We often speak of the syndrome of the blank page as the impossibility of starting or pursuing the writing of a text. In my own case, it is not so much a difficulty of filling the rosary of blank pages filling my computer screen, as an anxiety in the face of the inexorable passage of time. The hours pass and accumulate in an infinite and infernal loop. My screen reads 10:15 am? Might as well be 11. Soon 3 pm? That means that the day is over, well and truly lost! This anxiety is interspersed with sidelong glances at my cell phone (albeit strategically placed out of reach, in another room) or a quick session of Wi-Fi activation on my computer to surf the Net. However, neither the (desperate) messages to loved ones, nor the research on stress management and optimisation of productivity have any effect. No more than the background hum designed to fluidify my passing thoughts, alternating between monastic silence, the waves from ambient mixes on NTS, or the music from the popular videos of the “6 Hours Mozart for Studying, Concentration, Relaxation 🎵” variety, viewed by more than forty-eight million other YouTubers, just as exasperated and/or overworked as myself. Only consolation: my guilty, slow pace seems to be a flaw that is widely shared. Only problem: it feeds the horror of the lateness now on the horizon, an implacable sign of failure that can only be put down to the moral flaws of laziness and disorganisation.

To varying degrees, twenty-first-century readers will recognise themselves in the symptoms I’m describing. German sociologist and philosopher Hartmut Rosa reminds us that the “acceleration of the pace of life”, a phenomenon characterised by an overall compression of time, is the hallmark of our modernity. It is notably accompanied by a productivity imperative, a reduction in sleeping time, and the management of multiple tasks. Into the bargain, there is a perpetual “sense of urgency”, expressed through a “stress at work and outside of work^{1 1}The boundaries of which are increasingly blurred. ”, the fear of no longer being able to keep up, the fragmentation of experiences”^{2 2}Edouard Gardella, “Vers une pétrification du politique ?”, La Vie des Idées, 2011. Online : https://laviedesidees.fr/Vers-une-petrification-du – unless otherwise specified, all translations are ours (by Anna Knight, the author and editor). . Ultimately, we are witnessing a bona fide “instability of structural conditions (training, employment, family)”^{3 3}ibid. . The originality of Hartmut Rosa’s critique is based on his chrono-political perspective: he is not so much interested in the time of perception or in a metaphysics of time as in the relationship that Western subjects maintain with it.

It is the sort of time – which Michel Foucault would describe as discipline; Fred Moten and Stefano Harney as logistics – that penetrates and displaces bodies, rendering them docile and suitable for maintaining their own alienation. As an art historian focusing on the artistic practices of Afro-diasporic artists – and as someone with roots in the Franco-Caribbean diaspora myself – Rosa’s analyses are interesting in two ways. Firstly, they relieve my guilt as a freelancer and they also lead me to reflect on the role Atlantic history maintains with the development of instruments of temporal power, and how or in what specific ways contemporary Afro-diasporic art practices confront, circumvent, and subvert them.

However, this kind of investigation leads to consequences on the ways in which histories of art are written. It is therefore by design that I’m abandoning a unilateral and overarching perspective here, the separation between the fine arts and popular and vernacular practices; and that I am sacrificing the establishment of narrow chronological bounds as well as a zoom of the lens around one real and coherent territory. Using an amalgamation of audio-visual elements as a starting point, I will thus outline a range of Afro-diasporic strategies. Practices that criticise the Western regime of chrono-political domination whose subject is therefore – to repeat Rosa’s perspective – not so much time per se as the relationship that diasporic subjects maintain with it.

The modern society that emerged between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is characterised by a process of “historical temporalisation”^{4 4}Edouard Gardella, “Vers une pétrification du politique ?”, La Vie des Idées, 2011. Online : https://laviedesidees.fr/Vers-une-petrification-du . This causes the West to abandon its cyclic perception of time for a linear and positivist conception that differentiates itself through the importance accorded to the regime of acceleration. The turn of the eighteenth century would end the first phase of colonisation, as well as the apogee of triangular commerce, the prologue to the industrial revolution. Gradually, at the end of this century, new questions emerged regarding sovereignty and citizenry. A new political community – the nation – became a major political concern. These questions emerged within the context of imperial rivalries outside of Europe, which gave rise to the development of colonisation and slavery and imposed absolutism into the far reaches of settler colonies and African trading posts. The existence of these colonies and trans-Atlantic commercial practice posed the question of otherness and constituted a point of friction for nations then under construction – future nations^{5 5}See Cécile Vidal dir., Français ? La nation en débat entre colonies et métropoles (XVIe-XIXe siècle) .

In Colonisation of Time, Giordano Nanni insists on the determining character of technology within the colonial enterprise and domination, during which “the clock was as essential […] as the ship”^{6 6}Rasheedah Phillips, “Counter Clockwise: Unmapping Black Temporalities from Greenwich Mean Timelines”, The Funambulist, They Have Clock We Have Time, 36, 2021, 20. . This interrelation between modernity, colonisation, and technology crystallised in the nineteenth century with the perfecting of the map, a tool that ratified the relationship of space to time through movement, without representing it. Afrofuturist researcher and artist Rasheedah Phillips thus reveals that maps consign various temporalities: “the past of the one who drew the map, of the territorities drawn; the present of the user of the map, and of the changes in these territories; the future of all these events”^{7 7}Rasheedah Phillips, “Placing Time, Timing Space: Dismantling the Master’s Map and Clock”, The Funambulist (18) 2018, p. 44. . They enabled ships to travel towards the abusively named “discoveries”, on extractivist missions in which holds were loaded with natural cargo and commodities. “Human commodities” comprising African captives, whose forced transfers led them to the Americas and the Caribbean Islands and into colonies.


“Invitation to the Voyage”

In this context, the 1884 adoption of Greenwich Meridian Time – an imaginary and arbitrary line – as the international reference meridian is the symbol of British and, more broadly, Western hubris. It enabled the establishment of time zones that would contribute to the dissection of the world, in the same manner as borders. The map divides the world into a sphere of influences and imperial power, into mainlands and colonies. Territories and populations are now modern and advanced, now “Other […] who belongs to a different era: an individual who is late within their own time, who comes from another place, from another context.”^{8 8}Fabiana Ex-Souza, “Être périphérique” (Be Peripheral), Afrikadaa 9, “Anthropologismes”, May-June-July 2015 : 48–50 Nineteenth-century art history, from Baudelaire to Gauguin or Matisse, carefully consigned and depicted within its mythology of the exotic journey the theme of the “languor of the islands”, conveying this cliché in powerful detail, still in full-blown operation today. An affliction as much physical as it is moral, languor refers to “a weakening […] that considerably reduces the strengths and activity of a person”^{9 9}Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales (CNRTL). English translation of the entry for “languor” (langueur) from the French dictionary of the National Centre of Textual and Lexical Resources (CNRTL). Online: https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/langueur – translator’s note: I have kept the author’s definitions as the French definitions translated will have subtle differences to the equivalent non-translated English ones. . It is also the sign of a “character of a thing (landscape, climate) whose monotony and humidity give rise to this mood”^{10 10}ibid. .

In this respect, Aliha Thalien’s short film Nos Îles (Our Islands) could be described as a work on languor. Born and raised in France, the Martinican artist leads the viewer on a static stroll across the island. This journey falls within a specific historical and political context. Like all residents of a DOM – département des outre-mers (French overseas department) – whose region is located within the Caribbean Sea or the Indian Ocean, the inhabitants of La Martinique, a former colony that became a DOM in 1946, remain little-known to their fellow French citizens. Between assimilation to the Nation and maintenance at the periphery, departmentalisation – as geographical as it is political – allowed the state to undertake the “meticulous erasure”^{11 11}Edouard Glissant, Le Discours Antillais, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1981. of the shared colonial past. An exercise in “re-mediation”, Aliha Thalien’s film broaches the question of colonial remanence head-on and the relegation of and to these territories.

The film opens on a picture-postcard shot in saturated colours, showing Diamond Beach set against a disjointed mix of bouyon, socca and shatta. As the sequence develops and grows elongated, the exoticism of the image gradually fades away. The director captures the innocent considerations of a group of young friends, full of humour and sometimes gravitas: friendships and family relationships, the country’s economic situation, the békés class, the political perspectives on the island, and regional migrations are all topics of conversation. The film’s economy of means becomes a language focusing on a slow pace, allowing the murmurs of landscapes to unfold, along with silent expressions and embraces full of affection from each character. This ‘precipitation of slowness’ acts like a revelator that unhinges and subverts the essentialising cliché of the languor of islands. The filmic framework, combining documentary and fiction, involves the actors (re)playing and improvising dialogues, who thus wholly adopt and affirm their positions as authors “in the construction of [the] textualisation of reality”^{12 12}Ex-Souza, “Être périphérique”, 48–50. . With the gentle floating onscreen, Diamond Rock emerges from the waves like a haunting retinal mirage. Now sparkling under the sun’s rays, now mute amid a calm sea or threatening in a storm, it soon becomes the group’s subject of conversation:

– Does the rock scare you sometimes?
– Yeah.
– All the time.
– Apparently a slave ship was wrecked on it.
– Yeah. So, when you pass close by the rock, the energy is quite heavy,
actually. But do you believe it?
– I believe everything.
– I went there once on a boat. And I felt the energies. As though… I think that
it did really happen.

A mystical and ghostly presence, the rock undoes the stereotype of languor as nonchalance. A different order emerges behind the shipwreck on the rock that haunts the memory and imagination of these young people, which is a typically Glissantian “geopoetic”^{13 13}It is important to note that opposite Diamond Rock, on the coast of the town of the same name, stands the Anse Cafard Slave Memorial. This series of figures sculpted in reinforced concrete and whitened with sand from Trinidad and Tobago comprises fifteen busts, brought close together and arranged in a triangle. Designed by Martinican artist Laurent Valère, these sculptures were erected in 1998, on the occasion of the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery and are oriented in the direction of the Gulf of Guinea. The artwork, entitled Cap 110, Mémoire et fraternité, pays homage to the victims of the last shipwreck of a clandestine vessel transporting “human cargo” from Africa in 1830, when the Transatlantic slave trade was prohibited. The ship, whose name has never been established, smashed against a rock. Only eighty-six captives (twenty-six men and sixty women) of the three-hundred estimated captives escaped from it. The memorial site was arbitrarily chosen. Its presence attests and informs the magical haunting of the Rock. site. The author of Le Discours Antillais (Caribbean Discourse) thus declared: “Our landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history.

This characterisation of the function of the Caribbean landscape in Edouard Glissant enables the way the images behave to be analysed and grasped through the notion of “afrotopes”, a neologism forged by art historians Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson. This term refers “to those recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity”^{14 14}Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson, Art Journal, édition de l’hiver 2017, vol. 76, n°3-4, p. 7-9. (Anne Lafont (trad.) online : https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/magazine/article/afrotropes-mode-demploi . Struck by the tide, the rock gives rise to images stemming from an Afro-diasporic oceanic imaginary, where the ocean and the slave ship undoubtedly play some of the most iconic roles. Before the lens of Aliha Thalien, the image of Diamond Rock extends, multiplies. Its apparitions draw nearer. It offers multiple facets, exotic, nostalgic, and mystical-poetic images, whose narrative imposes itself through the questions, hesitations, and confessions of the characters. Contingent on “slow[ing] down, wait[ing], suddenly speed[ing] up, or seem[ing] bound to appear, given the right set of conditions, experiences, and technologies”^{15 15}Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson, “Afrotropes: A Conversation with Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson”, October 162, Fall 2017, pp. 3–18. , Diamond Rock either acquires a density or finds its image stripped back. Copeland and Thompson’s afrotopes draw on the “chronotopes” of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. While afrotopes designate motifs, chronotopes are the literal time-space matrix (chronos and topos) that highlights the relationship that unites temporality and event, through fiction and narration. The image, according to Bakhtin’s expression, “is fleshed out” and attests to “the intrinsic interconnectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed”^{16 16}Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 250, cited in ibid. . This infrathin flesh is at once full (body, object, fluids) and free (loss, absence and desire of relationships and affinities).

Water no get enemy

If your child dey grow, a water he go use
If water kill your child, na water you go use

Fela Kuti - Water no get enemy

In 1964, General de Gaulle was on an official voyage in the Caribbean and rallied La Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana^{17 17}Although it isn’t an island situated in the Caribbean Sea, but a territory in South America, French Guiana belongs partly to its cultural space, In the same manner as the north of Brazil or Colombia. . As his plane flew over the ocean, he described the islands under the cabin as “specks of dust across the sea”. This quote conveys the violence of colonial history and relationship that subsists today between continental France and its “overseas” territories^{18 18}the use of this term is controversial in that it reaffirms the colonial relationship (while also downplaying it) between France and the DOM-TOM. In this respect, see Françoise Vergès’ interview for Boukan magazine online: https://www.une-saison-en-guyane.com/article/societe/entretien-avec-francoise-verges-le-feminisme-decoloniale/ . De Gaulle’s colonial amnesia was not entirely off the mark. But it’s not so much the Caribbean islands as the residues of wrecks and bones that indeed form mounds of Atlantic dust in the dark abysses of the ocean. Canadian theorist of Barbadian origins, Rinaldo Walcott, recalls that “the black aquatic is the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship that Black people hold to bodies of water. It is a relationship that is not simply held by Black people but one that […] is also assumed by others to be actually constitutive of black subjectivity.”^{19 19}Rinaldo Walcott, “The Black Aquatic”, liquid blackness (2021) 5 (1): 63–73. Online : https://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article/5/1/63/173285/The-Black-Aquatic

Dominique White’s white and rust sculptures attest to this secular ambiguity. The British artist of Jamaican origins erects ruins battered by wind and waves. She deploys a spectral practice based on deboning, death, and memory, amalgamating broken masts, nets tangled with rusted chains, worn ropes, or shredded flags. All kinds of materials and elements that, while they sometimes form installations tending towards monumentality, remain on a human scale. She exhausts them all with her hands or fire. White’s practice repeats and displaces the motif of the ship. In so doing, her sculpture is a powerful afrotrope, combining temporalities and geographies, questioning the problematics of circulation of images and the diaspora. While the map, boat and clock are the ultimate technologies of colonisation, then Dominique White’s wrecks are the counterpoints of the cartographic project by afro-futurist duo Black Quantum Futurism formed by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa, whose project they brilliantly present: “Black/Afro Diasporan temporalities and traditions of time share many parallels with quantum principles: the past intermingles with the present, interwoven with the future(s)”^{20 20}“Black/Afro Diasporan temporalities and traditions of time share many parallels with quantum principles: the past intermingles with the present, interwoven with the future(s)” https://arts.cern/article/black-quantum-futurism-black-diasporan-temporalities-share-many-parallels-quantum . In an interview conducted for her solo exhibition at Triangle – Astérides (Marseille, France), Dominique White reveals the spatiotemporal challenges of these anti-monuments. She does not exclusively refer to slave ships, but to various kinds of vessels, their echoes and retinal, conceptual, and political persistence over time. The frictions of kaolin that she applies onto her artworks thus become a mourning or funereal ritual, for several events and instances of violence and loss.

In turn, she cites the Zong, a slave ship whose “captain decided to throw part of his ‘cargo’ overboard – thus perpetrating the murder of over 130 people reduced to slavery”^{21 21}Dominique White interviewed by Céline Kopp for her solo exhibition, online: https://trianglefrance.org/fr/files/feuille-de-salle-frpresse_v3.pdf and the Windrush. Between 1948 and 1971, this boat made return voyages between the United Kingdom and Caribbean colonies (Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and other islands of the Commonwealth) to transport thousands of local people with the goal of supplementing the post-war labour shortage. She also references pneumatic conduits or migrant boats and, more specifically the “left-to-die boat”. In 2011, France, Italy, and Malta left this pneumatic adrift for weeks in the Mediterranean Sea. The coastguards “watched the crossing of this makeshift raft on the Mediterranean, sometimes so closely that the survivors can still describe the faces of the personnel”.^{22 22}White, 5

Dominique White’s work thus retraces the continuum between stasis and movement, between death and the impetus for survival / lifeforce, in which Black subjects and their bodies are rendered vulnerable to violence.

Black Matter : Black Gold of the Sun

I am the white side of the sun
Follow the beat across the light
(…)
I am the black gold of the sun
I am the the dark side of the sun
Shadows that light up the day
Darkness shadow all the way

Nuyorican Soul – I Am the Black Gold of the Sun

In 1790, the captain John Gabriel Stedman published Narratives of Five Years — Expedition Against The Revolted Negroes of Surinam. It relates the events of a mutiny on a slave ship^{23 23}The mutineers almost always condemned the slaves to certain death. . Despite the success of the undertaking, it nevertheless reached its destination: Surinam. The captives rose up onto the ship’s deck. Their foreheads and cheeks were scarred using glass shards from bottles; they appeared with crescent moons and stars etched into their flesh. In her analysis of the episode in Black Is a Color, art historian Elvan Zabunyan posits that while the stars carved into the flesh of the mutineers constitute an echo of their ritual practices, this act nevertheless embodies an early breakaway, upon which a diasporic visual culture will soon be based. The “artistic tradition,” she explains, “is based on the continuity of the historical and collective experiences deriving from an origin”^{24 24}Elvan Zabunyan, Black Is A Color : une histoire de l’art africain-américain contemporain, Paris : Dis voir, 2004, p. 11. , for which the Atlantic slave trade stands as one of the points of departure. Against the reification and commodification of their bodies, against the annihilation of their person, culture, and subjectivity, this revolt of the captives possibly comprises one of the first documented iterations of the use of the Black body as a surface of representation and plastic material, which Elvan Zabunyan links to performative and corporeal artistic practices^{25 25}In the book, the author is more specifically interested in the artistic practices of the 1960s. .

Standing on the deck, above the hold where they were detained, the captives of the episode reported by Stedman inaugurated the union of two themes that stimulate the afrofuturist imagination^{26 26}An artistic movement “AFROFUTURISM thus engages a global, creative change, one of actions. Taking the side of those who, marginalised for centuries, have embodied alterity, it is addressed more than ever to the whole world. Inclusive and abundant, heterogeneous and uninhibited, trans- (in the initial sense of crossing), it invites us to perform the world.” Mawena Yehouessi “L’Afrofuturisme en 3 points EXPANSIONS(S°)”, Blacks to the future, 2016. Online: https://blackstothefuture.com/syncretics/ . During their revolt, the captives were united around a magic-religious practice that bound black matter to the oceanic and galactic milieus. This dimension defines the contours of an alternative Middle Passage deployed via a vertical axis between the fugitives’ dreams of flight^{27 27}The notion of flight that we find under the plume of African-American authors such as Adrian Piper or Frank B. Wilderson III, metaphorically links practices of flying and political emancipation through the imagination, thought, art, and so on. and the submerged life in the depths of the hold. An axis that allows us to see – as Alexis Pauline Gumb invites us to – “the depths of the oceans [in] the space beyond”^{28 28}Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive, After the End of the World (Durham: Duke Press University, 2018), 10 .

In her compendium Archive M, the poetess highlights the work of Black oceanianists who analyse “the dark matter of the depths”. Their research allows us to reflect on the constitutive relationship of Blackness and the ocean from a new perspective. Based on the scientific work of bioluminescence (material stemming partly from the decomposition of magnesium and calcium from the bones of slaves thrown overboard or who threw themselves off the decks of slave ships), Gumbs examines the history of the world via its matter and the way in which our vision, our perspective should light the way “all light is shared with those at the bottom of the oceans”^{29 29}Alexis Pauline Gumbs, ibid, 11. .

The work of Guyanese-born Dutch choreographer Cherish Menzo offers a variation on this organic theme. Co-created with Camilo Mejía Cortés, Dark Matter is a piece that works on Blackness from the point of view of the staging (lighting) and temporality, through dance. The piece is based on an experimental dispositive, since it has been created in different European cities (Amsterdam, Paris, Marseille) over the course of various workshops in Amsterdam, Marseille, or Paris, at La Villlette, where I was myself a participant for three days. Menzo was looking for participants interested in Afrofuturist, post-humanist issues, for a future production combining chopped & screwed electronic music and rap choir. The promise was to explore movement and voice to reflect on the way in which we perceive ourselves and others^{30 30}I’m paraphrasing the workshop call here. . Composed of a mixed group, but predominantly women of African descent, the workshop was divided into three parts. Although we did a warm up before each session, the first day was mainly devoted to an exercise that invited us to capture our inner movement, which Cherish Menzo called our “wave”, a word that in English refers to both soundwaves and the waves of the sea. It was then a question of breaking this wave down into its constituent parts and slowing it down. After training to keep this movement going, by each moving over an imaginary straight line that traversed the room, we started to dance collectively by forming a group, a sensitive, almost multi-headed organism whose movements were built up indefinitely in reaction to one another. Individually, the wave of our respective waves resonated from the ends of our toenails to the tips of our hair, animating our facial expressions as it passed.

We had to sense the others, sense them sensing us, become an organism of sensitive, reactive, tactile fluid. By dancing in close proximity, between the black walls of the room at La Villette, in a context questioning the production of the Black body, an episode of Alex Haley’s Roots later came to mind. As Keguro Macharia notes, Haley describes the “imposed proximity” of his protagonist Kunta Kinte:

He pulled lightly on the chain; it seemed to be connected to the left ankle of the man he had fought with. On Kunta’s left, chained to him by the ankles, lay some other man, someone who kept up a steady moaning, and they were all so close that their shoulders, arms, and legs touched if any of them moved.^{31 31}Voir à ce propos Keguro Macharia, Frottage, Black Fictions of Intimacy, New York, NYU Press, 2019, 1.

Separated from his family and loved ones, the protagonist Kunta Kinte is maintained in a “monstrous intimacy” with other displaced individuals – sometimes his enemies. Friction and chains are at once obstacles, bonds, and connections. In her essay Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, Hortense Spillers reminds us that the Black diasporas of the Americas and Caribbean are in search of model systems of alternative kinship. First slavery, then racist systems participated in the atomisation of the ones that originally prevailed among displaced populations. She suggests that it was under the waterline, in the hold of ships that the production of the atomisation of subjectivity, history, languages, and relationships of captive Africans was formed. Yet the captives were not passive in the hold. Clearly identified as a laboratory of diverse power dynamics and forms of racial, ableist, or sexist and sexual discrimination, the hold was also a place where the connections that notably led to the numerous mutinies that took place for four centuries were already recreated. Expert in maritime history and historian Marcus Rediker produced a body of work crucial for understanding the technology and domination, but also the life and modes of resistance aboard slave ships. He therefore highlights:

“The pervasive horror makes it all the more remarkable that enslaved people were able, under such extreme circumstances, to be creative. When fifteen to twenty different ethnic or national groups of people, many of whom could not understand or speak the languages of the others, were forced together aboard the vessel, the problem of communication presented itself on the lower deck. Slave traders consciously mixed different language groups to try to limit cooperation and collective resistance. But new kinds of communication nonetheless emerged from below: the enslaved sang new songs, danced new dances, invented new words, and spoke new, usually pidgin languages. New music was especially important as a ship made entirely of wood could be used as a percussive instrument: drummers could drum anywhere.”^{32 32}Marcus Rediker “The Transatlantic Slave Trade Ships: Trajectories of Death and Violence Across the Ocean”, The Funambulist 19, online : https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/the-ocean/the-transatlantic-slave-trade-ships-trajectories-of-death-and-violence-across-the-ocean

It was in these new relationships that resides the “awful gift” of the hold, as posited by the authors Fred Moten and Stefano Harney; which they pose as a model for reimagining ways of being and acting together, of establishing relationships and actions. This is what they call haptic or love, that is: “the ability of touching [others] and being touched [by others].”^{33 33}Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Les sous-communs – Planification fugitive et étude noire, Paris, Brook, 2022. (Trad. Coll.)
A touch that Cherish Menzo’s workshop incorporated, attempting to establish a space-time in which dance and anecdotes of lives were shared, comments on similar and sometimes shared diasporic stories and experiences. Beyond the hold, submerged lives and cultures are also a powerful afrofuturist theme, as well as a plastic and poetic afrotrope^{34 34}The term is also used by poets like the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite or the Saint-Lucien Derek Walcott. . In addition, Dominique White affirms the dialogue that her work and critique of capitalism maintain with the productions of the Drexciya duo. Based on stories relating to the way in which the Africans aboard the slave ships threw themselves overboard, believing that it was in death that they would return home among their ancestors, on the Continent, the duo from the US invent a future (or futuristic) world for them underwater, whose sounds they bring back up to the surface. They create a submerged culture that escapes – born out of disaster, evading death, and promising rebirth. In fact, the sculptural work of Dominique White, like the fictional sound compositions of Gerald Donald and Ralph Stinson, enables us to reflect on and reinvent the idea of the nation, by ridding it of its constraints from the juridico-legal projects of the nation state (border, race, historical fiction). Caught between various past and future catastrophes, they question the forms of life integrated within the project.

In a context in which the emancipatory projects run by Black diasporas have not always been able to be fully realised, from their home turf, these artists have laid milestones that question the concepts of freedom and emancipation, as well as the conditions of their exercise.

Time’s (un) screwed

In Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dills, The Hip Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, Dan Charnas notes that the metronome is a clock and that the two instruments have shared historical origins:

“The clock has been twinned with sound and song since its beginnings in ancient China — a water-powered mechanism that struck a bell — through its evolution into the ubiquitous towers in Europe that chimed on the hour. Thus it was the watchmakers of eighteenth-century Switzerland who created the innards for the earliest music boxes, in which a coiled spring rotated a cylinder with bumps on its surface, bumps that struck metal tines that produced musical tones spaced in time. Another machine, powered by spring and pendulum, was soon created to help musicians themselves measure time more precisely: the metronome. ”^{35 35}Dan Charnas ; Jeff Peretz, “Machine Time”, Dilla Time : The Life and Afterlife of the Hip-hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, p. 87

The jazz of Sun Ra, the P-Funk of George Clinton’s bands^{36 36}It was the bands Parliament and Funkadelic, responsible for creating a sub-genre of funk. , the dub of Lee “Scratch” Perry, or Detroit techno – by the pioneers of Drexciya at the Underground Resistance (UR) collective – were doubtless reference figures when it came to broaching the relationship of African-Americans to time and technology. To this list must be added the hip hop that author Ytasha Womack notes also “articulates alienness, otherworldliness, aspiration, community, and the metaphysics of nonlinear time”^{37 37}Ytasha Womack “Introduction” in Roy Christopher (ed.), Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2022). . This temporal question is posed by DJing. Since the advent of disco, then with hip hop and techno (among others), decks enabled the creation of mixing techniques. These techniques created in marginalised areas of society were exercised thanks to muscular and musical memory and practice. They are innovations that also enabled technological development^{38 38}In this respect, see André Sirois “Scratch Cyborgs: The Hip-Hop DJ as Technology”, in Christopher, Boogie Down. .

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, where he grew up until the age of 12, Clive Campbell – better known under the name of DJ Cool Herc – is the major pioneer of the hip hop movement^{39 39}A cultural movement born in the Bronx that contains four elements: DJing, MCing (which later became rap), breakdance and graffiti. . Onto the streets of the Bronx, he imported elements of Jamaican musical culture (the sound system, toasting) one day in August 1973, during a block party on Sedgick Avenue, legend has it that Herc perfected the Merry-Go-Round”. Instead of playing LPs end to end, he played breakdowns, rhythmic sections (so, percussions) that dancers loved, to pass from one record to the next:

“Herc did this by using two record players and a mixer to switch from one record to the next in rapid succession. By slowing down or speeding up his turntables, he could synchronize the tempos of the two songs and “match” their beats.”^{40 40}Dan Charnas ; Jeff Peretz, “Machine Time”, Dilla Time : The Life and Afterlife of the Hip-hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, p. 90

Herc thus transformed the musical landscape and signed the advent of the hip-hop movement. An equally major figure, Grand Master Flash developed “clock theory” in the wake of Kool Herc. His technique involved directly touching the black records, whereas Herc was mainly playing with his crossfader. So:

“the rotation of the vinyl records [ensured] precise timing; rubbing, catching, and releasing the vinyl [created] percussive, melodic, and harmonic effects; and using two copies of the same record [extended] the typically short “break” sections into infinite loops.”^{41 41}Charnas and Peretz, 90

With scratching and rubbing, DJing thus replayed the repertoire of acts of friction, always underlying the development of a creativity that enabled escape and emancipation from temporal structures, bringing bodies out of docility. A highly meaningful act in the context of the United States, with its legal and informal racial segregation, in which black vinyl intensified the separation of Black bodies from their voice, to sell it, distribute it, and play it in (white) spaces^{42 42}See Arthur Jafa, My Black Death (Hudson, NY: Publication Studio, 2015). . The question of the isolation, repetition, and manipulation of percussion sections allows us to think about the idea of a non-retinal but auditory persistence, an echo of past relationships and resistances. The record deck, a tool for temporal manipulation, stands out as a new manifestation of a vessel, traversing the sea, time, and (galactic) space.

This logic of the fugue, via a touch that enables technical and temporal manipulation, is taken to one of its paroxysms by Robert Earl Davis Jr. Born in the south of Houston, the young DJ called himself DJ Screw. He was the creator of chopped & screwed, a sub-genre of rap that emerged in the early 1990s. For a decade, the very prolific DJ Screw released over two hundred mixtapes, brought together and organised into a complete and final project: Diary of the Originator. Like Herc and Grandmaster Flash before him, Screw created his own anti-clock with a technique of “audio mix consisting of systematically slowing down the speed of play on one track played at the same time on two decks, but in a slightly offset way, so that the fast manipulation of the crossfader creates a disjointed repetitious effect from one deck to the other, maintained within the continuity of a restrained tempo — known as the technique of “chopped and screwed.”^{43 43}Mathieu Saladin. “Précipités de lenteur”. Audimat, 12 (2019): 154.

The sound of DJ Screw is a wreck, a haunted ruin. Like Dominique White, Screw exhausts the media that he touches: sound, vinyl records, cassettes. The legend behind his name is significant in this respect: deciding that he only likes one song on a record, he scratched the record with a screw to erase the others from the media and from his memory. Matthieu Saladin judiciously likens listening to one of Screw’s mixtapes to the discovery of “a record found in a state of advanced deterioration after a disaster, the latent memory of which it has apparently retained. Irreversibly damaged, yet still identifiable. Each melodic line or rhythmic sequence becomes a sort of ghost of itself, its own haunting duplicated”^{44 44}ibid . Screw’s practice and sound cannot be reduced to the metaphor of “ghost in the machine”. Before and after the constitution of his studio, he establishes a series of strategies, sometimes innovative, in order to play on the temporality of the music he remixes: scratching, splicing of black and brown cassette tapes to recreate a song, stop-time, reappropriation of his boom box… He strips the sound and media down to their bones.

Culturalist Mark Fisher recalled that “haunting” signifies both that which invades and disturbs, and what remains in place, the act of lingering. Screw’s slow pace surpassed the purely musical dimension and was coupled with an equally demanding ethos. The track “Sailin’da South”, on the essential 3’N The Morning, did not invite us to set sail to the south of the globe over the seas. In Houston’s slang, sailing meant hanging out with your friends in a car, driving slow with the trunk open, from which a speaker broadcast music. Leisure activities are a pervasive them in most of DJ Screw’s and Click’s sounds and songs^{45 45}Houston Collective led by DJ Screw, including the likes of ESG, Fat Pat, Lil’Keke or UGK. . Beyond entertainment, Screw’s relationships describe a veritable ethos in service of the collective and localism. His music celebrates a way of life in the South of the United States, and is thus placed in service to the Houstonian (and Texan) community, to which his entourage belongs. Albeit prolific, the DJ refused to play the industry game of massification and industrialisation, to which the logics of rap production, based on repetition, could be vulnerable, within a Marxist and Adornoian perspective. His lo-fi aesthetic earned him the attention of major labels and when they contacted him, he refused to sign without his friends. His songs stem from pirate practices. Screw favours informal circulation and positions himself as a bug.

From the embrace of Aliha Thalien’s characters, to the kaolin rubbings of Dominique White, to the reactivity of the bodies of Cherish Menzo’s performers, or the frictions of Black vinyl records and cassette tapes, the practices described in this text produce gestures that both create and refuse. Gestures that form “a unified or federating choir, yet dissonant voices that, from time to time, are joined in their common quest for freedom”^{46 46}Keguro Macharia, Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, New York, NYU Press, 2019, 12. . Beyond the mirage of inclusiveness and universalism, these Afrotropic frictions and emergences link up disjointed geographies and temporalities to do and write new histories (of art). These artworks remind us broadly of the turning point that has been taken, or that must now be taken, by contemporary art institutions. Because like the “rock” of Diamond, “contemporaneity consists precisely in the acceleration, ubiquity and constancy of radical disjunctures of perception, of mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world, in the actual coincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling contingency of various cultural and social multiplicities, all thrown together in ways that highlight the fast-growing inequalities within and between them.”^{47 47}Aleš Erjavec, “Art et esthétique : du moderne au contemporain” Diogène 2011/1-2 (n° 233-234), 211-225.

From the pendulum swing of the clock to that of the metronome, the Afrotopic Afro-diasporic imaginary explores the ocean’s ebb and flow, migratory comings and goings, the struggle associated with inhaling and exhaling. A history is outlined, and a critique of the contemporary capitalist world definitively emerges – possibly voicing, or paving the way for perpetually renewed forms of emancipation and relationalities.