Abstract
Afrofuturist ideas and tropes have had an impact on global popular and visual cultures and have also found resonance in South Africa. In this study, I explore Afrofuturist inflections emerging in South African Art. Orientated around the understanding that Afrofuturism is concerned with the re-inscription of Black identities through the reimagining of alternative futures or spaces where they can rethink themselves anew, this study is focused on ideas of agency and self-articulation.
This focus draws on the premise that throughout modernity, which has been afflicted by racial slavery, colonialism and apartheid, Black people have been constructed as existing outside the realm of humanity. They have subsequently endured unending forms of violence that have that induced trauma. The ideas that animate this study are thus concerned with making apparent how the construction of ‘futures’ through particular visual themes is simultaneously an attempt to redeem Black subjects and invest them with speech – that is, with a language that might undermine imperial authority which has manifested in varied ways over time.
Using currents embedded in postcolonial discourse and ‘Afropessimism’, which elucidate how Black peoples are uniquely positioned in the world and how they subsequently fabricate forms of resistance, I offer alternative interpretations of how Black identities are reimagined in Afrofuturist work in South Africa. Through close examination of Gerald Machona’s Vabvakure (People from far away) (2012), Mohau Modisakeng’s Ditaola (2014) and Ben Ngobeni’s Bridge of the Spirits (2017), discussed within the ambit of Afrofuturism, I suggest that, in their themes and iconographical registers, these three bodies of work have threads of self-articulation, resistance and agency.