Monad, Database, Remix

Abstract

This chapter is an ambitious exercise in enfolding-unfolding aesthetics. The Last Angel of History, a 1995 movie by John Akomfrah and Black Audio Film Collective and founding text of Afrofuturism, models manners of unfolding lost African-diasporic histories. There is a manner of unfolding that prepares the audience by creating new embodiments; unfolding with urgent élan of histories almost entirely lost; a protective aniconism that refuses to unfold. When history cannot be unfolded, fabulation kicks in, and the fluent unfolding technique of the remix. The Last Angel of History detects clues in databases that inspire Marks to unfold the deep time in which algorithmic knowledge traveled from Africa and West Asia into Europe and the Americas, including in the possession of enslaved Africans and their descendants. The Otolith Group's Hydra Decapita and Gabrielle Tesfaye's The Water Will Carry Us Home question whether this lost history can be fabulated.