Against Western Time

Against Western Time: 

The Black Angel of History and Visions of a Cosmically Black Future

Black art and thought are subjected to a hegemonic
white order, whose domain stretches across time itself. Afrofuturism is an
attempt to resist linear western time. Through their art Black artists are able
visit cosmic technological futures, spaces where racialized subjects wrestle
and reappropriate technology and space. Afrofuturism thus stands in opposition
to a “time presentism” (Rasheedah Phillips,436) and fear of the future. It rejects the pessimistic
reading of the Angel of History, with its notions of linear time, doom,
and progress. Afrofuturism circumvents the predicament of the Angel of
History by resisting the very temporal understanding that reinforces linear
white time.  However, contained within
legendary Afrofuturist Sun Ra’s music, poetry, and other works lies a kind of
pessimism and a clear connection to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the
Angel of History. We can critically analyze Afrofuturism by setting it against
Benjamin’s on the Concept on History and its conceptions of temporality,
space, technology, and time. The Angel of History as conceptual metaphor for
linear pessimistic temporality allows for the exploration of the diffrences in
time perception between Walter Banjamin and Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism is a collection of thought and art united by a common aesthetic of technology. Afrofuturism posits
a black future, spun with contemporary black experience. It critically reorders
time, rejecting linear notions that emphasize individual sites of trauma,
reinterpreting the future. For many Afrofuturists the past does not exist as a
definite beginning, instead blackness exists regardless of the racialization
that linear time would dub the start of blackness. 

The Afrofuturist temporal understanding
is at odds with the western spatiotemporally, which “conceives of time as flow and inevitability.”
(Rasheedah Phillips, 433) Western culture creates institutions, religious and
political, to reinforce its images of the future. The western controlled future
ensures predictability via linearity. This structure of time orders past,
present, and future into neat, fixed divisions, rejecting alternate
spatiotemporal understandings. Central to this western model of time is the
idea of a fixed endpoint of time, a chaotic apocalypse. That doom is ingrained
into western imagination. Whether through the Christian rapture, science: the
Chemistry concept of entropy, the unidirectional future is organized into an
increasingly mechanical temporality. Another central aspect of western notions
of time is conquest. As science and technology oriented themselves towards the
future, so too did the drive towards conquest. “Stephen Kern notes how the
‘annexation of the space of others’ and the ‘outward movement of people and
goods’ amounted to ‘spatial expressions of the active appropriation of the
future’.” (Phillips, 434) Linear time and control over potential futures acts
to confine oppressed people, to prevent them from creating political futures.
“For those deprived of access to the future, they become stuck planning for the
present while the society around them speeds forward in illusory, linear
progress.” (Phillips,437) This creates a mistrust of the future and futurity. A
mistrust furthered by Walter Benjamin’s spatiotemporal understanding that falls
in line with a western spatiotemporal understanding, in spite of Benjamin’s
leftism. 

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus
Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something
he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings
are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned
toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single
catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The
angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his
wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm
irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
(Walter Benjamin)

Benjamin warns of both technology and
progress, but in doing so reinforces the notion of linear time. The idea that
we a hurtling towards a chaotic end, locked into an endless wind of progress.
It inevitably reproduces the constraints of controlling potential futures, in
turn creating mistrust of the future, and robbing the oppressed of the abillity
to imagine potential futures. For Benjamin, Futurity in any capacity is
dangerous and threatening, the future is a sight of blindness that we face with
our backs turned. It is the unknown continuation of a single chaotic
catastrophe. This stands in opposition to Afrofuturism and black speculative
imagination which liberates future worlds and resist the current temporal
order, by restructuring past, present, and future as perpetual. Unlike
Benjamin, Afrofuturists peer into the future, without back turned on any
temporal period. 

Another important site within
Afrofuturism is space, half of the time space dichotomy. A site that Benjamin
is unwilling to explore. His cultural materialism is within itself a heightened
focus on the conditions of the present rather than imagining those of the
future, a key concept to Afrofuturism, which provides an alternative to the
white domination of space and time, reclaiming space as a meditative cosmic
body rather than a site of conquest and exploitation. “The Afrofuturist cosmos
is an inter-sidereal space, not firstly a set of objects or subjects but a dark
dimension, an atopia – a space out-of-space, a spacing – from which new ways of
considering human beings and the Earth could emerge.” (Neyrat, 121) Afrofuturism
is the next stage in the Copernican revolution, a critical reimagining of space
as the place. It rewrites the concept of the ship, altering the middle
passage as a site of blackness. The ship is no longer a slave ship, it is a
space ship, one propelled by a black imagination that rewrites history,
disregarding western notions of linear time. To frame the future, Architect of
Afrofuture Sun Ra writes “the future is never / Never comes tomorrow / Never is
not” (Neyrat,127) The future does not exist concretely, yet it demands that we
invent the future even when we have been robbed of that future. It is shaping
the present to transform it into a place of emancipation, by often imagining
what seems like escape into the future. This is the inaugural paradox of
Afrofuturism. The present only exists as so far as to bear the past and the
future. 

To resist the western time order, time rebels must
arm themselves appropriately, what better weapon than art. This is a weapon
that Benjamin is willing to use, though admittedly he picked a rather awful
looking piece of art, however in the
Afrofuturist movement, a primary weapon is music, one remains especially
significant. Janelle Monae, a contemporary Afrofuturist musician, highlights
the relationship between art, song, and imagination when she says “We believe songs are spaceships. We believe music
is the weapon of the future.” (Howard, 1) 

Funkadelic and its
sister band Parliament created an alternative Afrofuturism to the somber future
envisioned by Sun Ra. Weaving together contemporary Black culture, the cosmic
visons of Sun Ra, and the immutable power of Funk, they created P-Funk, a
radical new form of Afrofuturism. This P-Funk creates a revolutionary
solidarity and healing between listeners that jive with the groove of the beat.
A perfect demonstration of the song as spaceship is Funkadelic’s The Song is
Familiar:

There is a song
that I sing whenever I'm sad, feeling bad

There is a place in my head that I go when I'm feeling low

I can trust in the melody, in this song I can find me

Ever since I lost you, I've been so lost too

In our love there is harmony, and I want to see this love through with you

There is a song you can sing

When the love you had is love gone bad

There is a place you can go

There's a quiet place...all you gotta do is space

There is a song
that I sing whenever I'm sad, feeling bad

There is a place in my head that I go, when I'm feeling low

To my song I can relate and I don't got to syncopate

Every word is in time, on time, at all times

In our love there is harmony, and I want to see this love through with you

There is a song you can sing whenever you're sad, feeling bad

There is a quiet place, you can go, when you're feeling low

There is a song you can sing

When the love you had is love gone bad

There is a place you can go

There's a quiet place...all you gotta do is space

There is a song that I sing whenever I'm sad, feeling bad

There is a place in my head that I go, when I'm feeling low

This song itself
exists outside of white time and space, a melody deep within the oppressed that
can be tapped into bringing healing. It connects the listener to a place beyond
the physical world that requires the listener to “do… space.” The space exists
within the human imagination, yet “Every word is in time, on time, at all
times”. This directly connects with the Afrofuturist conception of past and
present, while Afrofuturism is turned towards the future it exists in the
present, defined by the connection between past and present. It is in the
cosmic funk that oppressed people can find solace, meditation, and focus on
alternative futures. 

Works
Cited

Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History.
SFU, 2016. 

Clinton, George, and et. al. “Funkadelic – the Song
Is Familiar.” Genius, Genius,           https://genius.com/Funkadelic-the-song-is-familiar-lyrics.

Gunkel, Henriette, et al. “Future.” We Travel
the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments,           and
Diffractions, Transcript, Bielefeld, 2019, pp. 433–438. 

Howard, Danielle A.D. “An Angel, a Thief, and a
Mothership: Imaginative    Considerations
of Black Being.” The Black Theatre Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2022,     https://doi.org/10.2458/tbtr.4771. 

Neyrat Frédéric. L'ange Noir De L'histoire:
Cosmos Et Technique De L'afrofuturisme.           Translated
by Daniel Ross, Editions MF, 2021. 

Olaloku-Teriba, Annie. “Afro-Pessimism and the
(Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness.” Historical  Materialism,
Historical Materialism,             https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/afro-pessimism-and-unlogic-anti- blackness.