Blog Post #2: "The Last Angel of History" through Lara Marks Eyes: My understanding

    Lara Mark's Article, "Close-Up: John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film, clears up the confusion I had with the film, "The Last Angel of History." While watching the film it was hard for me to grasp what was happening or what the narrator's main argument was. The way it was filmed and jumped from scene to scene made it hard for me to comprehend the meaning of the film. I knew it was about different black artists have contributed to the science fiction world and the definition of Afrofuturism. Lara Mark's article instantly defines the argument of the film. "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." (Mark's, Page 1) After hearing Marks describe Afrofutusim and this film as, assembling futures from fragments of the past, the film became a little more clear to me. How each artist in the film has taken something from the past, or many things from the past, and used it to create art for the future. This art is more advanced, touches on many different issues in our world, as well as shows science fiction and Afrofuturism. 


    Lara Mark continues to explain that by collecting fragments of the past and assembling futures with them black people have been able to "survive" in the alienated and dislocated state that America is to them. George Clinton, a black musician, used this idea and translated it through music. He believed he came to earth from another planet on a spaceship. Clinton says, "Space for black people is not something new. I really believe we've been there, were returning to there, and the consciousnesses of Black People, of all humankind, are striving to return. Whether somebody gave us our intellect genetically by cloning, or that were descended from the stars." After reading this quote from George Clinton I understand Afrofuturism to a different extent. George Clinton really believed that He and other Black people are from space and used music to translate this to the rest of the world, spreading the definition of Afrofuturism and Black people's involvement in science fiction. 

By Lydia Hagan


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