Silent Interview with a Scholar in France
Ramia El'amine-Fazul is a French scholar working on an Art History Master thesis on #Afrosurrealism and #Afrofuturism in mainstream music.
Could you explain the genesis of your manifesto? What led you to writing and publishing it and to creating this "new" art movement? What was your process like? Where did you draw your inspiration from exactly? What was your aim when you published it?
I wrote the Afrosurreal Manifesto in 2009 for the San Francisco Bay Guardian at the behest of my editor, Johnny Ray Houston, who wanted to dedicate an issue to the concept. I'd been working on the contours of the movement for years by then, including speaking with Amiri Baraka on his concept of Afrosurreal Expressionism and Ishmael Reed on his Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto. It was the 100th anniversary of Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto which was first published in the newspaper Gazzetta dell'Emilia. I was aware that print media was being placed in jeopardy by tech and the internet and was curious if a traditional arts manifesto published in a newspaper a century later would have the same impact.
I studied what constituted a traditional arts manifesto mostly through Mary Ann Caws' book Isms: A Century of Manifestos (2000). My manifesto was an experiment that I called a "time installation" where I wanted to see if an old form and format could prove to be just as impactful and resonate at the start of the 21st century as it had been at the start of the 20th. I didn't have any expectations when I published it because I was a staff writer for a weekly newspaper. We published that issue and quickly moved on to the next. Though I got both positive and negative feedback locally that first few weeks, it would take years for me to realize that my work had done exactly what I'd anticipated.
How do you articulate your movement to previous black artistic or cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance, the Négritude and Neo-HooDoo? Is Afrosurrealism their descendant, or is it an umbrella term where all of these black traditions and practices could fall under?
I see all arts movements as being on the same continuum. There would be no Surrealism without Dada and Futurism. There would be no Négritude without The Harlem Renaissance and so on. Afrosurrealism is a continuation of this tradition, rooted in Amiri Baraka's impetus of the Black Arts Movement, along with he, Ishmael Reed and Henry Dumas' earlier iteration as The Umbra Writing Collective but I don't see racially separate movements on this continuum. Human consciousness and creativity don't work that way and the intent on that separation is white supremacist on the face of it. Afrosurrealism is not a subcategory of Surrealism anymore that Surrealism is a subcategory of Dada. They are distinct evolutions.
In your manifesto, you mention some artists/examples that are often considered as Afrofuturists (like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Prince, Sun ra and Marvel's Black Panther) despite the fact that you clearly differentiate Afrosurrealism from Afrofuturism in the text, and Ytasha L. Womack wrote an entire chapter about Afrosurrealism in her infamous book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. It appears that both movements seem closely related through their histories and manifestations, so how do you personally consider the links between Afrofuturism and your own movement?
I think it is a misnomer to call Jean-Michel Basquiat, Prince, Sun ra and Marvel's Black Panther Afrofuturist. When Mark Dery coined the term in 1994, he made no mention of any of these artists or works and they were only included after the publication of the Afrosurreal Manifesto in 2009. In fact, no one had written or spoken of Afrofuturism for nearly a decade until my manifesto was published. I wrote about all of this extensively as a columnist in residence for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art seven years ago. I'd already pointed out the Afrosurreal influences of each artist you mentioned, including the anti-colonial superhero Black Panther and the prediction that a movie would eventually be made, in my manifesto in 2009. These influences were literally poached from my document and inserted into the Afrofuturism pantheon without explanation or reasoning. There is plenty of evidence that Basquiat was more inspired by Baraka's Black Arts Movement than any future-casting. Prince has gone on record saying that he focuses on the present with his music. Sun Ra was a cosmic worker, and his movie Space Is The Place is set in my town of Oakland, CA and featured members of The Black Panthers and even borrowed from the Surrealist classic, The Seventh Seal, is not about the future, but the present reality of that time. If anything, Ra existed beyond or above time, as noted in his famous phrase, "It's after the end of the world. Don't you know that yet?", which I fully embraced in my manifesto as "The Future-Past". When Womack interviewed me in 2012, I didn't get to see what she wrote until after it was published. In hindsight, this was an error on her part because there were so many concepts that she hadn't studied or been familiar with prior to publication that she got many of my references wrong. The glaring being not knowing who Kehinde Wiley was but there several others.
Reynaldo Anderson, the founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), listed in his article "Afrofuturism 2.0 & The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto » (p. 234-235) some of the many sub-categories represented by the BSAM (which is an "umbrella term" according to Anderson), and Afrosurrealism was one of them. Do you also link your movement to the BSAM? Or do you consider your movement to be more autonomous?
About eight years ago, Anderson commissioned me to write a piece for an anthology he was working on with Greg Tate. Having only been familiar with him through a debacle called Ethnosurrealism at Loyola College's Astroblackness 2.0 conference where a panelist blatantly said, "We intend to replace Afrosurrealism in the academic discourse," I was wary of participation but considered it a place to establish distinctions between Afrosurrealism, Afrofuturism and whatever it was the Anderson was up to. I wrote The Electrical Scent of Damas: Negritude, The Harlem Renaissance, and The Afrosurreal, received my check and moved on without another thought. Not only do I not consider Afrosurrealism as a part of the BSAM "movement", I've never been involved with Anderson or his hostile takeover since that one interaction. It wasn't until years later that I learned that Womack had formed an alliance with him and Stanford Carpenter (who coined "ethnosurrealism" at Anderson's conference.), years before interviewing me and it was only after re-reading the book with that knowledge that I realized what had been planned that long ago. In 2018, he worked with Damon Davis out of home city of St. Louis in an attempt to once again divorce my manifesto and my name from my movement. It was only due to public outcry that he amended his position and acknowledged me as the founder.
When one searches "Afrosurrealism" on Google, one of the very first links is an infamous article published by Lanre Bakare in the Guardian (« From Beyoncé to Sorry to Bother You: the new age of Afro-Surrealism »). The references to your manifesto were quite obvious, at least to me, and yet you are not mentioned anywhere. What do you think about this lack of credit/erasure, as I understand from my research and your previous posts on your socials and recent publications that it is not a unique case? How do you explain it?
Yes, Bakare is a thief. This was obvious to anyone paying attention the minute his article dropped. Several people reached out to the publication to make corrections and all were ignored. My only reasoning for this is that the article was paid for by a consortium whose intent was to "muddy the waters" by publishing an Afrosurrealism piece in a newspaper called The Guardian, reflective of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2018, I didn't understand exactly how vast this network devoted to my erasure was, but since that time I've seen The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art NYC, The Tate UK, Horniman Gallery UK, Art In America, and even books from Yale and UC Press that have either erased my name, rewritten my history, or denigrated my contribution, including Rochelle Spencer's "book', and almost the entire connection to Terri Francis, who is centered in Bakare's piece and whom I allowed to republish my manifesto in Black Camera in 2013 under the condition that my partner's art be on the cover, only to find that she did it to obscure that fact that the original was published in 2009 in a 2022 article for Art In America to imply that she was my predecessor. Again, only public outcry caused them to amend a correction.
It's taken me a decade of research to find the culprits and organizers of this manufactured obscurity. I encapsulate it here, but the network is more vast than even that. My only assumption is that white supremacy takes issue with a Black American "cracking the code" of art history and they see me as an interloper/invader and capitalism must erase my anti-capitalist document and my name in order to turn a profit from its influence.
Regarding the examples mentioned in Bakare's article, how do you perceive the associations made with your movement, this new afrosurrealist "pantheon" that emerged in popular culture?
This question folds into the previous one. Many pop culture artists have used my manifesto uncredited, including Jay-Z, Beyonce' and Donald Glover. When journalists like Maya Phillips began to make the connection, I began to pay attention. I'm not a regular consumer of pop culture, mainstream movies or television shows, so the whole phenomenon was missed on me for a long time. I first started taking notice in the commercials for Glover's "Atlanta" then upcoming 4th season where one played Sun Ra's "It's after the end of the world, don't you know that yet?", while Kendrick Lamar's "Alight" video seemed to be reflecting the same. When I found that both of these projects shared a director, it became obvious that capitalist endeavors were cribbing from my aesthetic framework intentionally. When Thomas Flight contacted me for an interview, I had to confess that I hadn't seen an episode of "Atlanta" at that time and didn't start playing catch up until after his podcast. I've yet to see a Peele movie, but when he acknowledged me on a TikTok last year, it cemented what the journalists had been saying and what I'd begun to suspect. Ultimately, arts manifestos are meant to inspire art in the vein of the aesthetic that the manifesto frames, and so much of the art journalists call Afrosurreal simply isn't, it's just weird, which discounts much of the revolutionary content, but some get it right, while others are called Afrosurrealists without intentionally being so, like Boots Riley, whom I've known for nearly 30 years, and would call a fellow traveler.
According to you, are Afrosurrealism, activism and (black) capitalism compatible?
The Afrosurreal Manifesto was born in a time when my focus was praxis. I was very involved with protesting the murder of Oscar Grant, was working for various alternative newspapers and magazines, and was a bookseller at City Lights Bookstore, home of both the Beat Movement and an independant alternative press. The Afrosurreal Manifesto is an extension of my activism at the time, where I was warning San Francisco of the imminent corporate/tech takeover of the the political and social function of the city, which has met its completion in 2024 with a nearly non-existent Black population, the criminalization of homelessness, and the destruction of public space and public services. What is often overlooked is strategies I infer throughout the document, like the importance of remaining declassified/anonymous/invisible and attempting to establish multiple revenue sources as power and wealth consolidate and limit options for work and creativity. The fact that The San Francisco Bay Guardian was a free newspaper that took a decidedly anti-capitalist stance was the reason why they printed it, and also why it no longer exists. I don't believe in Black capitalism because white supremacy in America has deprived Black people the generational wealth and material conditions to enable it. It's a "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" myth that blames the wealth gap on the oppressed and not the oppressor where it belongs.
You recently published an article titled "Afrosurrealism Is Dead (And it’s about damn time)" in The Brooklyn Rail, could you elaborate on this notion of the death of your movement? And what does the future hold for the movement?
My father has an adage: "You can't truly destroy what you didn't truly create." After witnessing all of these bad faith actors, thieves and liars, it became to clear to me that the popular consensus as a result of this hateful campaign was that I didn't create Afrosurrealism, and if that were true, I couldn't destroy it to be rebuilt anew closer to the original intent. I used Brooklyn Rail to prove my father's adage. Seeing how the message reached you in Paris, I have proven that I am, in fact, the founder of Afrosurrealism and have hopefully derailed those who have been attacking me and my work for 15 years. As for the future, that would be you, and writers, artists, theorists and scholars like you who are putting in the work with academic rigor, good faith and a devotion to historical accuracy and truth. I gladly lend my support to those who want to further Afrosurrealism as a legitimate framework as much as I oppose those who want to do the opposite.
What are you working on currently?
I was the Managing Editor for the alternative weekly The East Bay Express for five years when it inevitably gave way to corporate forces and I was pushed out over a year ago. I'm currently working or creating my own alternative media network and am doing a podcast called The Doom Loop Dispatch with fellow journalist Kevin L. Jones and am slowly learning the ins and outs of Substack and Youtube to establish what I'm tentatively calling BriarPatch Media.