BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

A good amount of literacy, black literacy I mean or, even better, literacy about blackness and its history. This is one of the certain advantages in diving into Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions – the cinema theatre version of his on-going project that has already been showed in its installative version in several exhibition spaces. The informative core of such non-linear film is actually not its main purpose, but the occasion to put the dominant white narrative on question. More than achieving this literacy through the film, the film aims at raising the question and the need for such literacy. That is the question and the need to shift our perspective.

In this vein, Joseph gives a central role to W.E.B. Du Bois’ project of an encyclopaedia on and for black people, the Africana, not only as occasion to spread information that has been systematically removed or put aside but also as a Gedankenexperiment where blackness would be the hegemonic horizon of history. From this point of view, the film is the coherent prosecution of Du Bois’ Africana, a sort of contemporary update or a living updating of Du Bois’ project. In a way, the 160 minutes of the film are the minimum time we would need in order to carry out this Gedankenexperiment – and the cinema version, with the enhanced intensity and attention it conveys, its almost obligatory form.

I’ve already experienced two or three installative versions of Joseph’s BLKNWS, but only the cinema “conditions” allowed me to explore some fundamental nuances that make his proposal interestingly critical. One of these is the questioning of his own North American perspective on blackness, which he actually shares with the many current historians and theoreticians of blackness. The new filmic material he integrated in his cinema version BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions insists on this perspective in having the only linear elements of storytelling focus on a (science-)fictional boat back to Africa. The symbolic and utopic reversibility of the African diaspora with its deep long-lasting stigmata of enslavement and suffering cannot take into full account the African perspective on blackness and colonialism. In this regard, W.E.B. Du Bois’ disorientation once in Africa, at the end of his life, seems to be a particularly meaningful key to understanding Joseph’s film – something that will find a resonance in the ambiguity and misunderstanding of Louis Armstrong’s fiasco of a journey to Africa (see Johan Grimonprez’ Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat). Would it be to find a common perspective in writing the history of blackness? The fundamental reflection on creolisation, here, would suggest a pluralist and theoretically queer answer.

Another fundamental nuance that I would like to stress concerns queerness as the ultimate emancipatory questioning, which is provided with a self-critical potential within the historical context of black emancipation thought. Saidiya Hartman’s reflections on “waywardness” have a universal force, they critically concern also the patriarchalism that connotates the thought and the attitude of many “heroes” and “masters” (fathers) of blackness. To this are connected Fred Moten’s weirdness and poetry as a positive way out of the post-colonial situation of blackness. Joseph himself recognises that a specific moment of dialogue between Hartman and Moten at the Duke University triggered his urgency for the project, and that they constitute, respectively, the historical and a-historical poles between which he moves as filmmaker.

He moves or, he meanders I should say, for his high-pace editing works more through associations, suggestions, flashes, than argument. The pleasure for the form of collage and the interest for popular culture, from television to TikTok, constitutes an inflationary aesthetic that is not that easy to digest in a cinema theatre. Nevertheless, this fragmentary progression mirrors the fundamental fragmentation of blackness, mainly in its historical dimension. Here, another concept by Hartman, the one of “critical fabulation”, seems to play an essential role in BLKNWS. Despite the apparent factuality of the journalism format, Joseph’s discourse is a fabulation that, according to Hartman, is able to respond to «the gaps and the silences of the archive of Trans-Atlantic slavery». Now, such gaps and silences not only call for a certain amount of fictionality, but are also important to keep. In her influential  “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), Hartman speaks of a “narrative restraint” as guiding principle that prevents us from completely filling those gaps and silences. Therefore, among the “Terms & Conditions” of BLKNWS there will also be a certain degree of fragility, and our filmic journey would necessarily imply moments of stumbling, of getting lost, of meandering. The paths of decolonialism are not straightforward.