Black To The Future Series: A Conversation with D. Scot Miller
Photograpghic portrait of AfroSurreal Manifesto Author D. Scot Miller. (Image courtesy of the artist.)
Using a title borrowed from an essay by cultural critic Mark Dery, the Black To The Future Series
is a sequence of interviews with artists whose practice has started to
define a new generation of work in the realm of AfroFuturism and
AfroSurrealism. This series has been created to spark conversation, to
hear various points of view on something that is constantly changing and
transforming, and with the hopes of allowing the practitioners to be at
the center of determining what these movements are.
To kick off the series we spoke with Chicago-based artist and writer Krista Franklin who cites the AfroSurreal Manifesto
as being a seminal work to many artists with AfroSurealist and/or
AfroFuturist ideas as well as an important part of her own understanding
of these terms and how her written and visual work fits into these
movements. Naturally, the next step in the series is to pose a few
questions to D. Scot Miller–the one who crafted the declaration that has
blazed a path from The Bay to the Windy City, influencing many along
the way. Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist, teacher and
curator who has been a very important part of today’s conversation
around the AfroSurreal and the ripples of that influence have shaken up
and helped define pieces of AfroFuturism.
Tempestt Hazel: Do you consider yourself an AfroFuturist, an AfroSurrealist or both?
D. Scot Miller: I would consider myself primarily an AfroSurrealist
with an AfroFuturist background. Due to my work with giovanni singleton
and Nocturnes Literary (Re)View, I was invited to be a member of the
original list-serve group with folks like Alondra Nelson, DJ Spooky, and
Tracie Moore when Mark Dery coined the term Afro-futurism in the
mid-90s. Though I found a great deal of support, information, and
fellowship there, I also felt something lacking. I’m not a techie. In
fact, due to my luddite tendencies, I had to be dragged into the
information age. I still prefer books to Kindles and hugs to friend
requests.
In 2004, I truly had an artistic vision. I’d been pulling together
notes for an as-yet-titled novel and a suite of blues poems. As is my
way, I’d pulled out every scrap, note, journal, dog-eared-underlined
paperback, and abused cassette seeking the voice that would speak again
through me. At some point, I cannot say exactly when, it all fit
together.
Post-apocalyptic Blues Suite in the blues issue of
Nocturnes (#3), and my 1st chapbook version of
Knot Frum Hear were products of this epiphany.
I’m curious about writers and artists who do not turn to science,
technology, or science fiction but still speculate about the past,
present, and future. Writers like
Ishmael Reed,
Zora Neal Hurston, Darius James, and
Victor LaValle, and visual artists like
Kara Walker,
Wifredo Lam and
Krista Franklin
who create fantastic works from a place of speculation with no regard
to the neo-liberal imperative of “progress” through technology.
In an introduction to
Henry Dumas‘ 1974 book
Ark Of Bones and Other Stories,
Amiri Baraka puts forth the term Afrosurreal Expressionism for what he
described as Dumas’ “skill at creating an entirely different world
organically connected to this one …the Black aesthetic in its actual
contemporary and lived life.” When I first ran across the term
Afro-Surreal Expressionism in Amiri Baraka’s introduction, I experienced
an instant recognition that changed the course of my artistic life. I
am AfroSurreal. My writing, my way of thinking, my life is AfroSurreal.
As I pulled together my work, I began to frame my writing around
AfroSurrealist Expressionism, in the traditions of
Bob Kaufman,
Amiri Baraka
and Henry Dumas. Because of my personal inclinations towards direct
engagement, the supernatural, and the “be here now” ethos of the Bay
Area, AfroSurreal offered an alternative to the luddite, mystic and,
later on, anti-consumerist in me.
As I started exploring my own aesthetic practice, AfroSurreal became a
more apt description of my work. So, in my personal experience, I see
them both on a continuum where one compliments the other. To me, they
are not mutually exclusive terms. It does seem, however, that many would
like there to be an either/or situation. AfroSurreal is about the
“both/and”.
TH: How do you define AfroFuturism and AfroSurrealism?
DSM: I began using AfroSurreal in the articles and essays I published
in various arts and music publications. In May 2009, editor Johnny Ray
Houston and I collaborated and co-curated the AfroSurreal issue of The
San Francisco Bay Guardian [titled
Call It Afro-Surreal].
For that issue, I wrote
The AfroSurreal Manifesto,
encouraging exploration in this emerging aesthetic and method of
inquiry that addresses the radical imagination of the Diaspora and its
influence on Western civilization, pop culture, and theory. I see the
term “AfroSurreal” and its various appellations as both a descriptive
and practice of seemingly disparate elements and cultures/narratives
merging to emphasize their similarities in a wholly new
culture/narrative.
As I was writing the AfroSurreal Manifesto, I looked for a succinct
definition of Afrofuturism. The closest I got was from Wikipedia back in
April of 2009:
“Afro-Futurism is a Diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that
turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black
possibilities in the future,” which I quote in the manifesto.
After The AfroSurreal Manifesto came out in May 2009, the Wiki
definition of AfroFuturism was changed to, “Afro-Futurism is an emergent
literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science
fiction, historical fiction, fantasy and magic realism with
non-Occidental cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day
dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and
re-examine the historical events of the past,” that very month.
One of the beauties of Wikipedia is being able to see that my work
made an immediate impact through the revision history. I think it’s
important to point this out because of the discoveries that were made
after May 2009, and how disturbing and exhilarating it’s been watching
AfroFuturism morph as a result of AfroSurreal. That’s AfroSurreal within
itself!
TH: I’m a big fan of manifestos as documents that establish a
clear(er) understanding of artistic movements and also set some
parameters for artists working within that realm (whether they follow
them or not). Manifestos, for me, are very important and almost a lost
practice. What led you to write the AfroSurreal Manifesto?
DSM: “Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past. We revisit old ways with new eyes.”
I think you said it best here. Manifestos are often misunderstood
documents. These days, people use the word to mean “declaration” or
“mandate”, but the arts manifesto has a long and active history dating
back to early industrial Europe.
The Dada Manifesto,
The Futurist Manifesto
and the many Surrealist manifestos of Breton and Artaud made serious
impacts on the tenor and tone of a period or movement. Mary Ann Cawes’
book
Manifesto: A Century of Isms
was very helpful in showing me how to formulate a working arts
manifesto in that tradition. I see art manifestos – as opposed to
political or economic ones – as works of art in their own rights. They
are living documents that can breathe, grow, and even reproduce.
TH: You explain this beautifully in your manifesto, but can
you talk a bit about the difference between AfroFuturism and
AfroSurrealism?
DSM: I think the primary difference between AfroFuturism and AfroSurreal is a deep and undeniable one: history.
In the 1932’s
The Legitime Defense,
was a limited-run, red and black journal, put together by a
twenty-something Martinique student in Paris, Etienne Lero, and his
black and brown expatriate comrades. The group of free-thinkers and
radicals had all rejected the “either/or” of burgeoning Marxist politics
for the “both/and” of surrealism. For them, it was about poetry and
politics, social and cultural revolution. Lero declares in his
manifesto, “…it is only by horribly gritting our teeth that we are able
to endure the abominable system of constraints and restrictions, the
extermination of love and the limitation of dream, generally known by
the name of western civilization.” It is from this small group of
radical artists and theorists, and the first small book they produced
eighty years ago, that Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley use as
the platform for
Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and Diaspora (University of Texas Press), the most comprehensive anthology of the AfroSurreal to date.
When
Black, Brown and Beige’s
surrealist chronology reaches the United States, Rosemont notes that
after Richard Wright attended an immense exhibition called “Fantastic
Art, Dada, and Surrealism” in 1937 that he “recognized surrealism as
revolutionary method of learning, a means of resolving immobilizing
contradictions, a way of seeing things whole and thereby changing the
world.” While the mainstream
American Arts and Letters
community of the time (Decidedly pro-fascist, pro-capitalist and
staunchly conservative) rejected surrealism, it was the African American
writers and artists who whole-heartedly embraced it, modified it, and
made it their own.
Beginning with
Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, and
Ralph Ellison, the seed of American Surrealism is Black American Surrealism (The AfroSurreal).
The 1950s can easily be categorized as the second most
anti-surrealist period in American history, and Ted Joans in New York
and Bob Kaufman in San Francisco stand as the only American surrealists
of the decade and slightly beyond it. Along with the emerging Beat
Movement (of which Joans and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) were initial
members), black radical imagination – always an inspiration to the
surrealists – came to the forefront and began to write itself into the
pantheon. To Joans, surrealism was more than a way to write a poem or
paint a picture, but a way of life that not only demanded “complete
freedom of the imagination and radical social change, but also a
far-reaching moral revolution.”
Joans’ sentiments can be placed directly alongside Kaufman’s–“I acknowledge the demands of surrealist realization.” His 1959
Abomunist Manifesto,
published by City Lights in 1959, still bears the wit and danger it
held over fifty years ago. Celebrated as “The Black Rimbaud” in France,
Kaufman was overlooked for both
The San Francisco Renaissance issue of Evergreen Review and
The New American Poetry
anthology of 1960. Rosemont says, “Such omissions cannot be considered
innocent oversights. After all, what is most important about Kaufman is
the fact that he was the author of some of the most beautiful, playful,
and effective poetry of the last four hundred years.”
Self-defense (Legitime Defense, in French) was the key word of the
Black Power movement, and afrosurreal writers emerged at the vanguard.
Ted Joans points out that Richard Wright coined the term Black Power in
1954, and with the emergence of the Black Arts founder and revolutionary
genius, Larry Neal, fire-spitter Jayne Cortez, and mystic-seer, Henry
Dumas; the surrealist-tinged black power and black arts movements found
homes all over the globe.
In 1974 (The same year Baraka wrote “The Afrosurreal Expressionism of
Henry Dumas”), San Francisco’s City Lights published the seminal City
Lights Anthology: Surrealism in the United States, featuring the
writings of Ed Bullins, Huey Newton, and a tribute to Bob Kaufman,
marking the beginning of new interest in the old form.
Poet, writer, philosopher and theorist,
Will Alexander has been a self-proclaimed black surrealist for over thirty years. His poem
My Interior Vita,
from “Compression and Purity” (City Lights, 2006) rings like an
AfroSurrealist’s Manifesto. When he says, “Yet, above all, the earth
being for me the specificity of Africa, as revealed by Diop, and Jackson
and Van Sertima, and it’s electrical scent in the writing of Damas/
Because of this purview I have never drawn to provincial description, or
to quiescent chemistry of condensed domestic horizon,” he seems to be
speaking for those who have rejected the quiet servitude that
characterizes existing roles for African Americans, Asian Americans,
Latinos and queer folk. Even as he’s speaking from a universal mind with
a universal tongue, he always seems to land on the side of “otherness”.
I see my explorations of AfroSurreal in the ‘00s, ’10s and beyond, as merely a continuation of work that began so long ago.
The second difference is far more surface and superficial, but still
should be noted and noted well: Mark Dery, a white academician, coined
the term “Afro-futurist” in the mid-90s. Amiri Baraka, a black artist,
coined the term “AfroSurreal” in the early-70s.
TH: How do these concepts influence and reveal themselves in your practice and the form that your work takes?
DSM: As an artist whose medium is the word, I feel that I’ve done my job when I can write a manifesto that truly manifests.
The SF Arts Commission supported The Afrosurreal SF literary event at
The Luggage Store Gallery
last year, the SFSU Poetry Center had an AfroSurreal panel with Maria
Damon and Will Alexander, and the San Francisco Public Library hosted
AfroSurrealist film-makers Shy Hamilton and Devin Cain from Chicago.
Poet and Scholar, Ruth Ellen Kosher presented The AfroSurreal Manifesto
to AWP in Washington, DC in 2010.
There has been an AfroSurrealist film festival every summer since 2010 in Negril, Jamaica. An AfroSurreal issue of
Black Camera,
is scheduled for release fall 2013. Liverpool Tate’s 2010 “Afro Modern”
show drew on many of the same elements, artists, and methods outlined
in the manifesto. In March 2012, poet and visual artist Krista Franklin
presented The AfroSurreal Manifesto as part of her Crit Week
presentation at Columbia College Chicago.
Krista Franklin presenting the AfroSurealist Manifesto at Columbia College Chicago, 2012.
AfroSurreal is growing of its own accord. A Samba band in Washington
DC was formed under the name, and several individual artists, scholars,
and organization representatives have begun to use AfroSurreal as both
an expression and method of inquiry. Artists, curators, editors,
academics, DJs, musicians, and that guy on the corner have responded,
recognizing the need for AfroSurreal. A need that becomes evident in its
absence (or invisibility).
I’m now being invited to universities to give talks and workshops; I
also have hosted salons and curated readings for the west coast version
of AfroFuturists known as
The Black Futurists.
Through all of this, I’ve been blessed to continue building community
in ways and places that I never could have imagined eight years ago.
Artists like Simone Leigh seem to be getting more, much deserved
attention and those discoveries allow me to be, to quote Suzanne
Cesaire, “In permanent readiness for the marvelous.”
TH: What do you feel are the biggest misconceptions about AfroSurrealism?
DSM: I can’t speak on AfroFuturism, but for me, the biggest
misconception of the contemporary AfroSurreal movement is that it
encourages exclusion, segregation, and any form of nationalism.
AfroSurreal, as a concept, falls more in line with pirate utopias and
temporary autonomous zones than a place to fly a flag or build a fort.
My studies have shown me that, “Afro-Surrealism rejects the quiet
servitude that characterizes existing roles for African Americans, Asian
Americans, Latinos, women and queer folk. Only through the mixing,
melding, and cross-conversion of these supposed classifications can
there be hope for liberation. Afro-Surrealism is intersexed,
Afro-Asiatic, Afro-Cuban, mystic, silly, and profound.”
TH: Sun Ra has very deep roots here in Chicago, is often
referenced as inspiration and continues to influence the work that is
made under the names of AfroFuturism and AfroSurrealism. Do you
remember when you first became aware of Sun-Ra?
DSM: My father is a jazz-head, so Sun Ra has always been a part of
pantheon. Though the old man is mostly a “bopper,” he did have a few Sun
Ra albums in his collection. I distinctly remember Spaceways Inc. Next
to Richard Pryor, Sun Ra was the second man I ever heard say
“motherfucker” on vinyl.
Sun Ra. (Image from PW Blogs.)
TH: What is it about his philosophy that resonates with you?
DSM: In
Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra,
Afro-futurism is a place “where the material culture of Afro-American
folk religions are used as sacred technologies to control virtual
realities,” this is the most apt definition of Sun Ra’s creative
movements towards Afro-futurism, but I find his techniques for
expression Afrosurrealistic. The book
Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-68, illustrates Afro-surrealism in practice because he created real-world, present time applications to his theories.
What best illustrates this from this thin volume is the “notes and
ephemera” section where the entire cosmos of The Arkestra is distilled
to catch phrases on an evolving series of business cards and ticket
stubs. “Those Atonites Are At It Again,” says an early one. “Beta Music
for Beta People,” says another. There’s even one from El Saturn offering
to record the local church sermon which “Enables the pastor’s voice to
be within reach of every member when spiritual guidance is needed.” That
spiritual element calls back to Leopold Senghor’s distinction between
Surrealism and AfroSurreal, “European Surrealism is empirical. African
Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical.” I think this also holds true
the contemporary, “every dot and tittle” literalism of many other
contemporary movements.
TH: The career and influence of early 20th century artists
and later Sun Ra prove that the principles of these movements were
relevant decades ago. But what do you think it is about this moment that
creates an environment which is conducive to a magnified resurgence of
these philosophies as well as the receiving, uplifting and celebrating
of these ideas on so many levels by artists, institutions and
scholarship alike?
DSM: “Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there
is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover
it.”
We can document explorations in the name of AfroSurreal as far back
as the 1930s, and even then it changed the landscape on three
continents. AfroSurreal has always been a mighty force that can be
applied to everyday life. It’s also, like Bob Kaufmann, Ted Joans, and
the Jazz they loved, been overlooked when most vital due to its black,
poor/working-class origins, especially in the United States.
Being from West Virginia, the grandson of Georgia share-croppers and
Alabama domestics, I’ve always seen class erosion as inevitable. I think
it’s a good thing too. Maybe our forgotten prophets will finally get
their due.
TH: What are the current questions and explorations in
AfroFuturism and AfroSurrealism adding to the dialogue that has already
happened around these concepts and ideas? What is different about these
movements today that perhaps doesn’t align with historic concepts of the
past that have served as an influence for it?
DSM: I’m interested in seeing how AfroSurreal can use AfroFuturism to
address the digital divide differently. Like I said earlier, I’m not
hi-tech, I’m lo-tek. Lo-tek is a term used by William Gibson in
Neuromancer
to describe the re-appropriation of obsolete or discarded technology
for unforeseen uses by the Rastafarian hackers in the story, on some
“the stone that the builder refused.”
As we speak, there are poor people from Nigeria to Sao Paulo, Egypt
to Greece who can build cell-phones from several broken ones. People are
hacking into sophisticated monitoring systems with hand-made computers
housed in milk-crates and wooden boxes. I’m intrigued by the technology
of Brazil’s favelas and the squats of Berlin that allow whole
communities to get electricity and water while living entirely off the
grid. We have to remember that AfroFuturism was born before the dot-com
bubble bursts, taking a whole lot of the utopian sheen of the internet
with it. We now have an over-dependence on technology that aligns with a
conspicuous hyper-consumerism that forces conformity better than any
world philosophy could have hoped to achieve.
In response to this the AfroSurrealist life is in the moment, fluid,
filled with aliases and census- defying classifications. It has no
address or phone number, no single discipline or calling.
AfroSurrealists are highly-paid short-term commodities (as opposed to
poorly-paid long term ones, a.k.a. slaves). AfroSurrealism is about the
present. There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the
future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced
sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers
are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is
the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past. Or
as the mystic journey-agent Le Sun-Ra would say:
“It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?”
To learn more about D. Scot Miller and the work that he does, visit his websites:
http://dscotmiller.blogspot.com/2009/05/afrosurreal.html
and http://afrosurrealsanfrancisco.tumblr.com/
