The Black Intellectual in the African DiasporaThe Example of Stuart Hall

This conversation served as the keynote address for the opening of the Callaloo Conference at Oxford University celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Callaloo.

An Opening

BOGUES:

I want to begin by thanking Dr. Charles Rowell for asking me to do this conversation with John Akomfrah. So following his request, that is what we are going to try and do up here. I am not going to give a talk on Stuart Hall. Instead I am going to talk to John about a particular documentary, The Stuart Hall Project.¹ The title of the conversation that Charles asked me to do was called, “The Black Intellectual in the African Diaspora: The Example of Stuart Hall.”

Let me begin by saying a few words about John Akomfrah. John is a noted filmmaker who has directed several films. He began his journey as filmmaker when he belonged to and was a leading figure in that remarkable film collective, Black Audio Film Collective.² Critics now say that this collective produced some of the most “poetic and allusive” films of the period including what is now understood by many as the signature film of that period, Handsworth Songs (1986). In 1995 he directed the Last Angel of History, a film on Afro-Futurism with a rift on Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History.” And today after forming his own company along with Lina Gopaul, Smoking Dogs Films, he has continued to direct films like Nine Muses, Auto Da Fé, and the stunning The Unfinished Conversation. Over the last decade or so he has further deepened and sustained a specific sensibility. It is one which was there before but now he has created a distinctive visual grammar. When he was working with Black Audio, the films he directed had at their core the archive, and if you look for example at Handsworth Songs, you would see the ways in which the archive was used as a montage to both shape and tell the story. The archive was both the spine and the content of the film producing an aesthetic of the real.³ The real is deployed in John’s work to create a certain kind of cinematic practice to tell the story of black lives, particularly in Britain. It is the real because there is no separation between the external product, the film that we see, and the internal making of the film. Language does not separate domains. Rather through a visual conjunction the film is sutured as an exploration. In the last of couple years, as a film director, what he has done in my opinion is to create a certain kind of cinematic grammar in which the visual is like an elongated sign: one delicately fine-tuned with an aesthetic, one which Stephen Alexis the Haitian writer and intellectual would call a “marvelous realism.” But at the core of this elongated sign and aesthetic is a preoccupation with the work of the real.

Take for example Nine Muses. The story is one of migration, a theme which John is preoccupied with. Here his directing produces a distinctive, artistic sensibility. One in which a new cinematic grammar is being worked out. Every chapter in this film is elongated with layers folding into each other. Perhaps this cinematic grammar may be connected to what Arthur Jafa calls BVI: “black visual intonation.”⁴ This is critical artistic practice in which, as Jafa says, “black cinema replicates the power, beauty and alienation of black music.” Arthur Jafa, Greg Tate, and John are deep friends and one has to think about what that artistic friendship might mean for each other’s work. In my view Akomfrah’s work has the power of a real, not just the power of the black music, but the power of a real, a marvelous assemblage and tableau of sounds, of color which evokes and provokes. This is crucial because when I think about this particular work that we are discussing today, The Stuart Hall Project, one in which revolution, politics, culture, and the New Left are all...