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Black Audio Film Collective's The Last Angel of History (1996) sketches the artistic and intellectual movements that have come to be called Afrofuturism, which argues that since the great rupture of the Middle Passage, African diaspora people have been doing science fiction, assembling futures from fragments of the past. The films creative and intellectual energy lie in its manners of unfolding, that is, forms of historiography that would make sense of perceptible artifacts. This essay examines several manners of unfolding, includinganiconism, unfolding from fragments, unfoldingfrom a database, fabulation, and unfolding deep history.
There's something seductive, thrilling, enigmatic about the Black Audio Film Collective's The Last Angel of History (1996). Dimly felt ideas take form. Images flash over your retinas too quickly to grasp mentally, so you feel them, in goose bumps, in fixed attention. You feel your capacities enlarge. Maybe you feel afraid, for things you thought you knew are coming undone. It's tempting to try to master this very smart film by being just as smart as it is: to use a couple of recurring characters from Parliament Funkadelic, by being the Sir Nose D'void of Funk to the film's Star Child. But I found that briefly renouncing the academic Sir Nose approach so as to pay attention to the feeling of my hairs standing on end alerted me to the moments when Last Angel was performing something particularly deft. I shall refer to these performances as manners of unfolding.1
The Last Angel of History gives a sketch of the artistic and intellectual movements that have come to be called Afrofuturism, in which Black musicians, writers, and artists argue that since the great rupture of the Middle Passage, African diaspora people have been doing science fiction.2 People who have lived the legacy of slavery are time travelers. As Greg Tate, Ishmael Reed, Kodwo Eshun, and numerous others argue in the film, ever since Africans were kidnapped, forced onto slave ship holds and plantations, and forbidden to use their languages, their descendants have survived and created in this alienated, dislocated state. They have done so by assembling futures from fragments of the past, preferring to disdain the present that accords them less than human status or, at best, offers "inclusion" in a humanity...