The Nine Muses: Recalibrating Migratory Aesthetics

With John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010) the complex vestiges of belonging in post-imperial Britain move beyond the archaeological and contestatory logics of his debut film Handsworth Songs (1986). Because of his films’ political import, themes that were black or diaspora-related, use of archival footage, street reportage, and re-enactment, Akomfrah’s oeuvre is often situated under the rubric of political modernism. While this emphasis has garnered fecund interpretations, this article proposes a complementary approach, one suggested by The Nine Muses itself. Motivated by renewed interest in the archive and tableau vivant, I read the film through complementary optics that might be generative for a renewed study of how this film’s specific reconstruction of the past elicits a space where the phenomenological, the aesthetic, and the hauntological come to the fore. The film’s overall framing of real pasts, overlapping archived moments with mixed modalities that reanimate the very idea of movement, suggest how these varied forms might elicit or revivify affective imaginaries for futures after the postcolonial.