Since the beginnings of transatlantic slavery, utopian visions have been central to the construction of alternative destinies for the African diaspora. With the rise of modernity, black intellectuals and artists began to envision advanced technological societies in which black populations would be liberated from the myths that had perpetuated their subjection throughout colonial history. Afro-futurism is paradigmatic of this utopian thinking. One of the leading figures within the Afro-futurist tradition was American jazz musician Sun Ra who proposed the recently explored frontier of space as the site from which to escape the limitations of earth and create a black separatist society. Central to Sun Ra’s philosophy was music: music transcended earthly time and could be harnessed as a form of teleportation. Not only this but music functioned as a dialect outside of the colonial languages that perpetuate black oppression. Sun Ra’s astral vision was beyond the bounds of possibility, but he was less concerned with the unachievable and more concerned with the utopian potential that already existed within music. 

Part of my theory involves expanding the temporal boundaries that contain Afro-futurism. I begin with Sun Ra because his work offers the clearest example of how culture can be harnessed as a utopian force. His philosophy involves several threads that are all central to my thesis; firstly, the creative recuperation of past civilisations through new cultural mediums, secondly, the deconstruction of racist mythology that has been perpetuated since the beginnings of slavery. Lastly, and most importantly, he exemplifies the use of culture and the arts to create codified forms of communication that incorporate non-semantic meaning. I place Sun Ra at the end of a long tradition. The aforementioned elements of his work have been used by African-Americans since the beginnings of slavery to project utopian visions, Sun Ra’s work is arguably the product of these ideas converging with modern technology. I am elucidating my theory by tracing examples of culture and the arts spanning from the beginnings of transatlantic slavery up to the present day. I have taken examples from a variety of mediums including music, dance, literature and even conjuring, all of which contain the aforementioned threads and in some way seek to redress the fragmentation implicit within the diaspora. 

While much of this thesis, in its progression, will uncover the extent to which the myth has shaped the African experience, it is necessary to clarify at this point – before the concept has been elaborated to its denouncement- what I am suggesting when I refer to the myth. Racist mythologies were constructed and perpetuated to justify the enslavement and subjugation of black populations. W.E.B Du Bois’ essay Of Our Spiritual Strivings argued that the historical struggle of the African-American man is the struggle to attain his self-consciousness, to integrate his ancestral associations with his colonial displacement and reconcile his dual identity. Throughout the twentieth-century Black intellectuals and artists began to deconstruct myths as part of a drive toward solidarity and consciousness raising. However, even before the twentieth century, African-Americans had been recovering aspects of African culture as a means of reconciling themselves with a heritage that had been fragmented by the middle passage. The middle passage is something I consider further, however, it is necessary to state that it simultaneously represents the physical transportation of slaves between the African continent and the Americas, and in a more abstract sense the loss of culture, tradition, and identity that was inherent in this physical displacement. 

It would be near impossible to create a narrative that locates every utopian form of communication used by the African diaspora since the beginnings of slavery as the diaspora has vast geographical, historical and societal complexity. My argument itself is founded on a subjective and broad understanding of the terms Afro-futurism, utopia and even communication. It should also be acknowledged that the majority of my sources – such as George James’s Stolen Legacy – can be considered particularly subjective interpretations of history. However, I seek to map a selection of examples, all of which can be considered relatively disparate, but all of which are linked through their deconstruction of the myth, and their utopian potential. It is also important to note that all of these cultural products are connected by their inability to be made artefact. As western history is a long narrative of appropriating and making artefact the products of African Culture, all of the examples I consider possess hidden functions and are codified forms of communication that make them resistant to repossession or appropriation. I am dealing with cultural expressions that have the dual function of recovering a cultural inheritance that was breached by the middle passage whilst offering a new collective identity to those whose identity was fragmented by the displacement of their ancestors. 

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The first chapter of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, titled ‘The Open Boat’ (8), portrays the middle passage as an ‘abyss’, one that consumes all traces of culture and identity from its passengers so that ‘the-land-beyond’ becomes ‘the-land-in-itself’ and native languages become obsolete. Within African tradition, culture and experience were transmitted orally as opposed to documented through written record, thus the middle passage – which systematically separated tribes – resulted in a fragmentation in oral culture and a loss of tradition. The dislocation between the individual and the past, accompanied by the inaccessibility of education, meant that slaves were isolated by the obstacle of language. However, oral culture pervaded and took new forms; the blues became a cultural remnant of life prior to the middle passage, whilst simultaneously being an expression of life in the new land. Blues music is intrinsically associated with its emotive capacity, the blues scale an embodiment of the sombre and tragic context of its birth, however, as a musical genre it is also immensely functional. There are two communicative elements implicit in the blues, firstly that of its instrumentals and secondly the collective nature of its vocals. It would be difficult to articulate every way in which the instrumentals of the blues function, particularly as such topics have had whole books dedicated to them – for example Ben Sidran’s Black Talk –however, for the sake of argument there are some fundamental examples that assist in understanding the genres linguistic elements. Slave masters were often confounded by the irregularity of the blues, its tones and rhythms appeared entirely foreign – in written records it is described as ‘rude and uncultivated’ (Oakley 19). However, blues instrumentals through their irregularity were replicating the ontology of verbal communication. Ben Sidran (6) described how the timbre – which pertains the characteristics of tone and sound – is constantly changing within the blues which allows ‘semantic value’ to be given to ‘tonal significance’. Blues rhythms and tones essentially imitate speech. African drumming was central to the early development of blues and existed as a more direct means of communication. Drumming patterns were by no means a standardised form of Morse code, but rather a means of communicating that involved the phonetic reproduction of words. Techniques became advanced to the point where plantation owners in Mississippi came to ban the use of drums for fear that they could be harnessed as a means of organising revolt. The middle passage did not entirely eradicate oral culture, but rather forced it to become codified within the instrumentals of the blues. 

The functional and emotive natures of the blues intertwine. Arguably, the primary aim of slave music was not to create a language with which to incite revolution, but rather to liberate the individual from a feeling of isolation, its utopian element lay in its unifying capabilities. The vocal component of the blues was a far less codified form of communication however its complexities made it almost uninterpretable to slave owners and personal to its creators. Amiri Baraka described blues singing as a narrative that told of the slave experience. Where instruments were not always accessible, singing could be taken anywhere and work songs were often encouraged on plantations as a means of increasing productivity. There are certain complexities within blues singing that made it culturally specific to the dual identity of African-American slaves. The communal chanting of both work songs and spirituals – the two primary forms of early blues singing – meant that there was no distinction between performer and audience, the songs structures renounced hierarchy and instead focused on the collective. And yet, Sidran (14) noted that, as the blues developed, cries and ‘personal sounds’ became integrated into the collective, allowing for individual expression within the group. In a situation where individuality was supressed and people were reduced to their labour capacity, blues singing offered solidarity as well as a space with which to reconnect with one’s own identity. While spirituals were tied to their Christian origin – a religion that had been enforced on slave populations – they represented a form of open protest and a means of consciousness raising in the guise of assimilation into Western culture. Considering some lines from the popular spiritual ‘Steal Away’ it can be noted how invocations of freedom are enveloped within biblical illusions; 

Steal away to Jesus?

Steal away, steal away home! 

I ain’t got long to stay here! 

(Tubman)

For second generation slaves the notion of ‘home’ would not have been a lived reality, however, spirituals became a means of continuing the tradition of oral history so that the fictional memory of home offered slaves a sense of identity. The concepts of freedom and home that were so prevalent within the blues were more than anything utopian ideals that reconstructed the fractured identity of first and second generation slaves. Blues in itself re-established a culture that had been lost in the abyss of the middle passage and used it to communicate the collective desire to return back to Africa.  

Jazz was born out of the blues, and it carried into a new age the same codified non-semantic meanings that had been rooted in its predecessor. What separated Jazz from the blues was its reception, it had a certain palatability that led the genre to be adopted by white middle class America. It was popularised and integrated into Western cultural but, just as slave masters had been ignorant to the alternative function of the work song, Jazz retained a primitive purpose outside of its enjoyment by white northern Americans. Amiri Baraka’s[1]exploration into Jazz, Black Music, described how the origins and meanings of the genre were a ‘secret’ to its western audience, ‘in much the same sense that the actual life of the black man in America was secret to the white American’ (13). Integral to the covert function of Jazz is improvisation, which took its origins in the call and response nature of blues songs. Traditional work songs would often involve the proposition of a question that would be met by a response from the collective, for example I reference these lines taken from the work song Hoe, Emma Hoe:

Caller: Master he be a hard hard man.

Chorus: Hoe Emma Hoe, Hoe Emma Hoe.

Caller: Sell my people away from me.

Chorus: Hoe Emma Hoe, Hoe Emma Hoe.  

(Slave Work Songs)

While work songs had more of an intrinsic structure to follow, call and response became far more fluid within Jazz. Paul Gilroy (79) used the term antiphony to describe the responsive nature of jazz music, which had a ‘democratic, communitarian moment enshrined’ (79) within it. Essentially, the improvisation of the Jazz collective has the dual function of, firstly, embedding the individual within the collective, and thus reconciling the identity of the ‘once fractured, incomplete, and unfinished racial self’, and secondly, offering a space with which the individual can flourish (79). In the same way personal calls were integrated into the blues, individuality had its place within the collaborative nature of Jazz. As a linguistic metaphor, improvisation gives an uncertainty as to what will come next, which replicates the ontological nature of conversation. The jazz collective provides the black musician with a platform from which to exercise his metaphorical voice, a voice he is denied within the White American society that subjugates him. Within the dynamics of Jazz exists the utopian projection of a world where the voice of the African-American has legitimacy. 

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In the Reconstruction era, the immediate legacy of slavery created a situation where diaspora populations continued to be hegomonized by the myths that had warranted their capture. With limited access to formal education, literacy remained a barrier to the advancement of African-Americans within social and economic society. The African-American vernacular had its origins in first generation slaves’ struggles to adopt a new language after their transportation to the Americas. The vernacular was also influenced by the fact that native African languages had aimed for ‘circumlocution rather than exact definition’ (Sidran, p.6). Where the rearrangement of sentences and shortening of words had signified imagination and creative capacity within African traditions, white colonisers mythologised the vernacular as characteristic of the inherent childishness and incapability’s of the African-American. The short stories of Charles Chesnutt are predominantly concerned with this Reconstruction era of Southern American history. It is important to acknowledge that Chesnutt was among those select few black writers that by the late nineteenth century had propelled their work into the highbrow culture of white America. He was a pioneer in the way his work openly concerned itself with the race question, reconciling the past, present and future of the African-American experience, but doing so in an age where his readership was primarily white. Returning briefly back to Amiri Baraka’s text Black Music(11), he had noted in his introduction that ‘jazz was collected among the numerous skeletons the middleclass black man kept locked in the closet of his psyche’, the educated African-American was often quick to reject elements of black culture that had become characteristic of his race. Jazz synonymized a blackness he sought to detach himself from. Similarly, the vernacular would have been scorned by the literate African-American, who had internalized the myth that it signified underdevelopment. Charles Chesnutt sought to reclaim the vernacular from the colonial myth that had defiled it, and reinstate it within the African oral tradition of story telling. Many of his short stories, for example The Goophered Grapevine and Po Sandy,interchange between the eloquent syntax of the narrator and the vernacular of the ex-slave figures that characterise his southern settings. Taking some lines from the vernacular of The Goophered Grapevine it can be seen how the presentation of the syntax appears as an almost foreign language: ‘dey said ‘Hoddy’ en Mars Dugal’ ax ‘im ter hab a seegyar; en atter dey run on awhile ‘bout de craps en de weather’ (Chesnutt 8). By transcribing the vernacular into the literary, Chesnutt conveys a sense of the complexity and intricacy implicit in its diction, the reader gains an immense satisfaction from growing accustomed to the way it reads, that parallels a sort of mastery of a new language. The vernacular within Chesnutt becomes a second language that travelled from slavery into the reconstruction era and was passed on generationally. The vernacular comes to replicate the oral traditions that were lost in the middle passage, and codifies in language the struggle of the first slaves arriving in the new land. 

Chesnutt’s stories are not not merely an example of the vernacular; existing within the plantation tale tradition, they also persistently reference ideas of conjuring and witchcraft. Conjuring, as it is understood today, is an umbrella term for a wider set of folk beliefs and practices that originated in West Africa. However, Chireau (226) described the prevalence of conjuring in the Americas as the ‘incomplete Christianization of black Americans that began in slavery’. It was a means of covertly maintaining a sense of African spirituality and identity where assimilation into Christianity had been enforced. Within Chesnutt’s work conjuring has a distinctly utopian function in that it offers the possibility of escape from slavery. The frame narrative of Po Sandy employs the ex-slave figure of Julius McAdoo as a means of relating memories from the plantation days. The conjure woman, Tenie, in an attempt to prevent her husband Sandy’s transfer to a new plantation, offers to transform him into another form of natural being. At one point the narrator details how ‘she made up her mine fer to fix up a goopher mixtry w’at would turn herself en sady ter foxes, er sump’n, so dey could run away en go some’re whar dey could be free en lib lack w’ite folks’ (Chesnutt 16). ‘Goopher’ is used frequently within Chesnutt to refer to the practice of magic. While the tale’s conclusion ends in the death of both Tenie and Sandy, it still demonstrates how conjuring functioned as a utopian system. Where slaves lacked any control over their situation – for example Sandy’s forced transfer between plantations – conjure represented a form of control over the natural and spiritual world. Du Bois (104) attributed to the conjurer a plurality of functions including: ‘healer of the sick, the interpreter of the unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of the wrong’. The existence of such powerful beings offered utopian promise to those slaves who chose to believe in the practice. 

Conjuring was not exclusively a prospect of liberation, as with everything I have previously discussed it had covert as well as overt functions. Paul Easterling (‘Conjure’ 2019) traced conjuring back to a ‘variety of belief systems indigenous to the continent of Africa’, it was a more explicit example of African culture that had been transplanted by diaspora populations into the Americas. In the New World conjuring acted far less as a formal belief system and more so as a means of maintaining an element of one’s native spirituality. Slaves would be subjected to violence if they refused to assimilate into western culture, any remnants of native language, cultural practices, or religion were banned as they challenged the myth that African peoples had been an uncultivated race prior to their capture. Chireau asserted that conjuring traditions were able to survive for generations in the Americas, I argue that this was a result of its ability to be codified within daily life. Practices took shape as commonplace activities; ‘goopher’ could involve dancing, singing, spell making and or the employment of household objects. Conjuring to the white slave holder existed more as an abstract concept than something that could be rooted out and prohibited. Easterling (‘Conjure’ 2019) described it explicitly as a ‘method of communication’ that employed ‘symbols and symbolic phenomena to interpret, understand and shape the physical and spiritual world’. Rituals and practices were codified within quotidian events, and yet to diaspora populations conjuring practices represented a remnant of a native culture that had survived the transatlantic and found a new soil and purpose within the slave plantations of America. 

Magical practices constitute a long tradition in African culture that can be traced back as far as Ancient Egypt. It is at this point that I want to establish George James’s 1954 text Stolen Legacy, as central to understanding how the cultural revival of Ancient Egypt – a sight of advanced civilisation – become a progressive force for the African diaspora. James’s argument contended the notion that civilisation emerged originally in Ancient Greece and Rome, but rather that the schools of Western Antiquity appropriated much of their knowledge and philosophy from the kingdoms of North Africa. James in the mid 20thcentury believed his findings would put an end to the ‘perpetual caricature of the African culture in literature and exhibitions’ (110), he simultaneously believed that ‘the pendulum of praise and honour’ was ‘due to shift’ (108), which would in turn liberate African descendants from their inferior social status. I contest that James had been overly optimistic and had failed to account for the extent to which these myths had been institutionalised. However, I believe the central aim of Stolen Legacy was really to liberate black populations from the myths that they had internalised within themselves, creating internal rather than external change – these are ideas I develop on later. Returning to my original point, that magical practices had held a significant place within Ancient Egyptian society, I consider James’ descriptions of the Egyptian Mysteries System as an early example of codified languages. 

I want to state here that I do not believe any of the previous cultural cases I have given have any direct correlation with the communicative methods used by the Ancient Egyptians. Ancient Egypt functions as a direct reference point onlywithin the twentieth century examples I come to discuss. However, the mysteries system provides a clear example of how clandestine languages have functioned within African history. The Mysteries acted as a belief system as well as the center point of culture within the ancient kingdoms as it was believed that the individual achieved salvation ‘through the cultivation of the Arts and sciences’ (James 24). Ancient Priests existed as mediators between the people and the gods and James (96) dedicates a section of his text to describe how the education of the priests was codified within ‘secret systems of languages…mathematical symbolism’ and ‘magic’. Stolen Legacy details the two primary forms of language that existed within the ancient world, firstly that of the demotic, which was spoken by all citizens regardless of status or wealth, and secondly, the hieroglyphics which constituted a written format and was exclusively used by Priests in order to ‘conceal the secret and mystical meaning of their doctrines’ (James 97). James also relates how alongside hieroglyphics, Priests practiced a spoken language, Senzar, which could only be mastered by those who had been initiated into the spiritual role. Within the world of Ancient Egypt these enigmatic languages functioned to maintain the sacredness of the Priests. In a similar sense the codification of language and meaning by the diaspora becomes a way of preserving a sacred African heritage that is under constant threat of eradication in the Western world. 

As discussed above, the Ancient Egyptians intertwined the spheres of culture and spirituality, for them music represented a fundamental practice that united human life with the spiritual realms. I want to briefly touch on how music functioned in a similar way for the African diaspora in the aftermath of slavery, to do so I turn to African-American Novelist Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. The text concerns itself with the ex-slave characters’ attempts to reconcile themselves with the immediate legacy of slavery, in particular the legacy that lived within memory. Morrison’s central character, Sethe, is haunted by the spiritual embodiment of her daughter, who she had murdered during her years in captivity as a means of protecting the child from the hands of the slave master. The text addresses the inhumanity and barbarism implicit in slave holding whilst simultaneously considering the trauma of experience that ex-slaves faced post emancipation. In her foreword Morrison (xiii) relates how ‘the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive’. While there exists a plethora of critical theory concerned with the interconnecting themes at work within Beloved, my interest lies in the texts presentation of spirituality and the collective, both of which present utopian potential in the way they act to reconcile the traumas of the past within the present. Sethe in her isolation is increasingly weakened by the figure of Beloved, the incarnation of her most regrettable and harrowing memory from her life in captivity. It takes the actions of the collective – the black village women of the Cincinnati – to cast out the spirit of Beloved that haunts Sethe. Music, just as it had been used by the Ancient Egyptians to connect with the realm of the spirits, is employed by the village women as a method of conjuring. Morrison (308) relates how through the act of singing the‘women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of the words. Building voice upon voice until they found it’. Music within this instance has a plurality of functions: firstly, it acts to reconcile the isolated individual with the group, offering a source of support necessary to expel the living memories of the past. Secondly, music functions as a form of communication between both the spiritual realm and the conjurers themselves. The women use their voices systematically in order to create the ‘key’ that will free Sethe. Morrison (305) recollects how ‘In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like’. Singing exists as a native language that transcends geographical and temporal boundaries. While slavery displaced individuals from their own communities, community structures could remerge through the universality of music. Morrison presents singing and rituals as a means of maintaining community structure and providing solidarity even in the aftermath of emancipation. 

While Toni Morrison’s narratives are founded in fiction, like Chesnutt, she sought to reveal truths about the black experience. However, unlike Chesnutt, Morrison was not producing content for a predominantly white readership; she was working within a new age where black authors began to write for the sole purpose of their own liberation. Amiri Baraka has been referenced throughout this work, in fact, Baraka has played an integral role in my theory for both his research into diaspora music, and his founding of the twentieth century Black Arts Movement. The Black Arts Movement was established in Harlem in 1965 and represented an active, political attempt at deconstructing racist mythology and unifying black artists into a separate cultural collective. Baraka (xviii), in his Anthology of the arts, Black Fire, articulated his aims, including; the creation of work that was ‘black by form and content’ and the orientation of these arts in order to make them claimable ‘by the black community as part of a cultural revolution’. Both Baraka and Morrison believed music to be the pinnacle of African-American culture, this was due to its ability to be decontextualized and still manifest a distinctly black essence.  The aim of the Black Arts Movement was to replicate the functions of African-American music within other mediums, particularly literature. Morrison articulated that ‘if it was truly black literature it would not be black because I was… It would be something intrinsic, indigenous something in the way it was put together’, her professed aim was to integrate the ‘texture’ of the blues and Jazz into her writing; I want to consider one of the many ways in which she achieves this (Gilroy 76). In the spirit of Chesnutt, she frequently employed the African vernacular, however, she purposefully adapted it to make it more readable, and less a replication of its physical pronunciation. The Vernacular within Beloved functions by omitting, reordering and misusing words rather than misspelling them, for example ex-slave figure Baby Suggs announces; ‘Suggs is what my husband name’ (Morrison 167). Morrison wanted to capture the vernacular in a way that was ‘not as illiterate but powerful’ (Jaggi 2003), the language of the vernacular is not only preserved but reimagined. By seamlessly integrating vernacular speech within the formal body of the text, she refutes the myth that it symbolizes illiteracy and establishes it both as an expression of identity, and as an ‘indigenous’ part of black culture. 

I consider Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Movement (BAM) to be emblematic of a shift that can be placed around the mid-century, in which the cultural practices of the diaspora developed a more overt utopian and revolutionary potential. Since the beginnings of transatlantic slavery, diaspora populations had worked to reclaim elements of a native identity that had been lost within the ‘abyss’ (Glissant 8) and reconstruct those fragments into cultural forms specific to the African-American identity. In the mid-twentieth century, as the civil rights movement and black power sentiments gained momentum, Baraka’s movement sought to deconstruct racial mythologies and harness the arts for the purpose of consciousness raising. Published just prior to the formation of BAM, Frantz Fanon’s text, Black Skin White Masks, elaborates on the idea of the myth as a tool of racial subjugation. Fanon (83) as a black man in white society described himself as ‘fixed’, he existed as a ‘triple person’, responsible for his ‘body’, his ‘race’ and his ‘ancestors’, in this sense the black individual cannot escape the colonial narrative that has imposed upon them a static identity. Fanon (13) terms this fixed identity ‘jungle status’ an idea that is unraveled perfectly within Morrison’s Beloved: ‘white people believed that…under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood’ (Morrison 234). The myth of an uncultivated, savage race that was perpetuated by white colonisers in their justification of slavery, still hangs above the heads of the African diaspora. Baraka’s own poetry sought to deconstruct the myth by writing of its existence and refuting its legitimacy. Within An Agony. As Now. he professed ‘I am inside someone/ who hates me. I look/ out from his eyes’, addressing his own previous internalisation of racial myths (The Dead Lecturer 1964). With the same hand he wrote the poem Ka’Ba detailing the rich cultural products that have come from ‘African imaginations/ full of masks and dances and swelling chants’, he repudiates his ‘jungle status’ by evoking images of a cultural heritage that dispels the myth of an uncultivated African race (Amiri BarakaOnline Poems).Baraka presented the black arts as the remedy with which to reconcile one’s identity, an identity that had been made plural by a systematic racist mythology. I propose that whilst the literature and poetry of BAM employed colonial language, it mirrored itself on the the texture of the blues and jazz in order to create cultural products that were codified by a black essence and exclusive to the plight of diaspora communities. 

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Moving forward, I want to consider ways in which non-semantic languages developed within entirely new cultural forms in the latter half of the twentieth century, specifically within the dance form Voguing, which emerged from the Harlem ball scene of the 1980s. Just as Jazz had been adopted by white audiences in the 1920’s, Voguing became integrated into mainstream culture after it was popularised by white American singer, Madonna, in her 1990 song Vogue. Prior to the songs release the dance form had received publicity from its feature within Jennie Livingston’s 1989 documentary Paris is Burning, that had brought the ball circuit to the attention of a wider audience. Before I digress into an analysis of Voguing I want to consider its existence within the wider sphere of Harlem drag culture. Within the documentary the ball scene itself has an implicit utopianism, providing its black, queer attendants a place where ‘you can become anything and do anything, right here, right now. It wont be questioned’ (Paris is Burning 43:21). While much of the behavior exhibited within the documentary represents individual desires to assimilate into white, heterosexual, upper class American society, the world of the ball scene above all else functions as a microcosm of a utopian society, where individuals are granted unlimited freedom of expression, and hierarchy is determined not by sexual or racial identity but by creative output. Attending a ball is ‘like crossing into the looking glass, into wonderland, you go there and you feel 100% right’, the drag ball offers its participants a sense of belonging that is not accessible within white middle class America (Paris is Burning 4:08). The utopian society of the Ball scene comes complete with its own colloquial terminology, which becomes part of a codified language, personal to its members. Voguing itself is an example of this terminology and can only be defined through its association to other terms, in particular, ‘shade’ which is a form of insult based on implication rather than direct address. The inventor of Voguing, Willi Ninja, described the dance as a physical non-semantic form of shade in which individuals converse with each other through a structured sometimes ‘pantomime’ style of movement (Paris is Burning 36:35). Ninja noted that the dance styled itself on the ‘hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt’ which relates to my earlier point that black cultural forms often distinguished themselves by referencing Ancient Egyptian society as emblematic of an African heritage (Paris is Burning 38:38). Voguing also mirrored Hieroglyphics as a cryptic mode of communication, exclusive to those involved. Creativity, for the marginalised, became ‘retaliation, an act not only of agency but of glorious ownership of self’ (Schweitzer 245) and the Ball scene functioned as a safe, utopian, environment for these non-semantic and semantic expressions of identity to flourish. 

Sun Ra had been creating avant-garde forms of jazz as early as the 1930s but he continued to develop his philosophy throughout the second half of the twentieth-century and create a legacy that would be carried on after his death through his musical collective The Arkestra. I chose to return to Sun Ra’s work in an attempt to coherently collate all of my aforementioned threads of thought. As stated in my introduction, Sun Ra’s work offers the clearest example of cultural expression functioning as both a codified language and a utopian force, whilst referencing an ancient African heritage. In effect, Sun Ra’s work is a highly developed attempt at rectifying the fragmentation of the African diaspora. He simultaneously offers the hope of a future where black populations can escape oppressive realities that have been codified within colonial history. To make simpler, Sun Ra suggests that the legacy of transatlantic slavery will continue to limit African-Americans until they remove themselves from its narrative and exist outside of the confines of history. 

Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka had considered music the highest form of black culture, Sun Ra elevated it and made it his solution to oppression. Just as the blues and Jazz had transcended the temporal by structuring themselves around improvisation and an apparent state of perpetuity, music within Sun Ra’s vision functioned as a tool of teleportation with which to physically escape earth. For Sun Ra music was a ‘universal language’ with which to speak across the physical language barriers that divided black populations (A Joyful noise 7:14). His understanding of music related to how it had been used to rebuild community structures following the fragmentation caused by the middle passage. Sun Ra also continually paid tribute to Ancient Egypt through the costumes of the Arkestra, which resembles the way the community of the Harlem Ball circuit had referenced it as a site of African heritage. Sun Ra considered Ancient Egypt ‘the kingdom of culture, beauty (and) art’ a site of advanced civilisation with which to refute the myth that the African continent had been undeveloped prior to its colonisation (A Joyful Noise 20:07).

Even within the twenty first century black artists continue to pay homage to the Ancient Egyptians within their work; if I were to develop my thesis further I would trace the themes I have discussed through a wider variety of contemporary cultural examples. However, I want to briefly refer to British songwriter and dancer FKA Twigs 2014 music video ‘Two Weeks’ as a modern example. She combines avant-garde expressions of both Voguing’s hieroglyphic body movements and pharaonic costume to create her own futuristic vision where she, a black female, exists as a godlike figure of authority. FKA Twig’s work serves to show how black forms of cultural expression continue to reinvent themselves whilst still integrating elements of a lost heritage. 

As aforementioned, part of my theory involves an expansion of Afro-futurism. I have done this by locating the practices of Sun Ra – the father of Afro-futurism – within a much longer tradition that goes back to the beginnings of transatlantic slavery. Culture has continually been used by the diaspora as a means of bridging the gap between the African past and the present, reconciling the dual identity that was discussed by Du Bois. The diaspora made sure to create these cultural forms in a way that ties them inextricably to their point of origin; regardless of their adoption by white communities, these cultural productscan never be entirely requisitioned and, therefore, have a resistance to being made artefact. The final and most important thread that interlinks all of the cultural mediums that I have considered is the fact that they all contain an embedded communicational element that allows black populations to connect in spite of linguistic barriers. The reason that this final thread holds such significance is because it represents the underlying utopianism: the potential for black populations to one day separate themselves from the historical narrative that has suppressed them, and establish a separatist society that will resolve the fragmentation that slavery created. Cultural mediums exist outside of the restrictions of colonial languages and therefore become the necessary means of communicating a utopian vision for the African diaspora. As Ted Wilson, a poet of the Black Arts Movement writes: 

Blow sounds of yesterday

that they call tomorrow

Blow love-calls in your foreign language

which is common to all

in your sphere of life

(Black Fire 168)