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The world is ruled by artificial intelligence, space empires are fighting with each other for rare resources, half-starved stalkers are killing each other in search of technologies of the past - this is how the white science fiction writers of Europe and America saw the future. And what about the rest? "Knife" understands how the Europeans appropriated the time of the colonized peoples and what the latter are trying to do about it. On March 23 in Moscow at the festival "Knife - Culture of the Future" Daniil Zhaivoronok will give a lecture "Decolonial Future and Posthuman", sign up for the festival on Vkontakte and Facebook!
In his famous dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
The future does not come by itself: it is constructed, produced, invoked. It is imposed, colonized, restricted and controlled. He is conquered and resisted. The future does not arise from scratch, but from a complex interweaving of ideas, sign systems, technologies, organizations, material structures - everything that we call society and its history. At the same time, different cultures, different peoples and social groups may have different and conflicting ideas about the future. But not every future has an opportunity to come true.
Consider Mel Gibson 's Apocalypse (2006) as a metaphor for the conflicting relationship of different time horizons. Throughout the film, we are shown the Mayan world (through the eyes of a modern Western director, of course) - their culture, religious rituals, everyday life and conflicts. This world also has its own temporality, which is determined by natural phenomena (solar eclipses, rains) and cultural and social organization (construction, wars, agriculture, religious rituals).
The Mayan time horizon collapses dramatically, canceled when the ships of the Spanish conquistadors appear on the horizon. The modern viewer understands that the appearance of the conquerors radically cuts off the Maya's own temporality (perception of time).
The European colonization of South America was the beginning of a future new world, determined by the expansion of European peoples, and the end of the future as it appeared to the conquered civilizations. Now we learn about the history of colonized peoples, the same Maya, from colonial projects like Gibson's film, which present the life of Indians in a rather distorted form (the film was accused of racism and reproduction of colonial stereotypes), as well as from sciences such as archeology, anthropology and ethnography , who also have an impressive history of intimate ties with the colonial project behind them.
Colonization meant that some cultures (non-European), if they are not completely erased from the face of the earth, are subject to others (European). It is the latter who, having the power and resources, determine what the future is, what it should be, how it is arranged and what it consists of. But, perhaps even more important, it was the colonialists who had the power to determine history, describe events from their point of view, and impose the meanings they invented on subordinate peoples. Physical and symbolic violence led and continues to lead to the fact that local cultures, knowledge, forms of thinking, life and communication are erased, and their place is taken by the discourses and practices of the colonialists. We still read stories in textbooks about the "discovery" of the Americas, Australia and Oceania. Indigenous peoples talk about "invasion". But the voices of the latter are practically inaudible in the general flow of information.
Thus, colonization was never just a matter of territory and resources. Time and history were also the subject of colonization. The captured population was either destroyed or marginalized and built into the temporality imposed on them, which was set by the economic, social and cultural regimes of the colonialists. And despite the fact that the modern world is described more as post- and decolonial, our ideas about the future are still dominated by the hegemonic Western cultural and economic regimes.
This problem is relevant not only for the so-called indigenous peoples. Decolonial scholars and researchers insist that modern regimes of power are, in principle, colonial: they seek to capture our subjectivity, impose on us their values, temporality, forms of perception, imagination, labor and thinking. Of course, the colonial invasion is not equally intense for different groups, but perhaps we are all interested in looking for ways to resist and elude its effects.
The history of non-European peoples is either devalued and marginalized, describing it as barbaric, primitive or backward, or it is erased and forgotten, recognizing it as impossible (and often unnecessary) for understanding, study, and even more so revival, if not as an entertaining curiosity.
Therefore, for many colonized peoples, the problem of access to their historical and cultural heritage and its revaluation is urgent. Reflecting in Black to the Future on the fate of African Americans who were forcibly transported and enslaved and whose culture has long been destroyed and marginalized, American cultural theorist Mark Deri asks:
For such groups, the characterization that African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler gave to the characters in one of her novels is appropriate : "They must either forcibly evolve, abandoning a worldview centered around their own lives and values, or disappear." As Pamela Ryan, another African American activist and researcher, writes, "African American women have no time to dream."
British researcher Ziauddin Sardar analyzed the existing corpus of futurological texts and showed that the overwhelming majority of authors of this genre are white men from Europe or the United States. The future they describe is based on Eurocentric views and presupposes the preservation or even strengthening of the status quo existing in international politics and culture. A similar situation has developed in science fiction - another form of production of ideas about the future. Here, too, representatives of the First World continue to dominate, and one of the main themes is militarism, technological development, the construction of new social hierarchies and, of course, the colonization of new spaces and worlds.
One of the cycles of Octavia Butler's texts is called "Xenogenesis", which can be translated as "born of (from) another."
Decolonial variants of the future are xenogenetic: they are based not on Eurocentric attitudes and belief in progress, modernization and efficiency, but on the experience, knowledge and culture of the colonized.
They are directed both forward and backward, using elements of half-forgotten, reconstructed ancient legends, rituals and traditions and creating ultra-modern myths, utopias and dystopias. One of the most striking trends among decolonial projects representing an alternative future isAfrofuturism...
Initially, this movement arose from a call for the restoration and revaluation of the values of African culture, which in modern African American communities has been partially lost due to forced resettlement and slavery. However, it was not only about remembering your historical and cultural roots. Afrofuturism called for the use of the rich heritage of African culture to create new forms of aesthetic and political imagination, while taking into account the current experience and situation of the African American population. The result was a fusion of ancient Egyptian mythology, magical symbols and rituals with forms of modern popular culture (hip-hop, jazz, R&B, techno, jungle) and a simultaneous criticism of racism and other problems of modern societies.
American jazzman Sun Ra, in his Afro-futuristic manifesto film Space is the Place (1974), presented music as a means of saving African Americans, who at the end of the film travel on a starship to another planet to build a free society there without racism. According to cultural critic Tricia Rose, Sun Ra's images of flying saucers suggest a new vision of technology, which is not limited to destructive rationality, but involves a symbiosis with spiritual and ethical values.
Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney, in their science fiction stories, try to outline the contours of the hybrid societies of the future. In these societies, the line between norm and deviation, human and non-human, nature and culture, is being destroyed, hierarchies and exceptions are dissected and criticized. Their heroes and heroines are not conquerors and conquerors, but marginal characters transforming themselves in unpredictable, always different unstable worlds.
The Afrofuturist future is not about maintaining stable forms and relationships, but about using diverse cultural resources and creating opportunities for mutations necessary for survival.
It is important that to build images of the future, Afrofuturism uses not only texts, but also music and visual images (including clothing) to go beyond the limits of thinking and imagination, limited by Western logocentrism.
British-Ghanaian writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun believes that it is African American music of the 20th century (from jazz and funk to jungle and hip-hop) that is the most vivid expression of otherness and posthumanism - important characteristics of Afrofuturism. The African American population, as a result of slavery and subsequent oppression, was excluded from the human category and endowed with the status of another, alien, and music was not a means of overcoming this alienation, but its expression. As Ashun writes, in African American music, the human appears as a meaningless and dangerous category.
However, while criticizing racism and expressing the African American community's experiences of oppression are central themes of Afrofuturism, it has an uneasy relationship with African American political movements. So, for example, Sun Ra at some point began to separate himself from the Black Power movement, at odds with him in his understanding of race: he considered it an illusion, which equally embraced both white and non-white. Samuel Delaney was also critical of the concept of race:
If Afrofuturism develops most productively in the sphere of culture, then another most important decolonial movement - Zapatism - has a direct political dimension. This movement, after a series of military clashes with Mexican government forces, managed to create a number of autonomous zones in the state of Chiapas.
In their political practices zapatistasadhere to the principles of horizontality, universal equality, collective decision-making and direct democracy. These principles are based on both anarchist ideology and following the practices and values of the Maya. They use the appeal to the past as a productive opportunity to create alternative forms of communication and coexistence. The Zapatista Maya insist that they have their own special temporality, which implies a certain rhythm and speed of imagination and the processes of thinking, discussion and decision-making, and refuse to obey the time frames that the Mexican government is trying to impose on them.
The appeal to Mayan culture helps the Zapatistas to rethink the concept of territory. If from the point of view of the state and corporations, the territory is an empty space, a resource that can be captured and used as you like, then for the Maya it is inextricably linked with their future and their history: with the spirits of ancestors inhabiting it, magical and natural forces. In this regard, the thinking of the Indians is much more environmentally friendly, because time, space and life itself are directly connected in it.
As the Argentine scholar Walter Mignolo writes, Zapatism is an unstable and undefined product of a double translation between modern political theories and Mayan cosmological views, between current problems and local history.
The future the Zapatistas are trying to create is not based on a linear view of time, ideas of progress, efficiency, and other Western ideals. But it does not seek only to preserve some kind of traditional society.
The Zapatistas try to build the world not around production and technological cycles and the rate of circulation of capital, not around unchanging customs - but around communities that include both nature and people, not only living ones, but also dead and future generations.
Another world is impossible if you fit into the rhythms dictated by the oppressors. The Zapatistas are moving towards their future at a pace that is consistent with their own ideas, capabilities and circumstances. Maybe they do it slowly, but they don't go anywhere.
But not in all cultures, the future is something distant, new, something that is just coming. Many communities think of time as cyclical rather than linear. For example, in Hindu cosmology there is a concept of four eras, yugas, successively replacing each other, through which the existence of the world and societies constantly passes. After the end of the last era (Kali-Yuga), the first (Satya-Yuga) begins again. Accordingly, the future, present and past here are very relative concepts.
Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Cohn, who describes the life of the Runa people from the Amazon, says that for them the future is represented by the spirits of deceased ancestors (since the future of every person is death, it is also a transition to a new form of existence) living in the forest.
Thus, in the culture of the rune, the future coexists with the present and, moreover, is able to actively influence it.
As the Australian researchers I. Milojevic and S. T. Inayatulla note, such a characteristic of the European idea of the future, as fantastic, in many cultures "is a part of everyday life [in which] the myth is not separated from the lived reality." As an example, they cite Hindu mystics who are able to make astral travel and visit other planets (aliens, in turn, visit Earth to learn wisdom from local gurus). Moreover, the Hindu concept of rebirth suggests that everyone has the opportunity to be born on another planet in their next life. Krishna already resides on a real planet - Gloka Vindravan, and Brahma - on the Brahmaloka planet (which is also undergoing destruction, like all planets).
West Indian philosopher and revolutionary Franz Fanon, one of the most influential anti-colonialists, wrote about the culture of North Africa in his book A World of Hungry and Slaves:
According to the Zapatistas, one of the goals of their struggle is to build a world in which many different worlds can coexist.
Perhaps this is one of the meanings of decolonization - not in creating a single version of the future for all, but in an effort to provide an opportunity for building different versions of it (and different versions of the past): technological, magical, fantastic, astral, utopian and dystopian, or even worlds that exist outside of the concept of the future.
Ziauddin Sardar calls such a world post - normal - in it, none of the versions can claim the status of a hegemonic, obligatory norm, in relation to which all others will be considered deviations. However, perhaps we are not waiting for the onset of a golden age and a harmonious utopia of coexistence, but the continuation of colonial and militaristic battles for the destruction and further capitalist hyperexploitation of natural resources. After them, there will be no future on this planet.
In his famous dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
The future does not come by itself: it is constructed, produced, invoked. It is imposed, colonized, restricted and controlled. He is conquered and resisted. The future does not arise from scratch, but from a complex interweaving of ideas, sign systems, technologies, organizations, material structures - everything that we call society and its history. At the same time, different cultures, different peoples and social groups may have different and conflicting ideas about the future. But not every future has an opportunity to come true.
Consider Mel Gibson 's Apocalypse (2006) as a metaphor for the conflicting relationship of different time horizons. Throughout the film, we are shown the Mayan world (through the eyes of a modern Western director, of course) - their culture, religious rituals, everyday life and conflicts. This world also has its own temporality, which is determined by natural phenomena (solar eclipses, rains) and cultural and social organization (construction, wars, agriculture, religious rituals).
The Mayan time horizon collapses dramatically, canceled when the ships of the Spanish conquistadors appear on the horizon. The modern viewer understands that the appearance of the conquerors radically cuts off the Maya's own temporality (perception of time).
The European colonization of South America was the beginning of a future new world, determined by the expansion of European peoples, and the end of the future as it appeared to the conquered civilizations. Now we learn about the history of colonized peoples, the same Maya, from colonial projects like Gibson's film, which present the life of Indians in a rather distorted form (the film was accused of racism and reproduction of colonial stereotypes), as well as from sciences such as archeology, anthropology and ethnography , who also have an impressive history of intimate ties with the colonial project behind them.
Colonization meant that some cultures (non-European), if they are not completely erased from the face of the earth, are subject to others (European). It is the latter who, having the power and resources, determine what the future is, what it should be, how it is arranged and what it consists of. But, perhaps even more important, it was the colonialists who had the power to determine history, describe events from their point of view, and impose the meanings they invented on subordinate peoples. Physical and symbolic violence led and continues to lead to the fact that local cultures, knowledge, forms of thinking, life and communication are erased, and their place is taken by the discourses and practices of the colonialists. We still read stories in textbooks about the "discovery" of the Americas, Australia and Oceania. Indigenous peoples talk about "invasion". But the voices of the latter are practically inaudible in the general flow of information.
Thus, colonization was never just a matter of territory and resources. Time and history were also the subject of colonization. The captured population was either destroyed or marginalized and built into the temporality imposed on them, which was set by the economic, social and cultural regimes of the colonialists. And despite the fact that the modern world is described more as post- and decolonial, our ideas about the future are still dominated by the hegemonic Western cultural and economic regimes.
This problem is relevant not only for the so-called indigenous peoples. Decolonial scholars and researchers insist that modern regimes of power are, in principle, colonial: they seek to capture our subjectivity, impose on us their values, temporality, forms of perception, imagination, labor and thinking. Of course, the colonial invasion is not equally intense for different groups, but perhaps we are all interested in looking for ways to resist and elude its effects.
Colonization deprived many cultures and peoples of the most important resource necessary for the invention of images of the future - the past.
The history of non-European peoples is either devalued and marginalized, describing it as barbaric, primitive or backward, or it is erased and forgotten, recognizing it as impossible (and often unnecessary) for understanding, study, and even more so revival, if not as an entertaining curiosity.
Therefore, for many colonized peoples, the problem of access to their historical and cultural heritage and its revaluation is urgent. Reflecting in Black to the Future on the fate of African Americans who were forcibly transported and enslaved and whose culture has long been destroyed and marginalized, American cultural theorist Mark Deri asks:
Many communities that have survived colonization and its aftermath focus on economic and cultural survival and preservation, and lack the resources to plan and imagine their own versions of the future.
For such groups, the characterization that African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler gave to the characters in one of her novels is appropriate : "They must either forcibly evolve, abandoning a worldview centered around their own lives and values, or disappear." As Pamela Ryan, another African American activist and researcher, writes, "African American women have no time to dream."
British researcher Ziauddin Sardar analyzed the existing corpus of futurological texts and showed that the overwhelming majority of authors of this genre are white men from Europe or the United States. The future they describe is based on Eurocentric views and presupposes the preservation or even strengthening of the status quo existing in international politics and culture. A similar situation has developed in science fiction - another form of production of ideas about the future. Here, too, representatives of the First World continue to dominate, and one of the main themes is militarism, technological development, the construction of new social hierarchies and, of course, the colonization of new spaces and worlds.
One of the cycles of Octavia Butler's texts is called "Xenogenesis", which can be translated as "born of (from) another."
Decolonial variants of the future are xenogenetic: they are based not on Eurocentric attitudes and belief in progress, modernization and efficiency, but on the experience, knowledge and culture of the colonized.
They are directed both forward and backward, using elements of half-forgotten, reconstructed ancient legends, rituals and traditions and creating ultra-modern myths, utopias and dystopias. One of the most striking trends among decolonial projects representing an alternative future isAfrofuturism...
Initially, this movement arose from a call for the restoration and revaluation of the values of African culture, which in modern African American communities has been partially lost due to forced resettlement and slavery. However, it was not only about remembering your historical and cultural roots. Afrofuturism called for the use of the rich heritage of African culture to create new forms of aesthetic and political imagination, while taking into account the current experience and situation of the African American population. The result was a fusion of ancient Egyptian mythology, magical symbols and rituals with forms of modern popular culture (hip-hop, jazz, R&B, techno, jungle) and a simultaneous criticism of racism and other problems of modern societies.
American jazzman Sun Ra, in his Afro-futuristic manifesto film Space is the Place (1974), presented music as a means of saving African Americans, who at the end of the film travel on a starship to another planet to build a free society there without racism. According to cultural critic Tricia Rose, Sun Ra's images of flying saucers suggest a new vision of technology, which is not limited to destructive rationality, but involves a symbiosis with spiritual and ethical values.
Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney, in their science fiction stories, try to outline the contours of the hybrid societies of the future. In these societies, the line between norm and deviation, human and non-human, nature and culture, is being destroyed, hierarchies and exceptions are dissected and criticized. Their heroes and heroines are not conquerors and conquerors, but marginal characters transforming themselves in unpredictable, always different unstable worlds.
The Afrofuturist future is not about maintaining stable forms and relationships, but about using diverse cultural resources and creating opportunities for mutations necessary for survival.
It is important that to build images of the future, Afrofuturism uses not only texts, but also music and visual images (including clothing) to go beyond the limits of thinking and imagination, limited by Western logocentrism.
British-Ghanaian writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun believes that it is African American music of the 20th century (from jazz and funk to jungle and hip-hop) that is the most vivid expression of otherness and posthumanism - important characteristics of Afrofuturism. The African American population, as a result of slavery and subsequent oppression, was excluded from the human category and endowed with the status of another, alien, and music was not a means of overcoming this alienation, but its expression. As Ashun writes, in African American music, the human appears as a meaningless and dangerous category.
However, while criticizing racism and expressing the African American community's experiences of oppression are central themes of Afrofuturism, it has an uneasy relationship with African American political movements. So, for example, Sun Ra at some point began to separate himself from the Black Power movement, at odds with him in his understanding of race: he considered it an illusion, which equally embraced both white and non-white. Samuel Delaney was also critical of the concept of race:
In general, Afrofuturism is in a rather controversial relationship with movements based on identity politics. By sharing criticism of racial or gender oppression, he transcends stable categories by imagining post-racial, post-gender, post-human, and post-species societies. Such a future does not fit into ready-made categories and thinking patterns.
If Afrofuturism develops most productively in the sphere of culture, then another most important decolonial movement - Zapatism - has a direct political dimension. This movement, after a series of military clashes with Mexican government forces, managed to create a number of autonomous zones in the state of Chiapas.
In their political practices zapatistasadhere to the principles of horizontality, universal equality, collective decision-making and direct democracy. These principles are based on both anarchist ideology and following the practices and values of the Maya. They use the appeal to the past as a productive opportunity to create alternative forms of communication and coexistence. The Zapatista Maya insist that they have their own special temporality, which implies a certain rhythm and speed of imagination and the processes of thinking, discussion and decision-making, and refuse to obey the time frames that the Mexican government is trying to impose on them.
The appeal to Mayan culture helps the Zapatistas to rethink the concept of territory. If from the point of view of the state and corporations, the territory is an empty space, a resource that can be captured and used as you like, then for the Maya it is inextricably linked with their future and their history: with the spirits of ancestors inhabiting it, magical and natural forces. In this regard, the thinking of the Indians is much more environmentally friendly, because time, space and life itself are directly connected in it.
As the Argentine scholar Walter Mignolo writes, Zapatism is an unstable and undefined product of a double translation between modern political theories and Mayan cosmological views, between current problems and local history.
The future the Zapatistas are trying to create is not based on a linear view of time, ideas of progress, efficiency, and other Western ideals. But it does not seek only to preserve some kind of traditional society.
The Zapatistas try to build the world not around production and technological cycles and the rate of circulation of capital, not around unchanging customs - but around communities that include both nature and people, not only living ones, but also dead and future generations.
Another world is impossible if you fit into the rhythms dictated by the oppressors. The Zapatistas are moving towards their future at a pace that is consistent with their own ideas, capabilities and circumstances. Maybe they do it slowly, but they don't go anywhere.
But not in all cultures, the future is something distant, new, something that is just coming. Many communities think of time as cyclical rather than linear. For example, in Hindu cosmology there is a concept of four eras, yugas, successively replacing each other, through which the existence of the world and societies constantly passes. After the end of the last era (Kali-Yuga), the first (Satya-Yuga) begins again. Accordingly, the future, present and past here are very relative concepts.
Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Cohn, who describes the life of the Runa people from the Amazon, says that for them the future is represented by the spirits of deceased ancestors (since the future of every person is death, it is also a transition to a new form of existence) living in the forest.
Thus, in the culture of the rune, the future coexists with the present and, moreover, is able to actively influence it.
As the Australian researchers I. Milojevic and S. T. Inayatulla note, such a characteristic of the European idea of the future, as fantastic, in many cultures "is a part of everyday life [in which] the myth is not separated from the lived reality." As an example, they cite Hindu mystics who are able to make astral travel and visit other planets (aliens, in turn, visit Earth to learn wisdom from local gurus). Moreover, the Hindu concept of rebirth suggests that everyone has the opportunity to be born on another planet in their next life. Krishna already resides on a real planet - Gloka Vindravan, and Brahma - on the Brahmaloka planet (which is also undergoing destruction, like all planets).
West Indian philosopher and revolutionary Franz Fanon, one of the most influential anti-colonialists, wrote about the culture of North Africa in his book A World of Hungry and Slaves:
If the European Enlightenment claimed to bewitch the world, ridding it of everything magical, otherworldly and supernatural (but only in order to replace the old fetishes for the worship of reason, progress and capital), then some non-European cultures continue to live in a fantastic world inhabited by a wide variety of entities. This fantasy can be an obstacle on the way to certain models of the future (for example, Fanon criticized the superstitions of the inhabitants of North Africa, as they hinder the acquisition of genuine political consciousness and the struggle for a worthy future and against the colonialists), but it can also be considered as an alternative model of understanding it.
According to the Zapatistas, one of the goals of their struggle is to build a world in which many different worlds can coexist.
Perhaps this is one of the meanings of decolonization - not in creating a single version of the future for all, but in an effort to provide an opportunity for building different versions of it (and different versions of the past): technological, magical, fantastic, astral, utopian and dystopian, or even worlds that exist outside of the concept of the future.
Ziauddin Sardar calls such a world post - normal - in it, none of the versions can claim the status of a hegemonic, obligatory norm, in relation to which all others will be considered deviations. However, perhaps we are not waiting for the onset of a golden age and a harmonious utopia of coexistence, but the continuation of colonial and militaristic battles for the destruction and further capitalist hyperexploitation of natural resources. After them, there will be no future on this planet.
