Dystopic Monochrome and the Colors of Political Possibility: Questioning the Phenomenology of Afro-Pessimism through Photography

G.S. Sahota

Abstract

This presentation, composed of five fragments focused on questions of race and photography, constellates an immanent critique of contemporary Afro-pessimism’s questionable ontologies premised on “identity-thinking” (Adorno). Afro-pessimism, wittingly or unwittingly, betrays the possibilities of social transformation arising from within, yet at odds with the racial identities mediated by American white racism. The presentation looks to key moments in African-American history and Afro-Asian musical connections to rescue critical alternatives to the conceits of Afro-Pessimism. By examining key moments revolving around the photographic medium in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Frederick Douglass, the experiments with Indian sonic colors in the late compositions of John and Alice Coltrane, and the synesthetic visions of the photographer Khalik Allah, these fragments aim to dissolve the artificial contrasts of racist language and imagery into the hues of an absolute continuum symbolized by the rainbow (borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s early writings and small essay on photography). This absolute continuum admits of no sharp racial distinction. What these operations entail is a critique of the phenomenology of dystopian monochromes of racial rhetoric shared by both afro-pessimism and the white Alt-Right, a critique afforded by the immanent powers of the photographic medium. In capturing radical contingency and sheer individuality, the camera can summon the latent potency of natural processes to explode the quasi-natural codes of racial reification, especially their monochromatics, and in doing so, recapture the irreducible ideality of color beyond the visual, sonic, or any other medium.

Keywords:  race and photography; color and media (music and image); critique of afro-pessimism; dialectical criticism; Marxism

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