Signs of Struggle, Songs of Sorrow: Notes on the Politics of Uncertainty in the Films of John Akomfrah

It is said that the end of the 1970s marked the beginning of a time of disorientation and disappointment. The dreams of emancipation and liberation that once were longed for gave way to an overwhelming sense of mourning: mourning for crumbled hopes and broken promises, mourning for possibilities that turned in on themselves, a mourning seemingly without end. Deprived of the certainties that supported revolutionary dreams, politically engaged cinema was bound to explore other forms of sensibility that had to come to terms with their own uncertainty. The work of the Black Audio Film Collective and John Akomfrah responded to this challenge by reawakening the phantoms of history and infusing the act of mourning with the possibility of collective agency. Between documentary and allegory, between letting go and moving on, Akomfrah’s films weave a sensible tissue from histories of fractured horizons and absent ruins that refuses to act as an urgent response to the “state of emergency.” Instead, what is explored is a politics of uncertainty that takes grief by the hand and generates sites of memory that leave room for a reimagination of the future.