Black Possibility: A Metaphysical Space of Power and Wild Imagination

Abstract

Black Possibility: A Metaphysical Space of Power and Wild Imagination Caroline Edwards (bio) 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 [End Page 476] 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...