4 - Spaces: Twenty-First-Century Suns/Sons Must Rise Again

Summary

No futurism is worthwhile unless it includes indigenous knowledges.

Kodwo Eshun, ‘The Algorithmic Poetics’ (2017a)

Kgositsile's ‘Towards a Walk in the Sun’ (1971) is a future memory. The poem interweaves and enfolds indigenous knowledges from Southern Africa with new political and aesthetic imperatives of exile in the Black world to produce otherwise possibilities. The ‘otherwise’ ‘bespeaks the ongoingness of possibility, of things existing other than what is given, what is known, what is grasped’ (Crawley 2016: 24). Kgositsile harnesses the otherwise from the Tswana literary corpus in his care, which enshrines the cosmologies, languages, mythologies, forms of being and relating, and terms of humanity, which he in turn refashions and transforms to reconfigure the political present in Black America. This chapter focuses on the cosmology of the sun and the native sons to reveal the infinitely generative nature of the Black Arts Movement archive in twenty-first-century African American social movements. In their quest to construct continuities between the past and the future, to walk in the footprints of their predecessors, twenty-first-century Black movements mine the Black arts archive in fashioning a radical imagination that responds to the unfinished project of white supremacy and Black liberation.

It is within this context that the Houston-based arts collective Otabenga Jones & Associates (OJ&A) retrieved ‘Towards a Walk in the Sun’, adapting it to operate within the realm of visual and material culture, as well as the sonic archive. The poem's radical convergence of two world systems – South African and African American literary classics, aesthetics, and oralities — spurred on that art collective's responses, which are generative and offer new reflections on discourses of Afrofuturism. Further, in framing OJ&A's work as part of dreamkeeping, a practice of intergenerational and ancestral dialogue that converges pastpresentfuture, here I theorize dreamkeeping as a musical practice of ‘digging in the crates’. Within this practice, rap's self-referential method and citational practices function as a naming device indexical of Black alternative histories of thought, sounding the antiphonic utterance across space and time.