What does it mean to produce a visual soundtrack for a world that, breathing its last gasps, may not even exist in fifty years? How do we convey what is both most urgent and most fragile; what is most like us and most unlike us? How do we capture and convey that which is alien and foreign about ourselves and our counterpart others, yet refuse fetishization so that we can render it dignified? How do we learn from our mistakes and move forward in a fruitful, constructive way? And, most important, what role does Afro Asia play in this landscape?
The first thing we had to do was come to terms with the terminology. We wanted to play with the idea of an anachronism—the idea that something here was out of time. Not ‘out of time’ as in its time was up; nor as in being out of rhythmic step. We were considering what it meant to be out of time in the Sun-Ra sense: stepping into a scene, into a moment suspended in time but being from beyond that moments time. We knew that the best way to explain an anachronism was the imagine a movie set in 2009, but peppered throughout the movie was: the random car that hadn’t hit the market until 2013, the song in the background that hadn’t been recorded until 2011, and that apparel that had not been designed until after 2010. We knew what an anachronism was—our struggle was to define it succinctly, to make it an audiovisual moment that even a passive eye would be drawn to.
We couldn’t do it.
Sessions spent in the cluttered, and cramped Studio Room B25 at Lincoln Hall brought us a lot of rap but not a lot of production in those fraught early moments. Then, as if in display of their willingness to wait the process out, someone pulls out a book and starts reading: The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill. Someone else wants to know if it’s the right moment for that—if the moments we have together, as a group, are best used reading Mill on one side, and searching for pictures of broken landscapes on another.
Mill, it was explained, was the father of Utilitarianism and a leader in Liberal philosophy. Utilitarianism pushed the idea that any action, as long as it promoted happiness for the greatest amount of people, was not just right, but that it should be the guiding principle of conduct. Liberalism wasn’t too far removed—people should be guided by their reasonable faculties and given the freedom to develop in as healthy, prosperous, and diverse ways as they can. Oh, okay… But, uh, how does that help the group?
It couldn’t; at least not in any real and immediate way. However, that was much in the same way that neither Utilitarianism nor Liberalism could help people of non-European descent; how, from their earliest theoretical inceptions, both had been about the distance from and hegemonic position over the other. Mill called China a warning example of a backward people who, after having shown great promise and wisdom because of their formerly strong cultural practices, had nonetheless fallen stagnant. To Mill and his contemporaries, it wasn’t simply that China had “become stagnant—ha[d] remained so for thousands of years…if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners” it was also that, to him and his contemporaries, China had lost the capacity to do so (Mill 74). On Liberty, Mill’s masterwork, was published in 1859, not quite twenty-five years after the English had abolished slavery in its colonial holdings and replaced the free labor of enslaved Africans with the near-free labor of indentured workers from China and India.
But they already had a history, one of the group members pointed out. They not only had a history, they also had thriving customs, norms, and a functioning government. However, these things could not be acknowledged without having to draw attention to the underlying reason of sidling up and declaring a paternal instinct for the less-developed.
Followed by the efforts at dehumanizing enslaved place, it makes sense that a site such as China would need to be labeled stagnant and backward, even as a left-handed compliment was given over China’s cultural norms and institutions, it’s history, and wisdom. For 19th Century Liberals freedom was conditioned on reason and where reason was ‘lacking’ freedom and democracy were inappropriate. The articulation that China’s hope of improvement “must be by foreigners” was simply the trope of empire reenacted yet again (74).
By the time we arrived at a song and the visual elements that would render what our vision of Afro-Asia had grown to be, we had come to understand the force and vibrancy of history. That in times of distress and of conquest, history was typically cited or invoked in one form or another; history provided a place or rootedness that, conquered or not, couldn’t be wholly taken. It was a rootedness that we found in Alice Coltrane’s “Journey to Satchindananda,” which had already begun haunting the group. The bass line thrummed through us, simultaneously chilling and exciting us with each pull, each dance of the fingers, each play. But there was also the spell of the oud, each pull on the long-necked instruments strings, made magic and evoked the mystic. And in the moments when Vishnu Wood’s fingers made the oud’s strings sound like broken glass over nightfall, what was evoked were mandolins and sitars, and a history to sway with and draw strength from.
Here was a Coltrane and an Asia lying side by, brought to the present by the dark predilections of colonists and now-faded empires. Those hegemonic European societies whose pride was predicated on their supposed civilized nature, their civilizedness and the supposed burden they had ‘to assume’ of ‘raising’ the rest of the developing world. However, their dominance waned and, ultimately, the vestiges of their erstwhile and brutal greatness was found most starkly on the ruin they left behind, in the aftermath of their presence. But here remained a Jazz and an Asia, and as stark as the world looks in the moment, they are a testament to the human spirit.
We deployed Rammellzee, an Afro Futurist, to span the underground histories of visual art and emerge from the tunnels which, themselves stood as historic passages. The permanence of the tunnel structures that Rammellzee frequented—that he himself haunted—fully implied the hold and presence on the future that the past had. And through his work, Ramel was summoned to span the gap, to ferry us all from one moment into the next; through the tunnels of the past into the future that might be waiting. From Coltrane to Mandy Chan to Joey Bada$$, we spanned a bleakness born of the exigencies of the moment, of exploited histories, postcolonial trauma, of liberal capitalist democracy. With us, too, was Lisa Lowe who guided us sternly, taking us past Utilitarianism and Liberalism and reminding us that the same thinkers who gave us the exclusion of modern humanism which was persistently centered on “secular European tradition of liberal philosophy” that always positioned itself over and above the Other for the success of its own positionality (Lowe 192).
We too reached for history, approaching it with the reverence of standing on sacred ground. The world we had seen behind us was bleak, our sound reflective of both our pasts and our present. We might have sent the message in our song that we thought we’d lost substantial ground, but none of us was wholly convinced that we had gained enormous swaths of ground to begin with. Today we felt besieged by politics, by a collapsing environment, by inequality and injustice; by the crude gestures at the Other, by Exclusion Acts, and acts of exclusion. From the upper reaches of the halls of power where there was the demand to know ‘why did we need to keep taking in immigrants from shithole countries’ with more Europeans being the only viable alternative. And, too, there is Stephen Miller, a white nationalist and now top advisor to the president on matters of immigration. The history we stepped onto was of blood-softened ground that cried out to us. Yet, somehow, as we pieced together the landscape we imagined based on the facts as we understood them, something strange, almost mystical happened.
The tools with which we would tell our version of events were humble: FL Studios and our laptops, Adobe Premier Pro and our voices; a kick and a snare; Overflow, DJ Mad Dog, DJ Darkside, and DJ NoThankU; YouTube and our hope. Our hope to tell an honest story that an Afro-Asia fifty, sixty, a hundred and seventy-five years ahead of us would hear and “say this is how it happened, and this is what we have to get right.” But Joey Bada$$ told the story clearest as the video drew down: we have to survive, there is no other choice. We have to survive because we have stories to hand down. In fifty years, ours will be the words of the Ancients, and the Afro-Asia we encounter then will have to be a place from where we can draw strength even as we honor the histories of those behind us. We will pick up their chains and the contracts of their indentiture, we will touch the soil they tilled shoulder to shoulder, enslaved and indentured, and we will say, “Tell us your stories, so that we might tell them forward and finally learn from what our fathers’ fathers did not.” This is hope.
[RetroFutura: Catherine…Nick…Chau…Elias]
Dated: Dec. 18, 2019
Ithaca, NY
Works Cited
Lowe, Lisa. “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire, ed. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham: Duke University Press. 2008.
Mill, John Stuart. The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill, Notes and Commentary by Dale E. Miller. New York: The Modern Library. 2002.
Rose, Joel. “Leaked Emails Fuel Calls for Stephen Miller to Leave White House.” NPR Online Edition, November 26, 2019. (https://www.npr.org/2019/11/26/783047584/leaked-emails-fuel-calls-for-stephen-miller-to-leave-white-house).
Very interesting article. In the beging when you speak about anachronism and how it is essentially something outside of time or suspended, it made me think of something immutable and forever applicable. My thought process is that if something is outside of time, then it must be present throughout all time and not limited to one specific moment in time. Almost like cultural cornerstones that will always be relevant and important, like food. Great points!