Hermeticism Contra Hermeneutics: Kodwo Eshun's Afrofuturism and the Challenges of Black Abstraction
Abstract
This article engages with the Afrofuturist vision of the critic and theorist Kodwo Eshun in order to interrogate some of the dominant conceptions of referentiality raised by this special issue. Afrofuturism questions the forms of representation and cultural expression that might be appropriate to register the historical trauma of slavery and ongoing experience of alienation and racism. From this perspective, science fiction has been reinterpreted as a form of realism because it describes experiences of estrangement already livedby black people. However, Eshun’s sub-cultural writing carries a particularly provocative stance towards all forms of authenticity. In his book More Brilliant than the Sun(1998), he attempts to weaponize alienation and opaque forms of communication against any possible return to historical origins or stable textual referents. Against hermeneutical tendencies towards decoding, he embraces different forms of “hermeticism” and abstraction. I analyse this tension in his work, with close attention to the implied relationship between word and world. The latter part of the article uses the work of contemporary theorist Fred Moten to further problematize Eshun’s Afrofuturism.
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