Narrating African FutureS

In(ter)ventions and Agencies in African and African diasporic fiction

Susan Arndt, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, Susan Arndt, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429657306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Kunst

This volume is dedicated to fictional negotiations of future, or rather futureS. After all, 'future' cannot but exist in a multitude of complementary and/or competing futures, all causally related to each other just as much as to their pasts and their respective memories. Within this cyclical and causal triad of past, present and future, futureS have been made and unmade, remembered and forgotten, affirmed and subverted in the multiversity of competing agencies, interests, and accesses to power and privileges. Thus framed, African and African diasporic futureS have been done, undone and redone over the centuries, affecting and affected by planetary actions as ruled by global power constellations, whilst being contemplated and moulded by fictional in(ter)ventions in the process.

Literature and other cultural means of expression such as film, fine arts, performing arts and the internet are at the centre of this volume. Employing FutureS as a critical category of analysis, the book comprises perspectives from Europe, Africa and the Middle East, from academics, activists and artists. They all share their perspectives on African and African-diasporic visions of futureS, with an emphasis on dreaming and memory, environmentalism and ethics, freedom and resistance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the African Literature Association.

Dream*hoping memory into futureS: reading resistant narratives about Maafa by employing futureS as a category of analysis

Susan Arndt

ABSTRACT

This article conceptualizes “FutureS” as a category of analysis, insisting on four semantic pillars that induce me to speak of “futureS” rather than “the future”. The capitalized “S” in both FutureS and futureS suggests that “future” does not exist in the (simplicity of any) singular, and this is largely due to three reasons: First, the “S” refers to the fact that futureS are causally intersected with both the past and the present. Second, it draws attention to the fact that futureS are intersected and molded by complexities and coexistences of glocal encounters of conflicting, competing, and complementary agencies, interests, contingencies, possibilities and options in the un/making and (not) sharing of futureS. Consequently, and third, futureS are made (as guided by agencies in power) and can be un*made (through resistance). In fact, agency is power’s most virulent protagonist and antagonist at the very same time. This article will discuss agencies and their being triggered by dreams and hopes – and the memories they are pillared on. Delving into this thesis, this article compares two well-known conceptualizations of the integrative and causal intersection of past, memory and futureS: The German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” and the Adinkra philosophy of “Sankofa”. Thus framed, the article analyzes fictional and factual representations of memory-driven dream*hopes. First, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech will be compared with J. Cole’s hip-hop rereading of Black dreams against the backdrop of contemporary racial profiling in his song “Be Free”. Subsequently, the article delves comparatively into negotiations of Maafa with respect to the power of memory and dream*hopes in Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” and Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory.

“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”¹

“The subject of the dream is the dreamer.”²

“The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.”³

Future as a category of analysis: thinking futures as thinking beyond fact, fortune, and fate

The British sociologist Barbara Adam did extensive research on social narratives about time and future. Winding up a decade of research, she suggests that future is performed as fact, fiction, fortune, and fate.⁴ Indeed, future is a fact inasmuch as it bears notions of being in becoming. After all, it may be a fact that I cannot become 11 years old tomorrow and that we are all going to die, even the sun; or maybe not, since the universe keeps existing four-dimensionally, no matter what. Yet since we neither exactly know nor completely control what will be/come, could future ever be a fact-fact? The same goes for fate. There are certainly things that are beyond control, but fate is about the total absence of agencies and scopes of decision-making. Yet is there really something that exists beyond a total lack of decision-making? In other words, is there anything that is fate only? Moreover, future can also be explained and perceived as fortune — depending on our grade of happiness. However, fortune is never a mere “fortune-given” thing but wo*man-made as backed up by very earthly parameters. Therefore, anything we might consider to be fortune and fate is also very much about power and the privileges and options thus (not) granted. Hence, for instance, being born a princess or being born within the fortress of Schengen-Europe (or not) is less about fortune or fate than about power constellations that buy or disclose options of living into a self-determined future. Lastly, the fictional aspect of future holds true inasmuch as it does not exist beyond being imagined; and yet, this fictionalized meaning matters, because it creates social matters in a most powerful way. Therefore, the question is: do these concepts, as suggested by Adam, fully cover the complexities of “future”?

When approaching this question, the advantage of distinguishing between the usage of a term/concept as “category of practice” and as “category of analysis” comes to mind, as suggested by Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker in 2000 and particularly in the latter’s article “Categories of Analysis and Categories of Practice” (2012). Employing the example of the term/concept “Muslim”, Brubaker argues that “categories of practice” are about meaning as linguistically performed by “lay users” and, as such, embedded in daily language, which codes and is itself coded by political, religious, and socio-cultural discourses. Yet these very discourses cannot be unraveled and deconstructed without transgressing the realm of practice and entering a meta-level or, once again, what Brubaker calls “categories of analysis”. Of course, “the category of practice” is entangled with “the category of analysis” — the semantics of both keep reifying and resituating each other. Therefore, just as “the category of practice” informs the scrutiny of “the category of analysis”, the latter keeps resituating the meaning of a term (on its layer as “category of practice”), including its impact on societal structures and discourses.

Adam’s reading future as fact, fortune, fate, and fiction seemingly corresponds to an everyday language semantics of “future” and is hence all about Brubaker’s “category of practice”. When wishing to identify, deconstruct, and transcend what this “future” as “category of practice” is able to narrate, a “category of analysis” is needed that covers the wide realm of what will happen, might happen, has happened, might have happened just as much as what can happen and what could have happened, looking at reasons, causalities, and consequences in the context of “glocal” interactions as framed by discursive and structural histories of power. This is where the potentials of “future” as “category of analysis” — hereafter referred to as “FutureS” — are needed.⁵ This “category of analysis” interferes into “future” as “category of practice”, insisting on three semantical pillars that induce me to speak of “futureS” rather than “the future.” While having the capitalized “S” in common, the “F” is only capitalized — hence, “FutureS” — when referring to “the category of analysis”, while “futureS” is my term for talking about the subject of “future” in a different manner that, in turn, corresponds to the term/concept FutureS (cf. Arndt, Nyangulu, Piesche).⁶

The capitalized “S” in both “FutureS” and “futureS” suggests that “future” does not exist in the (simplicity of any) singular, and this is largely due to three reasons: First, the “S” refers to the fact that futureS are causally intersected with both the past and the present. Second, it draws attention to the fact that futureS are intersected and molded by complexities and coexistences of glocal encounters of conflicting, competing, and complementary agencies, interests, contingencies, possibilities, and options in the un/making and (not) sharing of futureS. Throughout global histories, some futureS have buttressed each other, while some have deflated each other and others have prevented each other’s existence; some have advanced and some hindered the other. There are futureS that neither did nor will ever happen, because one futurE thwarted the other — and in this instance the capital “E” puts emphasis on this erasure of given pluralities. Consequently, and third, futureS (as molded by and molding the category of analysis “FutureS”) are made and shared unevenly by power-coded agencies: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”, as internet visionary William Gibson suggests.⁷ Indeed, every struggle about power, freedom and justice is about futureS and every struggle about futureS is to strive for gaining access to power, freedom and justice. After all, futureS’ polyphony, complexity, reflexivity, and relationality are coded by the structures and discourses of power, along the grammar of racialization, gender, sexuality, religion, health, ability, age, and nation. The social positions thus coded decide, to a high extent, about the very impact and agency a person or collective may have in shaping (their own and other people’s) individual and collective futureS and their share of it. Ultimately, however, the struggle over futureS is not determined by power constellations alone. Rather, both power and futureS can be negotiated and un/made by agencies. Contextualized by power and powerlessness, privileges and deprivation, ethics and unscrupulousness, responsibility and the lack thereof, agencies desire and fear, fight and sustain, accept and negotiate, experience and forget, build and destroy futureS. In fact, agency is power’s most virulent protagonist and antagonist at the very same time.

Thus framed, in the following, FutureS will be mobilized as a category of analysis for a postcolonial rereading of fictionalizations of futureS as performed by (resistant) fictive and factual dreams and hopes and their power to transgress future as fate and fortune, un/making alternate facts and fictions in the process.

Futures as narrated by (memory-driven) dream*hopes

The agencies of futureS operate in different complementary and entangled modes — and narration is one of them: we were, are and will be, what we narrate. Narratives, in turn, may bury or carry and hence mediate (or not) and disseminate (or not) dreams and hopes in given entanglements with memories — and I wish to describe given intersections thereof in the following.

First of all, the concepts of dreams and hopes are used as complementary terms in this article. For one thing, I use dreams as (verbal/visual) narrations of what is strived for, wanted and desired — excluding the connotational layer of nightmares. Thus coded, on the other hand, dreams share a number of denotations and connotations with hopes — particularly if they are addressing ideas about futureS. Yet while dreams may exceed what is seemingly plausible in the very now, hope is more grounded in translating it into actions for possible changes, as I argue somewhat in line with the famous suggestion that “hope is a waking dream”.⁸ When waking up and desiring to (make the) dream (come true), the dream has turned into a hope and keeps insisting on change as dream*hoping futureS. Therefore, in the following, I will speak of dream*hopes (the asterisk is to mark the complementary entanglement of both concepts), unless the reference is clearly to one of the concepts specifically or when one concept is favored over the other by an author or in a text that I talk about.

As a joined venture, dream*hopes express individual and collective needs and desires, featuring individual and collective thoughts, images and sensations in various states, ranging all the way from sleep to speech, from likeability to unlikeability, from the slightest possibility of becoming fulfilled to the highest form of fulfilment. Whether composed by the human unconscious or uttered intentionally, dream*hopes are very outspoken about their very source: “The subject of the dream is the dreamer”, as Toni Morrison puts it in Playing in the Dark (17). Then dreams are about the dreamers — and hopes about the hopers. These dream*hopers are socially positioned subjects who own power-coded agencies, and these very subject positions inform the dream*hopers’ very dream*hopes. Ultimately, though, the dream*hopes are much freer than their subjects, i.e. the dream*hoping person(s). Sure, dream*hopes, just like humans, can be silenced, but they cannot be censored, nor can they be imprisoned, nor killed. What is more, dream*hopes can narrate what should (not) be/come (anymore). Dream*hopes comment on something called “reality”, but they are freed from its very obstacles. Dream*hopes offer and enter futureS without being expected to map the road or hand out the tools or manuals needed to make them come true — which, nevertheless, applies (according to the above mentioned slight distinction of the two terms) to dreams even more than to hopes. Thus, freed from obstacles such as gravity-ruled spaces and chronology-b...