic creativities in the past few decades now receiving overdue public recognition, which he himself is helping to promote. This volume follows an exhibition that took place between June and September 2022 at the Hayward Gallery in London, also titled the Black Atlantic, which Eshun curated. In 300 pages of what can only be described as a gallery, a library and a museum Eshun takes the reader on a voyage of discovery around the ruins of black history that these artists have excavated, dusted off and are now prominently showcasing in the world’s galleries. Through art, light is finally being shone also on contemporary and futuristic black experiences. This is art that the world cannot now afford to ignore.
Thematically arranged around slavery, migration through liberation and the future of black creativity the book covers so much ground and the important work of many artists and artists that many may not have heard of.
So, what is the Black fantastic? According to Eshun ‘By [the Black Fantastic] I mean works of speculative fiction that draw from history and myth to conjure new visions of African diasporic culture and identity’ (10). Thus, ‘the black fantastic looks to self-fashioned fictions, mythic worlds, African-originated knowledge systems and spiritual practices, as means of liberation’ (11). It is not a ‘genre or a movement but a way of seeing, shared by artists who grapple with the legacy of slavery and the inequities of racialized contemporary society...’ (12). Which is to say, black artistic creativity confronts the racial mythology and its attending fantasies with its own fantastic realities. But not just black creative expressionisms; it is also about black epistemology, a way of knowing, of acting, of seeing, of reflecting all captured in art. But is this not merely a clash of mythical titans, arising from opposing cultures?
Although he does not quite spell this out, what Eshun is doing is contrasting two kinds of mythologies: the mythology surrounding blackness which whiteness invented and the mythologies of the black African culture. While both are inventions, the difference lies in the fact that the former is negative, a falsehood, a dangerous myth, - as Ashley Montague (1942) tells us, - while the latter is a positive, uplifting and awe-inspiring. A Film like The Black Panther exemplifies the Black fantastic representation, which although stands on its own merit as a work of fiction but stands also as a mythological riposte to black misrepresentation. Therefore, the fantastic in the Black fantastic is not a mere adjective that describes the extraordinariness of these works, but an imaginative depiction of black ontology through mythology.
Ekow Eshun is one of a growing number of by black artists, writers, academics, curators, museums, galleries and many more that are shifting centuries old negative paradigms of blackness. Their works are contributing to educating, informing and entertaining the general public about what is fantastic about blackness. But this book is a collaborative effort. Although his is the authorial name on the front of the book - Ralf Rugoff, the director of the Hayward, wrote the foreword - but there are contributions by many others including Kameelah Martin on black feminist aesthetics, Michelle Commander on ‘Flying Africans, Technology and the Future’. They are in the form of extracts from Octavia Butler’s ever popular novel Kindred and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa Adriano Elia, Ian Bourland’s Afronauts: Race in Space and Tobias Wofford’s Afrofutures.
Martin describes black feminist epistemology through the concept of conjuring or Conjure epistemology. ‘Conjure feminism’, she writes, ‘is an epistemological framework for understanding black women’s work and experiences. It privileges women’s sacred knowledge and folkloric practices of spirit work’ (139). Conjuring is the invocation of ‘ancestral knowledge’ that is both spiritual and practical, a tradition that predates slavery, but which to this day black women in the diaspora continue to perform. Take the case of Valerie Lee’s Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers (1996) which deals with the tradition of black women’s midwifery. The slaves, though socially stripped of all connections with Africa in rituals that constitute of ‘social death’ (Paterson, 1982) have retained many of their cultural traditions.
Sankofa is a Ghanaian term (Akan language) which means - go back to your roots and return energised, empowered, or renewed to face the future. This idea inspired the theme in Gerima’s film of that title. The idea is not to forget who you are or where you come from but to remember and in remembering are able to navigate or negotiate the rough terrain of life. This is a veritable theme in the African system of thought. This is what Conjure feminist is all about but from black women’s perspective.
The works in this volume as they were in the exhibition are by celebrated and lesser-known artists. They include Chris Ofili, Hew Locke, Wangechi Mutu, Nick Cave, Lina Aris Viktor, Sedrick Chisom, Ellen Gallagher, Rashaad Newsome, Tabitha Rezaire, Alison Saar, Fabrice Monteiro, Frida Oupabo, Wole, Lagunju, Zohra Opoku and many more, including Juliana Huxtable’s Lil Marvel’s self-image (featured on the book’s cover) illustrates the intersection between, race, gender and sexuality. Sadly, the artists featured, and the many works displayed in this book are too many to mention and too rich to analyse individually. These artists are working across different fields, on different themes in different genres, from slavery and the treacherous Middle passage to black space travel. As well as art, there are analyses of music, film, literature and technology, each masterfully done. Each page turned is a revelation. Black artists are recovering from the past what was lost and in doing so, are helping to reshape black ontology through art. Through the efforts of writers like Eshun and galleries like the Hayward that are helping to transform black art from the fringes to the mainstream of public life.
This follows Jules-Rosette and Osborn’s African Art Reframed (2020) which also discusses the way in which African art has been transformed over the past decades through a process of reframing. Much like Mercer’s idea of the ‘longest journey’ of black art travel, Jules-Rosette and Osborn discuss what they describe as the ‘nodal’ transformation of African art through their idea of reframing. Nodality refers to the shift in structure and audience by institutions to promote black art, but the transformation occurs in stages. From being perceived as primitive, black art then moved through the stages of curiosity, private collections, small gallery spaces, display in museums as ethnography and finally in postmodernist renewal and ‘virtual museums.’ This nodal transformation was the call that Naseem Ahmed made nearly half a century ago and which this book and that of Jules-Rosette and Osborn will do so much to fulfil.
But is the Black Fantastic not another name for Afrofuturism or magic realism? Eshun thinks not. He sees both Afrofuturism and magic realism as having limitations that the Black Fantastic transcends. Mark Dery (1994) who coined the term Afrofuturism conceived it as a concept concerned with black techno-culture and science fiction but the Black Fantastic is much more than this, Eshun claims. According to him:
“The black fantastic shares commonalities with genres such as magic realism and Afrofuturism. But it differs from them in significant ways. Magic realism operates on polarities such as ‘history versus magic, precolonial past versus post-industrial present and life versus death’. By contrast Black fantastic finds productive tension in the to and fro between the everyday and the extraordinary. It speaks to the conviction that African beliefs and cultural practices are worthy of sincere, not sardonic, consideration as sources of knowledge and creative inspiration” (11-12).
This is not entirely convincing. Far from it. What does ‘operating on polarities’ mean and in what way is this significantly different from finding ‘productive tension in the to and fro between the everyday and the extraordinary’? This is the sort of thing that Isaiah Berlin would describe as ‘metaphysical free association’. The attempt to distinguish Afrofuturism from the Black fantastic pins nothing down in concrete terms. The concept of the Black fantastic is not closed off but open-ended. As such it can and will always accommodate new thoughts, ideas and concepts, but without falling into the categorising binary trap that gave us the colour line in the first place.
This might seem like a moot point, a splitting of hairs, but Eshun believes that this is an important distinction, and we must agree with him. But as Acuff (2020) points out ‘epistemologically, the term [Afrofuturism] speaks to the future of Black people in general.’ This point echoes Eshun’s own notion that the black Fantastic is also epistemological: a way of seeing or of knowing, which makes one wonder how this is different from Acuff’s observation. Much has been written on the concept of Afrofuturism – including an important essay, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism (2003) by Kodwo Eshun (Ekow’s brother) – but that debate will not detain us here.
What will detain us for a moment are two major flaws in the book. The flaws are that the book lacks a theory of black epistemology and black aesthetics, the latter of which should hold everything together. It offers no aesthetics of blackness that extends beyond thematic inspiration and an epistemology that is only half defined. The problem is the lack of a cogent theory or concept of black epistemology from which black art draws. Epistemology is more than a way of seeing or reflecting. There is always a way of seeing things, so this statement lacks full epistemological import. What exactly is that way of seeing that constitutes black knowledge? This still needs to be spelt out. It is one thing to draw inspiration from the past, to conjure or invoke black spirituality or historic or contemporary black experience, but it is another thing to tie it all in one explanatory bundle.
Regarding aesthetics, art cannot simply exist as a didactic medium, merely to teach or to inform. It must elevate, not just the mind or spirit but it must lift off the ground to reflect upon black experiences. The risk is that without this aesthetic conception black art is reduced to resistance art, forever engage in a struggle – predicated on themes of slavery, racism, discrimination and so forth. Yet, art as resistance is not what is problematic; art as utility or functionality is not a problem – a cathedral is a place of worship but also a piece of architecture, a piece of art. The problem is when it is merely functional or utilitarian to something and leaves no room to reflect upon itself. It is not the blackness of the artwork or the fact that it is the result of the black imagination that holds our attention; something else does. And that thing is the possession of aesthetic qualities alongside, and beyond that which inspired it. Black art cannot simply hang on gallery walls or sit on museum plinths because of their blackness; it must do more than represent blackness. Black creativity alone does not confer aesthetic merit on a piece of artwork. The question is what is the aesthetic appeal of these works in a black artistic context?
The significant defining difference, in answer to the question, is aesthetic beauty and appreciation. The depiction of the horrors and ugliness of slavery in art, is captivating not because of its ugliness and horror but because of the artistic skill in depicting that horror. We connect with the piece of art as art not to the horror. If not, we might as well turn to history books. Some might argue that there is no black aesthetics, only aesthetics. In that case there can be no black epistemology, or feminist epistemology.
Morris Weitz (1956) for example, long ago argued that talk of theory of art or aesthetic theory is mistaken since theory can never cover all the necessary and sufficient properties that we usually ascribe to art. Nevertheless, he went on to produce a theory of art, which states that art is an open-ended concept. Equally, Bell Hooks claims that ‘aesthetics is more than a philosophy or a theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming’ (95:65). Yet this way of seeing requires a way of describing, of conceptualising and of reflecting that specifically distinguishes it from other ways of seeing. This experience must be underpinned by a theory, a philosophy, or reflection that encapsulates the uniqueness, which is so described. This is Hooks’ black feminist aesthetics. Also, in his essay “What is this Black in ‘Black Popular culture” (1992) Stuart Hall notes that ‘the black aesthetic’ is ‘…the distinctive cultural repertoires out of which popular representations were made’ (28). This means that black art requires its aesthetic grounds for being black art. Or as Richard Powell points out:
“…‘black aesthetic’ is the name for philosophical theories about the art of the African diaspora: an aesthetic grounded in the idea of a new, that is, a Post-Emancipation and post-colonial identity which, from Jazz-Age Harlem and Montparnasse to the “sound system” societies of the west Kingston, south London, and south central Los Angeles, thrives in black communities where artistic creativity and performance are the basic cultural currencies” (1997: 15).
The Black fantastic needs its own distinguishing aesthetics, its own theory, beyond a way of seeing, beyond description, towards an overarching framework. This collection of works, though not a movement we are told, is largely polythetic or fulfils Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ criterion, sharing as they do many similarities even if expressed in different ways and through different genres, overlapping and crisscrossing. Still, the book is a thing of beauty with its many captivating plates of works by artists working in different areas, but which together have produced what can only be described as black magic.
References
Afrofuturism: Reimagining Art Curricula for Black Existence. Art Education, Vol. 73, (3) pp. 13-21. Doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2020.1717910, 2020.
Correia, Alice (ed). What is Black Art? New York: Penguin Random House, 2022.
Dery, Mark. Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delaney, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. In M. Dery (ed.), Flames Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (pp.179-222). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Eshun, Kodwo. Further Considerations on Afrofuturism. The Centennial Review, Vol. 3, (2) pp.287-302. Doi:10.1353/incr.2003.0021, 2003
Hooks, Bell. An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional in the Object of Labour. (eds.) Joan Livingstone and John Ploof. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007
Jules-Rosette, Bennetta., Osborn, J. R. African Art Reframed: Reflections and Dialogues on Museum Cultures. University of Illinois Press, 2020
Hall, Stuart. What Is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture? Social Justice, Vol.20, No 1 (51-52) pp.104-114, 1993
Khan, Naseem. The Arts Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain. Community Relations Commission, 1976
Mercer, Kobena. The Longest Journey: Black Diaspora Artists in Britain. Art History, Vol. 44, issue 3, pp.457-675. Doi.org/10.1111/146-8365.12576, 2021
Lee, Valerie. Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers. Psychology Press. New York, London: Routledge, 1996
Powell, Richard. Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996
Weitz, Morris. The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism., XV, pp. 27-35, 1956
Gabriel O. Apata is a research scholar and writer whose works cut across the humanities and social sciences. His interests include Philosophy, Sociology, Aesthetics, Religion, Post-colonial Studies, African history and politics and Diaspora Studies.
