Although Drexciya proper ended in 2002 with James Stinsons death, it has had

is having a long aesthetic afterlife. In recent years, the Drexciya project as well as
earlier figures such as Sun Ra have come to be grouped under the moniker of
Afrofuturism, coined by Mark Dery in a 1994 essay entitled Black to the Future,
describing it as:
Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses AfricanAmerican concerns in the context of twentieth-century technocultureand more
generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology
and a prosthetically enhanced future.1
Although in the discourse on Afrofuturism Drexciya and Sun Ra have become important
historical milestones, their vitality today has been accompanied by a dearth of critical
attention to their practices, contexts, and aesthetics. The mythmakers have become myths
themselves, invoked either in claiming progenitors (Sun Ra is often called the father of
Afrofuturism) or as narrative trope. Drexciya has remained a catalyst for contemporary
artists and filmmakers such as Ellen Gallagher and The Otolith Group who have made
work inspired by its mythos. Yet merely gesturing to its afterlife is not enough, as if the
gesture in the name of an aesthetic predecessor were sufficient critical grounding for
understanding the work of these practitioners, old and new. As Stuart Hall once put it,
every reading is an inherently political re-reading.2 Although I am not here directly
concerned with the work of the contemporary artists who have been inspired by
Drexciya, its afterlife (an inadequate term, for can music and art really be said to die
biological deaths, with that ring of finality?) remains crucial to bear in mind, for it
foregrounds the intergenerational touching that occurs between black artists that is neither
uncritical acceptance of a predecessors project and premise nor wholesale disavowal.
Nor am I interested in producing the re-territorialized social history of Detroit
techno that Sean Albiez calls for, so that we can move beyond utopian claims for new
colour-blind social formations or communities that were made in the European rave
scene and analyze the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of the US origins of
techno in Detroit.3 While Albiez is right to call for an understanding of Detroit techno
through its relationship to the dynamics within and of the city (a history that has not yet
been written), I take issue with his assertion that in considering black science fiction and
techno, we should not be tempted to inflate the transformative potential of its escapist
rhetoric.4 Again, Albiez is right to point out that techno is not usually understood as
black music in the United States and that the widespread appeal of hip hop and R&B
complicates and continues the racial polarization of American culture. But to measure an
1 Mark Dery, "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delaney, Greg Tate, and
Tricia Rose," in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery(Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 180.
2 Stuart Hall, "The Afterlife of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin,
White Masks?," in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed.
Alan Read(London and Seattle, WA: ICA Publications and Bay Press, 1996), 14.
3 Sean Albiez, "Post-Soul Futurama: African American Cultural Politics and Early
Detroit Techno," European Journal of American Culture 24, no. 2 (2005): 149.
4 Ibid.

aesthetic works efficacy through the statistics and demographics of its public devotees
would be to miss the point entirely.
Instead, I see Drexciya, the Underground Resistance label (with which it was
closely affiliated), and Detroit techno (as it was practiced and as it was taken up
elsewhere) as different interventions that black artists have made into what Darby English
has termed black representational space. In his 2007 volume How to See a Work of Art in
Total Darkness, English argues for understanding black representational space as the
effect of a politics of representation, raging ever since blackness could be proposed as
the starting point of a certain mode or type of artistic depiction.5 That is, much in the
way that Gayatri Spivak distinguishes between vertreten and darstellen, English
understands black representational space as both cultural territory understood as
material changes in the lives of black folk and conceptual terrain. With this in mind, I
would also argue for situating Drexciya in the broader context of critical aesthetic
practice in the Black Atlantic of the 1990s, one in which transatlantic slavery took on
great significance, as Huey Copeland has explored in his recent book, Bound to Appear:
Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America. While Copelands
purview remains within the visual arts his case studies are Glenn Ligon, Rene Green,
Fred Wilson, and Lorna Simpson, all of whom were born between 1954 and 1960 and
exhibited installations within a three year period of the 1990s his book asked: [J]ust
what did slavery look like in the late 1980s and early 90s, when it could be represented
at all? More to the point, how did artists figure the peculiar institution as a cultural
and political fact? What materials, historical, textual, vernacular, or artistic, did they
draw upon, and why? How did they reckon with the slaves position as a form of sexed
and gendered property located at the nexus of Western civilizations material, aesthetic,
and phantasmic economies?6
In the summer of 1983, Gayatri Spivak presented a paper at the University of
Illinois that issued a clarion call and a critique to scholars of postcolonial theory in the
form of a question: Can the subaltern speak? By exposing the positivist desires latent in
the endeavor to discover or recover a subaltern voice or subjectivity, Spivaks paper set
the terms of engagement for much of postcolonial theory over the past three decades. I
gesture towards Spivak from the outset because we still very much live within the realm
of the problem space that she opened up the problem of the permission to narrate.7 But I
also begin with Spivak in order to depart from her, to follow her line of questioning away
from the strictly textual realm and towards the sonic, which her titular question gestures
towards yet never completely reaches, remaining entrenched in the social text as written
text. According to Spivak, The subaltern cannot speak.8 Yet if we move in the other
direction, away from the question of speech and enunciation, we might ask of ourselves:
5 Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness(Cambridge, MA and
London: The MIT Press, 2007), 29.
6 Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in
Multicultural America(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 4.
7 Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman(New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 79.
8 Ibid., 104.

Can the postcolonialist listen? What forms of address, audibility, and aurality might open
up if listening is not bound to hearing, understanding, to making sense?9 This is a
question of how to be in the world, how to orient oneself in relation to sounds, music,
texts, speech, images, and bodies as much as it is a question of methodology and
theoretical alignments.
Pursuing the object of sound, as Rey Chow and James Steintrager remind us,
requires work in order to gather and make cohere what is inherently diffuse. Thus
subjectivity is involved whenever we try to draw some boundary in the sonic domain.10
In recent years, sound has emerged as an increasingly important category of analysis
across a range of disciplines, marking a shift from the regime and primacy of vision,
associated with reason and rationality versus sounds ephemerality, contingency, and
subjectivity.11 In contrast to images, as Chow and Steintrager elaborate, sound does not
appear to stand before us, discrete and apprehensible, but rather to come to or at us
we sense it as a space-filling emanation regardless of our ability to identify its source.12
In Baucoms book I see a bifurcated entanglement with, on the one hand, the
Drexciya project itself and, on the other, its afterlife in critical and artistic practice. The
first path of entanglement concerns the historicization of Drexciya, which I track
primarily through the writing and work of Kodwo Eshun, who has written about Drexciya
prolifically and prominently, and who, along with Anjalika Sagar, forms one half of The
Otolith Group. In the 1990s, Eshuns discussions of Drexciya primarily focused on its
militancy, as in my earlier invocation of Eshuns term esoterrorism, and its
technological rerouting of the outcomes of transatlantic slavery. In 2010, the release of
The Otolith Groups Hydra Decapita, an essay-film exploring the Drexciya myth, marked
a shift in Eshuns thinking. In an interview with Derek Walmsey for The Wire in
November 2010, Eshun said, When we first started thinking about Drexciya back in the
1990s, Drexciya was related very much to a question of mutation and a question of the
post-human. But, he continued, in the present it was very much bound up with what we
would call the Atlantic cycles of capital accumulation, a phrase he takes from Baucom.
So, Eshun concluded, it was very much bound up by the relations between finance and
death.13
Continuing this turn from the militancy of the posthuman towards spectrality, haunting,
and death, Eshuns 2013 essay for The Studio Museum in Harlems exhibition catalogue
The Shadows Took Shape was entitled Stealing Ones Own Corpse: Afrofuturism as a
Speculative Heresy. He writes that what Afrofuturism does is articulate the suspicion
9 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell(New York: Fordham
University Press, 2007).
10 Rey Chow and James A. Steinstrager, "In Pursuit of the Object of Sound: An
Introduction," differences 22, no. 2-3 (2011): 2.
11 Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, "Introduction," in Sound Clash: Listening to American
Studies, ed. Kara Keeling and Josh Kun(Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2012), 2.
12 Chow and Steinstrager, "In Pursuit of the Object of Sound: An Introduction," 2.
13 Derek Walmsey, "Cross Platform the Otolith Group," The Wire, no. 321 (November
2010): 29.

with which many contemporary artists regard the immediacy of Africanity, as well as
their skepticism toward all other certainties that support themselves on the foundation of
this belief in the visibility of the image.14 What is critical to question, according to
Eshun, is the inherent progressivism of Afrofuturism as an artistic practice. With the
adoption of optimism as the form of the capitalisms market projection, despair and
affirmation surrounding Africa and its prospects are practices of predatory
Afrofuturism.15
What if we begin without preemptively joining the critics who have described it
as belonging to a post-soul, Afrofuturist, or posthuman aesthetic practice? Which is not to
jettison these terms in the name of formalism, but to attempt to understand the ways in
which Drexciya may be Afrofuturist but, or posthuman and and in a close reading from
the ground up, what emerges may itself change or mark the boundaries of those contested
practices of naming.
In Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of
History, Ian Baucom traces via an exegesis of the Zong case of 1781 the ways in which
allegory as abstract signification analogous to the economic value that capitalism
confers on the commodity is not the literary effect or merely even the literary
counterpart of full-blown commodity capitalism. It is, rather, an epistemological
condition of possibility: a mode of representation which enables and clears the ground for
a form of capital which is an intensification and a wider practice of it.16
Jamesons questions point to what may, in simplistic terms, be deemed the gap between
aesthetics and reality, between representation as re-presentation in art or literature and
representation as a form of political delegation
I begin with Sinker and Drexciya in order to signal my own investment in a set of
entanglements, situated in between histories of African-American and electronic music
(with its mostly male interlocutors and practitioners), sound studies, and the stakes of the
term Afrofuturism, in which Drexciya has become an important milestone.17

14 Kodwo Eshun, "Stealing One's Own Corpse: Afrofuturism as a Speculative Heresy,"

in The Shadows Took Shape, ed. Naima J. Keith and Zo Whitley(New York: The Studio
Museum in Harlem, 2013), 117.
15 Ibid., 119.
16 Ibid., 21.
17 Afrofuturism was coined by Mark Dery in 1994, and in recent years its increasing ubiquity has been
accompanied by, I assert, an uncertainty about its critical purchase. Derys coining was really a
retrospective act of naming, for questions about the intersections of blackness, technology, and science
fiction had been already been circulating via figures like Sun Ra and Amiri Baraka in the mid-20 th century.
In his essay Black to the Future Dery described Afrofuturism as: Speculative fiction that treats AfricanAmerican themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century
technocultureand more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology
and a prosthetically enhanced future. [Published in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1994)]

In Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson argues that utopia has always been a
political issue in imagining a system radically different from reality.18 For Jameson,
utopia is fundamentally ambivalent. He asks, how works that posit the end of history can
offer any usable historical impulses, how works which aim to resolve all political
differences can continue to be in any sense political, and how texts designed to
overcome the needs of the body can remain materialistic.19 This gap between aesthetics
and politics is also a temporal one: How can the representation of a world that does not
yet exist be useful in getting us from here to there?20
I argue for understanding the Drexciya project as, in Ian Baucoms words, an
epistemological condition of possibility, a mode of representation which enables and
clears the ground for a form of practice.21 Aesthetic form is thus not just a reflection of
existing politics, but oriented towards the future, allowing what does not yet exist to
become sensible in the present. As Jameson suggests, utopias are perhaps fundamentally
negative, lingering in the proleptic not yet rather than offering a clear blueprint for the
future. Yet Drexciyas futurism is not an alternative to the present that lies in the future.
Drexciyas shift from Detroit-based to British and later German labels points to the ways in which what
has come be identified as first and second-wave Detroit techno has always been migratory. In part due to
the inherent portability of the record, this migration also has to do with the distinct history of electronic
music and its international (largely cosmopolitan) sites of production and consumption. The most canonical
historian of this has been Simon Reynolds, whose 1998 book Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave
Music and Dance Culture (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press) traced what he terms rave culture between
Detroit, Chicago, New York and Europe.

Their world is a contemporaneous one: Do [Drexciyans] walk among us? Are they more
advanced than us and why do they make their strange music?22
Thus Amiri Baraka writes, There was no communication between master and
slave on any strictly human level, but only the relation one might have to a piece of
18 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions(London and New York: Verso, 2005), xi.
19 Ibid., xiv.
20 Simon Reynolds has suggested that electronic music and the sub-cultures that form around it have the
potential to resolve this tension via the dance floor and the underground club, which inhabits spaces
abandoned by capitalism in order to allow a bodily experience of an un-alienated form of collective
expression. From this perspective, the utopian impulse of music is materialized and made real through the
ways people choose to use and collectively organize around it. I do not dismiss the notion that the
underground club is a space where the very idea of consumption can be transformed from commodity
fetishization to something else, but I stop short of concluding that this something else of the underground
club is the materialization of utopia. Analysis of the sites of consumption of electronic music is indeed
important to understanding its form. I will not endeavor to do so here, for by stalling utopias
materialization, by not following the music to the club but remaining with it as an ambivalent object, I seek
to complicate our understanding of the desire for utopia itself.
21 Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History(Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 21.Baucom enlists the notion of an epistemological condition of
possibility in order to reconcile the anachronism between the prevalence of allegory as literary form in the
seventeenth century and the later nineteenth century dominance of capitalism.

22 "Drexciya -- the Quest".

property if you twist the knob on the radio you expect it to play.23 What does it mean
to be an object? The history of blackness, as Fred Moten puts it, is testament to the fact
that objects can and do resist.24
Rather than continuities, retentions, genealogies or inheritances, Sonic Futurism
operates through interval, gaps, breaks It turns away from roots; it opposes common
sense with the force of the fictional and the power of falsity.25
If the black body was a commodity, its value as a body laid in its wholeness and
soundness. The pregnant black female body, sick and disruptive, was thus unsound,
incapable of delivering a return on the investment. Paradoxically, the very state
engendered by her captors rendered her body useless to them.
//Weheliye does not explicitly name but gestures towards. Thus in an essay on
Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age, Ben Williams
critiques Paul Gilroys The Black Atlantic for continuing only as far as hip hop, which
limits Gilroy to chiding hip hop for betraying its own radicalism and falling back on a
rhetoric of racial essence.26
Reading Eshun with Weheliye reveals a commonality both see the intersection
of technology and music as allowing not an excision of the human body, but a
transmutation (for Eshun an intensification) of human embodiment. A subtle difference
emerges in their arguments, though, for Eshun proffers the Technics SL 1200 a
hallmark turntable released in the 1970s and widely used by DJs as the medium of
bodily transformation while Weheliye points to the humans resounding through styles of
technological folding. While Weheliyes formulation foregrounds the social and the
dialogical, understanding the practice of DJing as transmuting a personal sonic
temporality into a social one,27 Eshuns formulation emphasizes instead the objectness of
the object itself, the very naming of the Technics SL 1200 signaling its status as a massproduced piece of industrial equipment for music that itself has abandoned nostalgia for
soul.
In chapters that address Adam Smiths The Theory of Moral Sentiments and
J.M.W. Turners 1840 painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying,
Typhoon Coming On (known as The Slave Ship), Baucom outlines the mechanism of
Self-Imagination-Spectacle that inaugurates, via appeals to sympathy and sentiment, a
liberal cosmopolitan spectator whose mode of witnessing is that of speculative
enrichment, who does not so much displace itself in order to take on the position of an
other, but ensures a proper return on its risk via the modulation of interestedness and
23 Amiri Baraka, Blues People(New York: William Morrow and Co., 1963), 3.
24 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition(Minneapolis,
MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1.
25 Ibid., 3.
26 Ben Williams, "Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age," in
Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, ed. Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu,
and Alicia Headlam Hines(New York and London: New York University Press, 2001),
70-1.
27 Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, 91.

disinterestedness.28 In this mode of apprehension and perception, the historical can be

accessed only at a spectatorial remove that the imagination does not so much bridge as
create.29 In a re-reading of the Kantian sublime, Baucom sees in the spectators
encounter with the sublime the overwhelming, the terrifying, the traumatic not a
particular or singular event but the engendering of a mode of awareness that allows it to
emerge ethically enriched by its speculative consumption of the spectacle of abstract
historicity.30 Having become aware of their own capacity to recognize the suffering of
others, the liberal community can recognize its shared humanity and political sovereignty.
Baucoms work approaches the Zong case and systems of transatlantic slavery not
as exceptions in the history of modernism, but as the alluvial bed of modernity.31 The
disinterested spectator the structures of feeling that mobilize him and the practices of
witnessing commanded of him that Baucom describes by way of Smith and Turner
remain, he insists, with us today:
Indeed, if there can be said to be a visual scene here, it would be the infamous black and
white poster that circulated on the Underground Resistance website before disappearing
now appearing only on popular social media image-hosting sites of an empty stretch of
sidewalk at the intersection of Waterman Street and West Jefferson Avenue in Detroit,
populated by overgrown weeds, and facing the boarded-up windows of the former
Ramsey Bar.
Understanding Drexciya by way of Baucoms insights, then, necessitates attending to its
representation of slavery representation understood here not just as a mode of picturing
or depicting, but as a kind of aesthetic labor encompassing Stinson and Donalds elective
affinity with Underground Resistance, their choices as artistic agents, and the sonic,
visual and textual material that made up their record releases. In Baucoms work I find a
promising conceptual and theoretical model for working out just what kind of historical
witness Drexciyas labor was simultaneously addressing and constructing as part of the
enduring duration of slavery that Baucom insists on. //

28 Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of
History, 249.
29 Ibid., 250.
30 Ibid., 252.
31 Ibid., 318.