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In this interview, filmmaker Kahlil Joseph delves into the profound role of spirituality in his creative process. He posits that spirituality transcends conventional understanding, emphasizing that it's an omnipresent force integral to existence. Joseph believes that everything, from individuals to cities, possesses consciousness, each with its unique agenda. This perspective influences his filmmaking, where he seeks to capture the unseen and the felt, rather than just the visible. By focusing on the interplay of sound and silence, Joseph aims to evoke a deeper, more intuitive response from his audience, encouraging viewers to engage with his work on a spiritual level

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Kahlil Joseph's short films are hard to classify. Somewhere between music video and avant-garde cinema, they've found audiences in both the art world and mainstream pop culture. It's a testament to the uniqueness of Joseph's artistic vision that neither space can contain it. This year, museums in New York and Maastricht will be treated to m.A.A.d, his striking two-channel installation, a collaboration with Kendrick Lamar from 2014, shot in the musician's home town of Compton, Los Angeles, and featuring snippets of home movies from Lamar's childhood.

Most people, however, will encounter Joseph's work online. Almost all of his music video work can be found there. His widely seen collaboration with Beyoncé, the 'visual album' Lemonade, was an undisputed Internet sensation that catapulted Joseph into a new league. He is without question the most sought-after under-the-radar filmmaker around. If his name remains unfamiliar, it's because he prefers to stand back and let the work speak for itself.
And the work speaks volumes. Joseph's films, like the music that inspires them, demand to be played over and over. This is because he's never telling just one story. His films operate on multiple levels simultaneously. On the surface, they offer the seductive pleasures and graphic visuals of classic music videos. Joseph has an eye for rapturous imagery and a penchant for gliding, hypnotic camerawork that transforms banal urban spaces into dramatic stages for kinetic young bodies. It's easy to stay in this sensual world. But Joseph has a lot on his mind. An avid cinephile, his works are laden with cinematic references. It's easy to recognize the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky and Spike Lee, among others, in Until the Quiet Comes, a chilling and elegiac short Joseph made with musician Flying Lotus in 2013. It features a young man, shot dead as a result of gang violence, whose body continues to dance into the night, as if resurrected. Joseph endows the gritty backdrop of a Los Angeles housing project and the predominantly black residents with uncommon beauty and respect. Black identity and its representation is something he explores head-on in Belhaven Meridian, a short based on the music of Shabazz Palaces that unfolds in a single miraculous shot that sweeps us through the streets of Watts, picking various characters and micro-narratives. It's Joseph's homage to Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, the 1977 film that heralded the emergence of a new black independent cinema in America. When Joseph's camera flips upside down, the long shadow of a young man running becomes an image of ecstatic beauty.
The sheer variety and propulsion of imagery contained in a single project can be astonishing, if not exhausting. Joseph's only feature to date is the 2015 documentary The Reflektor Tapes, a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the making of the Arcade Fire album. It's best understood as a kind of maximalist visual analogue to the band's extravagant and grandiose disco-rock aesthetic. Restless, fragmentary, and elliptical, it's more concerned with evoking the messiness of artistic process than with capturing the thrill of performance, which might account for why the film didn't catch on. My guess is that it will be rediscovered in coming years.
Perhaps the defining feature of Joseph's shape-shifting work is its uncanny ability to feel both nostalgic and futuristic. Soft-spoken and thoughtful in person, Joseph sat down for a wide-ranging conversation that touched on everything from Alice Coltrane to Michael Bay to Chris Marker.

Paul Dallas: The last couple of years have been especially busy for you. People outside the art and film worlds may not know your name, but they've certainly seen your work.
Kahlil Joseph: I recently saw a docu-mentary called Sky Ladder on the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. It's really dope. He's such a celebrated artist now that people literally throw money at him and say: 'Do whatever you want.' Back in the seventies and eighties when restrictions in China were intense, Cai was making amazing work. The Chinese government invited him to make an artwork for the Olympics. It makes me think of this White Stripes song called 'Little Room'. Have you heard it?

A long time ago, but I don't remember.
It's a twenty-five-second inter-lude on one of their albums. The lyrics go: 'Well, you're in your little room / And you're working on something good / But if it's really good / You're gonna need a bigger room.' It's so smart.

It's a great metaphor for the artist's dilemma.
In Sky Ladder, people comment on how things have changed for Cai, and I found it really moving. At one point, the government asked him to alter his design because it doesn't express the ideas they want, and he acquiesces. But his decision seemed less about compromise than it was about not being reactionary. I think a lot about that. On the other side, you have someone like Ai Weiwei, who never cooperates with authorities. However, his work can sometimes feel like part of a theatre of political rascals. It's not a judgement thing where I'm coming from. It's just interesting to see two thoughtful Chinese artists of the same generation and their reactions.

I think a lot about the relationship between art and politics, or art and activism. Your work has a lot to do with expanding ideas of black representation and identity, which has a political dimension. For me, your work is defined by operating on multiple levels at the same time. It's romantic, gritty, beautiful, painful, nostalgic, and futuristic all at once.
The art world definitely feeds off political unrest, probably more so now than in the past. It's like a fashion thing: work isn't considered serious if it's not political. I'm black, so I walk out of the house and I'm a news story. I think about an artist like John Coltrane, who was so uninterested in being politicized on any level. This hasn't diminished how people feel about him as an individual and as a creative genius. John Coltrane and his wife Alice were only interested in a more spiritual longevity and dimensionality. It makes more sense if you weigh political and spiritual concerns. Political ones are far less important than spiritual ones.

Alice Coltrane is especially interesting because after John's death, she began to develop this cosmic visionary jazz. She eventually withdrew from public life and opened an ashram and became a spiritual leader. Her devotional music is now being rereleased.
Back when I was nineteen or twenty, I had the chance to film her when I was interning at a photography studio. They were shooting Alice for Jazz Times and they wanted some behind-the-scenes moments. The photographer knew I had a Bolex 16-mm camera, so I found myself filming Alice Coltrane for hours on end when she was in the studio. She's one of the only artists I've met who has a real aura. She walks into a room and it's like there's an orange light around her. It seemed like she was floating. It was bizarre and magical. It had a profound impact on my life. She represented this idea of longevity and integrity. She was famous but she wasn'tfamous. She was current but she was also trying to be eternal. Years later, I became friends with Flying Lotus, who happens to be her nephew. When she passed away in 2007, I gave him the footage.

...The first time I saw her live I was transfixed...

Yes, I'm a fan! I was going to bring him up since you edited his documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death. Arthur's trajectory is fascinating. He was the cinematographer on Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and Spike Lee's Crooklyn, and had become a multi-disciplinary artist, though he's also making music videos for Solange. I met him at an event several years ago where he spoke about relationships between black music and black cinema.
Arthur has a show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. One of his pieces features a YouTube clip of Alice Smith singing live. I learned about it after I had made this new piece with her. I happened to be talking to Arthur and she came up. It's so crazy. We're both obsessed with her!

Let's talk about Shabazz Palaces, one of my favourite music groups. Belhaven Meridian and Black Up are radical and wondrous cinematic gems. Formally, they couldn't be more different. Belhaven Meridian is about fluidity, whereas Black Up is about fragmentation. I like the way Belhaven Meridian flips the music video genre on its head. The music weaves in and out, and at one point even stops altogether. The camera seems to be observing a number of stories unfolding simul-taneously but doesn't make us focus on one in particular.
Working on Shabazz Palaces was like the Holy Grail. Those films hold a special place for me, even today. It's about being inside the music versus being on top of it. I started making this stuff in a post-music-video age, so for me the golden age of music video has passed. Today, there are no budgets and no proper platforms to experience the work. Can you imagine art without museums or galleries to show it? Where do you even begin to look? When I started out, I wasn't working with much money and making the videos wasn't a source of income for me either. Belhaven was informed by so many different things. To do a one-take film means you have to know what you're doing well before you get there. In this case, the camera wasn't operated by a person. It was attached to a Russian Arm mounted on a truck. The movement is pre-set and you just hope that the orchestration and choreography in the shot lands!

I know he's an artist and that you both founded an alternative exhibition space in Los Angeles called The Underground Museum.
Noah will eventually be remembered for his paintings, but he had a deep appreciation for conceptual art, sculpture, video, and performance. He was an artist's artist. He loved the basic soul of what makes great art, no matter what form it takes or who made it or what country it's from. I have the same approach to cinema. About ten years ago, I was living in Texas working on films, editing stuff for other people. There was one other editor I was working with who really loved cinema. We'd talk for hours about movies. We were completely confounded and intrigued by Godard. There was no characterization in the films, and sometimes no real scenes. I remember thinking, 'Is Godard that far ahead of everybody else?' When there's a real, palpable love for cinema, you tend to have a wide appreciation. Someone I worked for once started talking shit about Michael Bay. I immediately started breaking down The Rock and how he can tell a story so fast given all the exposition. I've learned a lot from that guy.

I'm fascinated with the question of what makes art contemporary. Godard and Michael Bay are two filmmakers who are almost never discussed in the same conversation. They're both channelling something hyper-contemporary, albeit in radically different ways - one with an iPhone and the other with an arsenal of money and technology. In both cases, the result is a fragmentation and abstraction of narrative, which might be what you're getting at.
I don't know what's going on now in independent film. I think it's exciting because it seems like it has lost its path. It'll find its way, I know. If you look at the history of cinema, what we're experiencing happens every fifteen or thirty years. Attendance is at an all-time low; exhibitors and studios freak out; the movies look like cardboard cut-outs. I'm excited about the next wave, whatever it's going to be. The only thing that's ever moved art forward is a technological advance, like the shift from cutting film to nonlinear digital editing. That's why I think Godard gets it. His movies actually make money today because they don't cost anything to make. He's way, way out there. He's almost like the scout you send to the frontier to report back on what the fuck is out there.

I think a lot about Film Socialisme and Goodbye to Language because they're twenty-first-century films made by a twentieth-century filmmaker. They have a strange blend of radicalism and nostalgia. You and I are basically the same age, and so we have the experience of having been adults before the advent of social media. I'm wondering how you navigate this cultural shift and whether you ever feel the need to unplug.
I went to a conference recently on the science fiction writer Octavia Butler. As quiet and internal and humble as she was, you learn very quickly that she was voraciously reading everything. She constantly clipped newspapers and made notes, and was an ardent student of society. You learn that her insights into the future emerged from a careful study of the present. It wasn't coming from a place of anxiety or self-righteousness or having an agenda. She was a writer and she was doing research. She wasn't distracted in her efforts to understand human activity. For a monk or for people who meditate, maybe it makes sense to unplug from all the noise. When they hit Nirvana, that might be when they want to watch Game of Thrones.

I know you're not always keen to talk about your own work. My feeling is that an artist's responsibility is only to make great art. Everything else is extra. At the same time, I'm curious to know about your process and how you select projects.
When it comes to my own work, I feel like silence is louder. I often think the person in the room who hasn't said anything all night is more intriguing.
I don't really know how to answer your question because for me, it's beyond logic or conscious decision-making. I get different cues all the time, whether I'm out shooting something or in the editing room. It's really about getting so deep into something that you're really in it. If I'm paying attention to my soul, it will tell me what projects to do or not to do.

I wanted to get that dub where you're feeling it in your entire body...

Sounds intense! Where does the title come from?
Henry Taylor is a fantastic painter who was friends with my brother, which is how I met him. We were in Greece and he was telling me about an upcoming show. He wanted to run some ideas by me because he wanted to mix it up and not just show canvases. I was in awe that he was even soliciting my opinion on this! Henry's an amazing storyteller, and I said to him, 'The craziest thing you ever told me is when you met Bob Marley in 1979.' Bob was playing in Santa Barbara and somehow Henry, who was nineteen at the time, drifted backstage and found this room full of Rastas. Bob was there, eyes closed, sitting against the wall. All around him are these Trenchtown Rastas, but there's one empty chair next to Bob, so Henry just sits down.
Remember, this is 1979 and Santa Barbara is really white. It's like this alien ship of blackness has landed there. As you know, weed was insanely illegal back then. But because it's Bob Marley, the local authorities permit him to smoke in this back room, instead of onstage. They literally bend the law in order for Bob and his friends to smoke in peace. This is what I call high-level black space. It's controlled on every level. All the Rastas wonder who this kid is that dares to sit next to Bob. After about twenty minutes, Bob opens his eyes and starts talking to him. This is Henry's idol, so he doesn't know what to do. But Bob's the nicest human being, and so Henry just starts talking about a book he just read called Wizard of the Upper Amazon.
Six weeks later, I'm back in Los Angeles and Henry calls me. He can't stop thinking about the idea and he asks me to stage it. I was honoured. I decided to make a film installation and was fortunate to work with Blum & Poe. It was my first time collaborating with an art gallery and they were really supportive. We reached out to Damien Marley to use some of his music on the soundtrack. I'd been interested in taking sound to another level and I worked a lot on the soundscape and then created this intense sound matrix in the gallery.
At the opening, there was a line around the block. I stayed in the gallery the whole night, it was so dark, my friends never recognized me. As a filmmaker, you never get to experience a piece with the audience like that. It was amazing.

You transformed the gallery's literal and figurative white space into a literal and figurative black space. I'm curious about the legal implications, since only medical marijuana is legal in California.
The gallery consulted its lawyer at length, and since the opening was only a couple of hours, getting arrested seemed highly unlikely. In the end, the show went off without any problems. But of all the museums I've been approached by to do a show, it's funny that I'll be restaging Wizard in the one country where weed is legal nationally! Museums tend to be tricky because they aren't private spaces like galleries. I am really impressed by the Bonnefantenmuseum because they're willing to do it and they're open to the general public.

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Kahlil Joseph on Sound, Silence, and Spirituality - Extra Extra Magazine

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Kahlil Joseph's short films are hard to classify. Somewhere between music video and avant-garde cinema, they've found audiences in both the art world and mainstream pop culture. It's a testament to the uniqueness of Joseph's...

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The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, known as the Reconstruction Amendments, were important in redefining American citizenship and civil rights. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the 14th granted citizenship and equal protection under the law, and the 15th aimed to protect voting rights regardless of race. The implementation of these amendments faced a large amount of resistance, leading to the rise of Jim Crow laws and systematic disenfranchisement. Legal scholars argue that while these amendments laid the foundation for civil rights, their potential was undermined by subsequent judicial interpretations and lack of enforcement.

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The Transformative Impact of the Reconstruction Amendments from the Perspective of Enslaved People - Constitutional Law

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William M. Carter, Jr., The Second Founding and the First Amendment, 99 Tex. L. Rev. 1065 (2021).Rebecca ZietlowIn recent years, some historians and legal scholars have taken to calling the Reconstruction Era the Second Founding of our Constitution. In The Second Founding and the First Amendment, William C. Carter joins these scholars and asks what it would mean if courts took the Second Founding seriously. Carter argues persuasively that the Reconstruction Amendments altered the entire constitution. If Carter is [...]

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"The Site of Memory" by Toni Morrison (in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, 1987)
•	In The Site of Memory, Morrison explains how history often silences Black experiences.
•	She discusses how fiction becomes a tool to recover lost histories and emotional truths that the historical record ignores or suppresses.
•	Morrison argues that memory and imaginative writing, is essential for telling the fuller truth about Black life in America; directly connecting to this week's themes about "silences," storytelling, and cultural imagination.
-In The Site of Memory, Morrison reflects on the gaps and absences in historical records concerning Black Americans. She notes that earlier Black writers had to censor their work to avoid racist backlash, often omitting deep truths about suffering, violence, and survival. Morrison insists that the job of the modern writer is not just to present factual history, but to expand it with imagination and memory, restoring the emotional and psychological depth that was erased. She states: "Facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot." (The Site of Memory, p. 83) This aligns perfectly with what she argues in her Nobel Lecture about language carrying life, not just information.

Citation MLA 
Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, Houghton Mifflin, 1987, pp. 83–102.

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“Toni Morrison” published on 30 Jul 2024 by Manchester University Press.

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This article examines Malcolm X's 1964 speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet," highlighting its significance as a pivotal moment in his rhetorical evolution. The author emphasizes how Malcolm X presented an ultimatum to America: grant African Americans their rights through the ballot, or face the consequences of the bullet.

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» “The Ballot or the Bullet”: Malcolm X’s Ultimatum for America Angles / 2021

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This article provides an in-depth look at the Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Program, crafted by founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966. The program is presented as a foundational document outlining the Party's demands and beliefs, ranging from the right to self-determination to calls for full employment and decent housing.

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Introduction

The Black Panther Party (BPP) arose as one attempt to institutionalize the Black Power movement that emerged with the radicalization of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the mid-1960s. As the Black Power idea gained support, Black Panther parties and organizations formed across the country. The most influential was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, formed in Oakland, California, in October 1966. Its founders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, were inspired by lectures Malcolm X had delivered at Bay Area mosques.

The party's record and legacy are controversial. It operated "survival programs" in impoverished black neighborhoods, including schools, health-care clinics, and free-breakfast programs that at their peak in 1969 fed thousands of children each week. Its critics, however, point to a propensity among BPP leaders to romanticize revolutionary violence-reflected in a series of violent confrontations with law enforcement officials, some of them resulting in fatalities, and in a history of intraparty violence. The Black Panther Party finally disbanded in 1982.

The BPP's platform statement, written by Seale and Newton, reflects the authors' enthusiasm for nationalism and socialism-which quickly became a source of factional division within the party. Yet, despite its relatively brief and turbulent existence, the BPP's protests against police misconduct, its calls for reparations for historical antiblack injustice, and its advocacy of race-focused educational curricula echo strongly to the present day.

What We Want Now! What We Believe

To those poor souls who don't know Black history, the beliefs and desires of the Black Panther party for self-defense may seem unreasonable. To Black people, the ten points covered are absolutely essential to survival. We have listened to the riot producing words "these things take time" for four hundred years. The Black Panther party knows what Black people want and need. Black unity and self-defense will make these demands a reality.

What We Want

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

2. We want full employment for our people.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations- supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

What We Believe

1. We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised one hundred years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self-defense.

8. We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical, and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being, tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

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The Black Panther Party's Ten Point Program, with its emphasis on correcting current and historical racial injustices, resonates today.

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This comprehensive article offers an in-depth overview of the Black Arts Movement, highlighting its emergence in the mid-1960s as the cultural counterpart to the Black Power Movement. The movement sought to create a distinct Black aesthetic that celebrated African American culture and addressed social and political issues. Key figures like Amiri Baraka played pivotal roles in establishing institutions that nurtured Black artistic expression, such as theaters, publishing houses, and journals. The article emphasizes the movements influence across various art forms, including literature, theater, music, and visual arts, and its lasting impact on American culture and academia.

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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

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“Black Arts Movement” published on by Oxford University Press.

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In this scholarly article, James Smethurst examines Amiri Baraka's central role in the Black Arts Movement, focusing on how Baraka's work bridged the gap between avant-garde art and popular culture. Smethurst discusses Baraka's efforts to make art accessible and relevant to the Black community by incorporating elements of jazz, blues, and spoken word into his poetry and plays. The article also explores Baraka's establishment of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, which aimed to train artists committed to Black cultural nationalism. Smethurst argues that Baraka's fusion of radical politics with innovative artistic forms significantly reshaped American cultural landscapes

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Tina Campt's A Black Gaze introduces a transformative approach to viewing Black art. She challenges the traditional "white gaze" by advocating for a "Black gaze" that demands active, empathetic engagement from viewers. Campt emphasizes that Black contemporary artists, through their work, are reshaping visual narratives, compelling audiences to confront the complexities of Black life—including its joys, struggles, and resilience. This "Black gaze" is not passive; it requires viewers to feel and reflect, fostering a deeper connection and understanding of the Black experience

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In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation a…

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Toussaint argues that Afrofuturism offers a framework for reimagining labor and legal systems to prioritize human dignity and equity. He emphasizes the need for a legal praxis that is dialogical, constitutive, and legitimating, suggesting that business enterprises must reckon with the alienation and human sacrifice endemic to capitalist economies to uphold worker dignity

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See all articles by Etienne C. Toussaint

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During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, so-called essential workers from minoritized racial and ethnic groups were disproportionately subjected to wor

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Banner explores the intersection of Afrosurrealism and disability studies through the concept of "cripistemologies," which challenges normative ways of knowing and being. She examines how Afro surrealist works, particularly in the realm of technoculture, disrupt conventional narratives around race, ability, and technology. By analyzing multiple artistic expressions, Banner illustrates how Afrosurrealism provides a space for reimagining identities and experiences that are often marginalized or rendered invisible in mainstream discourse

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View of Technopsyence and Afro-Surrealism’s Cripistemologies | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

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This article discusses Afro-Surrealism as a movement that focuses on Black development throughout time, rather than solely on Black pain. It emphasizes the use of emotional and rational elements in art to convey honest thought and meaning. The author argues that Afro-Surrealism allows artists to depict the world through a Black lens, embracing the absurdity of current realities to reconstruct and reimagine them

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Surrealism is described as a 20th-century unusual or unconventional art movement that serves the purpose of releasing creative expression of the unconscious mind. Bizzare images, dreamlike landscapes of untamed thought. Surrealism is interested in exploring the minds thoughts and concepts directly as they come. Surrealism through artistic mediums like paintings can appear as incohesive juxtapositions, but are done so deliberately, and organically. Art has always been a tool used to provoke audiences to understand social constructs, societal reforms, and so called "uncomfortable" realities the broader public can't seem to digest. Which could be an understandable reason black surrealist creatives have flocked to the genre; to demonstrate their beliefs genuinely while still advising their audience on issues that matter through unorthodox means of articulation. What I am primarily focused on is the ways black artist have adapted surrealism, and made it their own. Afro-surrealism are the forms of artistic work inspired by the black cultural aesthetic with the purpose of liberating the people and expanding the understanding of how black individuals exist. Afro-surrealist look to inform the public on the invention of structure: racial, societal, and norms, all while still critiquing these structures that are imposed on them. African-American surrealist are interested in exposing the "right now ", another way of saying what is currently happening universally to effect the black livelihood. As described by Lacey Murphy and Kevin Mccoy in Afro-Surrealism: What Black is and Can Be. They state, "From "stop and frisk" policies to racially motivated 911 calls and other forms of racial profiling prevalent in society today, black Americans are continuously policed simply by race and appearance. This is why the mission of exposing the "right now" is crucial". In my essay, I intend to look at the ways afro-surrealist are communicating to us through the use of surrealism. From Henry Dumas to Sun-Ra onto the likes of Toni Morrison I will look at the mediums black surrealist use to communicate their message and its effectiveness. I will analyze how black artist have embraced surrealism, and how they are using it to their advantage as creatives and racial equity zealots. By singularly focusing on afro-surrealism and black artist who practice this, I can track subject matter patterns across the spectrum of surrealism black artist have chosen to explore.

Afro-surrealism as a component of the black arts movement that takes our world and creates a different scenescape that is still relatively connected to this one; and black artist have chosen to use this genre to express their feelings of worry, liberty, and injustice giving them the room to be as weird and free as they'd like. The Black Speculative Arts Movement or BSAM is a term that refers to the entire movement of black abstract arts. It was BSAM that helped bring recognition to afro-surrealism and display it on the the forefront of black arts movement. Reynaldo Anderson author of Afrofuturism 2.0 attempts to explain how BSAM has become an "umbrella" term for much of what the black arts movement consist of.

"BSAM is a loose umbrella term which represents different positions or basis of inquiry: Afrofuturism 2.0 (and its several Africanist manifestations, e.g. Black Quantum Futurism, African Futurism, Afrofuturismo, and Afro- futurista), Astro Blackness, Afro-Surrealism, Afro-Pessimism, Ethno Gothic, Black Digital Humanities, Black (Afro-future female or African centered) Science Fiction, The Black Fantastic, Magical Realism, and The Esoteric. Although these positions may be incompatible in some instances, they overlap around the term speculative and design, and interact around the nexus of technology and ethics."

While surrealism is only a small piece in a greater moment it's important to recognize how all of these different genres naturally connect to one another due to their desire to interconnect with the unethical treatment of blackness in a larger space. Much like the rest of the genres under the umbrella, afro-surrealism and its contributors deal with the ludicrousness and the strangeness of the black experience through music, paintings, photography, sculpture, film, and even stories. While sometimes ridiculous, the stories these artist tell while absurd are still true at the root of their origins in blackness. Artist who create on different platforms each had their own unique way of sharing their surrealist imaginations. In Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist, author Amiri Baraka describes the ways some artist have personalized the genre and the techniques they used to revolutionize the black arts movement. The author explores the techniques artist have previously used to construct meaning that isn't easily understood by the masses.

"The strangeness of Dumas's world resembles Toni Morrison's wild, emotional "places." Both utilize high poetic description- language of exquisite metaphorical elegance, even as narrative precision. But language tells as well as decorates. Both signify as powerfully as they directly communicate. The symbols sing, are cymbals of deeper experience, not word games for academics."(Baraka)

Black artist continue to build these distinctive worlds ruled by blackness and unfiltered black conscious thought. These platforms of art are unapologetically done so, with the inclusion of signifying, AAVE, and universal black rhetoric. Afro-surrealist look to inspire audiences through their ability to symbolically look at how blackness operates within white America through preposterousterity and emotion. Afro-surrealism also deals with the spirituality of autonomy, as it appears in Henry Dumas' Ark of Bones. He explores this side of surrealism by writing about how it intersects with the natural black experience. Author Henry Dumas' Ark of Bones weaves a tale of two young men and their journey to find the great ark that once held the black ancestors, and their destiny to transcend this world for a better one. Dumas is a successful surrealist writer who has the ability to make the reader question the nature of their reality in white America. While the reading itself is rather mysterious as it's content is filled with complex ideas, Dumas skillfully presents his take on afro-surrealism with a not so subtle approach to the importance of Africanness. Adetokunbo Pearse journal author of The Mystique Factor in Dumas Ark of Bones discusses the spirituality factor that plays a role in Dumas intriguing story.

"In aspects of theme, atmosphere, language, and characterization, the story Ark of Bones" brings to life the dream-like nature of the history of Africans on the planet Earth. It is a story plagued by attempts to dodge deadly blows aimed at the cultural lifeline of the community. In that sphere all of the human experience irrespective of race is, even like death, a concomitant mystique factor. Headeye, the mojo man, prophesied his own return. We are left to presume that at his second coming he will anchor his ark somewhere in the multicultural city center and help twenty-first-century man get on board." (325-327)

Pearse does a fine job of summing up the importance of spirituality in Dumas' work and what it does to further support the idea that afro-surrealism is centered around the notion of moving towards a more multicultural existence for all people. The story also relies heavily on cultural identity with the pleasant use of African-American vernacular and signifyin; and the opinion of holiness aligned with blackness after the protagonist of the story learned about God's people who sailed in the arks. Leaving their bones and haunting memory behind in this world. Only to return with Headeye to a different reality of welcome Africanism. Dumas isn't alone in his journey in seeking out the spiritual connection to blackness in surrealist art; other artist who've mastered the platform of music allow audiences to experiences their blackness in an out-of worldly way, literally.

Artist like Sun-Ra engages with audiences in the celestial alternate reality where race is only a construct that limits those who have an inferiority complex. Sun-Ra a jazz musician known for his vibrant playings alongside his arkestra (possible callback to Dumas' Ark) was himself an embodiment of afro-surrealism and futurism, proving the overlap of surrealism and futurism just as Anderson states. While most thought he was just another quack musical genius due to the claims he made, ""Since I don't consider myself as one of the humans, I'm a spiritual being myself,"(Sun-Ra to Joel Rose, NPR) People were quick to right him off; but what if he is on to something. What if Sun-Ra like Dumas understands more about the existence of blackness in America, or even on Earth. Author Yatasha Womack dives deep into the worlds of both afro-futurism and afro-surrealism and how they relate to one another and the impact they leave on society in her book titles AFROFUTURISM where she gives an explanation for both genres and describes their cultural significance and importance. Yatasha Womack quotes Mark Derry in her book AFROFUTURISM stating, "African Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees." An example of surrealism and life coming together to create a "human" who opposes the constructs that others imposed on him. Sun-Ra embraces this afro-futuristic style whole heartedly, rejecting the adversities that come with everyday black livelihood and reclaiming himself an alien. Sun-Ra found spirituality outside of the eurocentric norms of religion and Americanness, outside of this world even, I'd like to believe that he found peak blackness outside of Earth on his supposed home planet of Saturn. Why else would he have a song called "Space is The Place". In trying to grasp the how the spirituality is reflected on the visual side of Sun-Ra's performances, Peter Watrus wrote in the New York Times,

"He and his band, usually called the Arkestra, dressed in a funny version of 1950's intergalactica, with glittering hats (which were in fact spandex tank tops), robes and amulets that signified everything from Egyptology to outer-space surrealism. Sun Ra made his performances a mixture of camp, pandemonium, seriousness and spiritual catharsis"(Watrus)

Visual media has also impacted the afro-surrealist arts movement, maybe even more so than any other medium because of its widespread accessibility and intrigue to audience, looking to you Get Out and Sorry To Bother You. Author Larne Bakare delves deeply into the genre of afro-surrealism through the use of music, visual media, film, television shows, and artwork to understand the ways in which artist and creators explore the craziness of black life and society specifically through the black POV. The author looks at the past of the afro-surrealist movement to it's influencers and the impact they left on the movement. He observes the "weirdness" of the movement as a central theme to its mass appeal stating, "it's no wonder our pop cultural landscape is turning Afro-surreal at a time when society is wrestling with racial violence, bias and inequality." Writes Lanre Bakare whose essay on the new afro-surrealist covers writers like Jordan Peele and creative directors like Terrence Nance or Boots Riley. Jordan Peele takes you to the sunken place where black folks are the marginalized and forced to relive the trauma of being sought out for their physical prowess. Boots Riley shows us the acute horrors of capitalism and ask the question: what are you willing to give up to have it all? Terrence Nance uses his sketch show to introduce you to modern blackness and how white society interferes with it. He even introduces you to death personified whose sole job is to take the lives of black children; but is so distraught over her job, she [death] tries to follow after them. Proving even death is empathetic to the disgusting acts committed against black bodies. Writers and directors, specifically black writer and directors understand what is going on in America, because it is mirrored in their work. For some of them, they've chose to express their fears through surrealism for the abstraction of it all. These films are complicated and complex, but they are at their core what blackness is all about.

There's no arguing that afro-surrealism isn't a unique, exuberant, and artistic movement that engages audiences in critical rhetorical analysis. But I fear some fans of Jordan Peele's work, or jazz fans who are intrigued by Sun-Ra are still left questioning it, and asking what it means, or what's the message behind the art. How do artist take complicated themes that some might not comprehend, and use them to convey meaning? D. Scott Miller writes about what the afro-surrealist movement is and how their artwork has contributed to the conversation of surrealism. The manifesto shares Millers ideas how it's lasting legacy evokes emotion from audiences. He states,

"Afro-Surrealists distort reality for emotional impact. 50 Cent and his cold monotone and Walter Benjamin and his chilly shock tactics can kiss our ass. Enough! We want to feel something! We want to weep on record." Artist convey meaning through raw emotion. Through emotion that is evoked through what is happening during the "Right Now". "RIGHT NOW, Afro-Surreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists, and the unexpected turns this "browning" of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced."

Miller writes. I've chose to see it as the act of 'creating' is how artist have chosen to convey meaning. Terrence Nance see's how the lives of black youth are threatened by oppressive forces and institutions; so he writes a show that nonchalantly talks about their death. I could assume the meaning behind this is stop killing us! The meaning isn't in the art, it's the reason for the art, the reason behind the art, the inspiration for the art. If artist didn't care about black lives, or racial inequality, or the consequences of capitalism, we wouldn't have the content we have now. Miller quotes another on afro-surrealism, and how it's work has left legacies. "Jean-Paul Sartre said that the art of Senghor and the African Surrealist (or Negritude) movement "is revolutionary because it is surrealist, but itself is surrealist because it is black."" Blackness is tethered to the meaning in afro-surrealism because I believe that the artist understand the importance of unfiltered thought and the importance of sharing the truth. Artist convey meaning through afro-surrealism just as literature conveys meaning in the text, you have to care about the topic and the subject matter before you even pick up the book, and once you start to read, only then can you understand the artist intent. One can only convey meaning if there is a subject for the meaning to make an impression on. The message isn't the meaning, but the act of creating out of the need to liberate.

"The focus of Afro-Surrealism is the present but it does not deny succession of time and the importance of the past as an agent in shaping the 'now'" Writes Rali Chorbadzhiyska on their blog Starting Point 102. Afro-surrealism is the art movement that focuses on what is happening right now, but their influence on how to depict the "right now" is deep rooted in the history of blackness in America. In order to understand the experiences of African-Americans there has to be a blunt telling of their livelihoods. Afro-surrealism doesn't mince words or sugar coat, it's unabashedly honest even if the delivery of the message isn't always clear. I'm in favor of afro-surrealism because of the emotions that the art can evoke. One of the main goals afro-surrealism is to evoke emotion through the use of dionysian more so than the use of apollonian. Miller talks about the Négritude movement and how it is a central correspondent in understanding afro-surrealism. To further explain what Miller is talking about and the role of these two forms of rhetoric, I use The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's section on Négritude definition to explain the theory. They state,

"Césaire's views follow consistently from his surrealist poetics and eventually converge with his friend Senghor's. Césaire's notion of the primordial role that should be played by the Dionysian in art versus the Apollonian. These are categories that Césaire and Senghor adopted from Nietzsche's philosophy (Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy) to express the opposition between the primal, obscure force of life considered as an organic whole (the Dionysian) on the one hand, and on the other hand the plastic beauty or the form which brings into light the individuality of the object (the Apollonian): the Dionysian speaks to our emotion while the Apollonian speaks to our intellectuality."

By incorporating dionysian, or emotion in the afro-surrealism movement artist can convey honest thought, and meaning to their work. Which translates across all platforms of art. And by including apollonian, even just the slightest amount allows views to see the world through blackness for how it truly looks. Afro-surrealism isn't focused on black pain like torture porn; but focused on the idea of black development throughout time. An artistic timeline that shares the history and emboldens the people to further recognize what is happening in their own lives right now. I see afro-surrealism as the real 'wokeness' and the ability to see the world as it is and present it forth as such. My critique of afro-surrealism is that it is necessary tool of obstruction if we are too continue to tell the truth. There needs to be black artist willing to sacrifice the comfort most of us find ourselves in because we refuse to see what is happening "Right Now". It is a burden to bear and the consequences may weigh heavily, but the outcome is usually the same; a bewildered critique wondering what the sunken place is? Or if they too, are from Saturn. Solange said, "I saw things I imagined" speaking surrealism into fruition. In conclusion, the artistic movement of afro-surrealism is arguably more than just an artistic expression, but a political one and a form of self-assertion. While it can be depicted through music, paintings, photography, collages, and visual media, it is certainly not limited to just those forms of articulation.Afro-surrealism gives audiences the chance to interpret injustice in a telling that can either be comical, scary, mundane, and exciting but all the same they are being exposed to the serious subject matter. Because of outstanding artist who have taken on the load of informing people of what is currently happening in America, we are all "privileged" enough to be exposed to this art, and to learn from it, and garner an understanding of how some people have to live. While afro-surrealism may impart some of it's 'wokeness' on you, it's main objective forces you see and hopefully care. You won't care about capitalism, or racism, or the erasure of blackness until you ask the questions of why? And is that not what afro-surrealism is.

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Afro-Surrealism: Embracing & Reconstructing the Absurdity of "Right Now"

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Surrealism is described as a 20th-century unusual or unconventional art movement that serves the purpose of releasing creative expression of the unconscious mind. Bizzare images, dreamlike landscapes...

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Michael Richardson's chapter in the book Surrealism and Modernity examines Afrosurrealism as a response to the limitations of Western modernity. He discusses how Afrosurrealism challenges dominant narratives by embracing the "marvelous" and the mystical, drawing from African diasporic traditions. Richardson analyzes the works of artists and writers who use Afrosurrealism to critique colonialism, racism, and other forms of oppression. He posits that Afrosurrealism offers alternative ways of understanding reality, time, and identity, positioning it as a vital countercultural movement.

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8. Afrosurrealism as a Counterculture of Modernity

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8. Afrosurrealism as a Counterculture of Modernity was published in Radical Dreams on page 142.

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This article explores how Drexciya's Afrofuturist mythology reimagines colonial histories of dispossession by envisioning submarine utopias inhabited by descendants of enslaved Africans. The authors discuss how this mythos offers creative visions of oceanic futures, particularly in the context of climate change, and how it challenges traditional narratives by centering non-human and post-human perspectives.

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In this article, Terri Francis explores the concept of Afrosurrealism, distinguishing it from Afrofuturism and traditional Surrealism. Francis emphasizes that Afrosurrealism is rooted in the lived experiences of Black individuals, focusing on the present realities rather than speculative futures. The movement seeks to uncover the marvelous in the everyday and to reveal the hidden truths within Black life. Francis discusses how Afrosurrealism serves as a tool for expressing the complexities of Black identity, history, and culture through various artistic mediums, including film and literature. This perspective aligns with the works of artists like Arthur Jafa and Kahlil Joseph, who utilize visual storytelling to convey the multifaceted nature of Black existence.

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This exhibition by Ayana V. Jackson at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art brings to life the Drexciya mythology through immersive art installations. Jackson's work visualizes an underwater realm inhabited by the descendants of African women thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade. By embodying these mythical beings, Jackson reimagines narratives of trauma and loss into stories of resilience and transformation. The exhibition combines photography, video, and sound to create a multisensory experience that invites viewers to engage with the themes of memory, identity, and the African diaspora. Jackson's interpretation of Drexciya offers a poignant commentary on the enduring impact of slavery and the power of myth in shaping cultural consciousness

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This scholarly article explores how contemporary authors Junot Díaz and Colson Whitehead incorporate Afro-Surreal and Afro-Futuristic elements into their narratives. The analysis focuses on how these genres are employed to address themes of identity, history, and the African diaspora's experiences. By examining the visual and thematic techniques used in these works, the article sheds light on the broader cultural and artistic movements of Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism