Responsibility is important when putting stuff on here also, not about any diasporic wars bc we all dying out here. Firstly, citing & thanking @fanoniscanon for calling me in privately to further unpack & offer some considerations. Its gonna be longish thread innit. https://twitter.com/itsJaninebtw/status/1277635954031898630
Using abbreviations. AFAM= African American, African Caribbean= AfriCarib, New World African = NWA i.e. those exp slavery i.e. AfAms/ AfriCaribs, Continental Africa=Cont. A. I will be thinking through this messily & in contradiction bc fuck colonial frames of logic/ rationality!
I saw the trailer, its definitely Beyonce pulling on Afro/Black Futurism tropes, its flatten/ homogenises different African cultures as one homogenised entity, Jade aka @divanificent rightly dubbed it 'wakandification.' The impacts being its neo colonial representation of...
Cont.A being the 'dark continent' existing in a romanticised notions i.e. Kings/Queen context devoid of specificity, location or historical accuracy. This is the impacts of imperialism that NWA subscribe too, but why? Why do we (I do this too) do this?
When someone like Bey reproduces visuality of Cont.A in this way it serves the purpose of white supremacist anti blackness to reduce Cont.A to inauthentic visual markers which strips people living on the Con &its diaspora of their agency i.e. self representation
This has many ethical impacts bc proper research, working with folks from Cont could have resolved some of this, Beyonce is a commodity/brand &would still evacuate the resources of this labour. i.e. its her project & not one with collaborators. Celebrity culture=capitalism
I also think there is another set psychology going on here that fuels this homogenising. The pervasive Afriphobia aka anti-blackness, we NWA are socialised with, to destabilise our Africanness & to adopt the IDs of our colonisers, creates fragmentated ID /experiences
many of us flatten, romanticise, myth-make, Cont.A as this one big place for us to locate ourselves somewhere but nowhere simultaneously, we are try to root ourselves in stability bc via the "west" we experience chaos, instability disorientation consequently we adopt imperial
lens to see Africa as this mythical motherland, unaffected by white western modernity. We are imperfect beings & we hunger for perfect place/ refuge for our Blackness, where white supremacy does not exist (not true). This kinda explains pan africanism, hotepery, afrocentricism
With this logic comes massive flaws bc its reproduces colonial frames bc how can this perfect place have complexities. To give ourselves stability, structure & fixed identity we conjure what we think Cont.A should be often losing sight that its reproducing colonial frames
Re the OP @fanoniscanon &I had DM convo, won't be able to relay it all, but key points(?). Focusing on Ghana bc that is their heritage - but a framework can be applied for African nations with multiple ethnic groups where power & coloniality creates conflict, erasure & exclusion
Knowledge production via ethnic dominance is crucial here, when NWA 'adopt' visuality of Cont.A like dress. @fanoniscanon explained that Ashanti / Akan dominance is the visuality that gets 'exported' due to ethno nationalism & erasure of ethnic groups with less power/visibility
Knowledge production also works in which ethnic groups get to preserve/ document their culture via books i.e. colonial frames to export knowledge - again its ethnic groups with the most visibility, power&resources who get to dictate 'Ghana' to the world.
NWA accept this w/o criticality this is not down to 'laziness' but whose knowledge is accessible & why i.e. Sankofa is flattened as Ghanian national representations. NWA don't often locate it as Akan. This is commodification/ capitalism, & maintains power of dominant groups
Having regional understanding is key, to 'properly' understand this does require scholarship to understand the complexities & nuances of this. Unless you are rooted from that group this is lost on you, but this is where ethics/ collaboration is key in Bey's case.
NWA don't acknowledge power dynamics, intra ethnic conflicts, historicising & coloniality bc it disrupts / destabilise an identity we are trying to stabilise & keep fixed - even if this erases, marginalises politics of the place we are tying to connect with
whether that is micro i.e. think Afro Punk or macro Beyonce/ Black Panther. Even though our imagination is rooted in imperialism for many this visuality is better, bc complexity destabilise the myth & means fragmentation. So the myth is only one's access to a constructed truth.
To kinda end, the trailer Beyonce made is really for NWA not Cont.A or its diaspora. It is for us to consume this myth making project, to make us feel 'whole,' to give us self-esteem i.e. remember who you are even if white supremacy erased our lineage. The affects of chattel
slavery is so deep that many of us are still too psychologically fragile to conceive cont.A beyond myth making terms. Someone like Beyonce probably think this is ground breaking/noble work w/o realising the various dynamics at play.
This is not to excuse or stan Beyonce, but the homogenising/romatinicising of Cont.A is a reoccurring motif by many AfAm that is fuelled by racial capitalism but also the psychological affects of slavery as white supremacist violence debilitates us to think beyond mythical terms
To end, end, the project of "recovery" is ultimately and will always exist with limitations and be problematics
You can follow @itsJaninebtw.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: