{"id":3129,"date":"2010-03-05T10:26:17","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T15:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=3129"},"modified":"2016-05-05T09:28:32","modified_gmt":"2016-05-05T13:28:32","slug":"mi-brain-nuh-need-visa-fi-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=3129","title":{"rendered":"Mi Brain Nuh Need Visa Fi Fly"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/a><\/p>\n

The latest Woofah<\/a><\/em> — a UK-based magazine covering the latest and greatest in bass culture — is finally out, and it’s a big, glossy whopper of an issue. What’s more, yours truly has a thinky-piece in it exploring the fraught relationship between Afrofuturist reggae musicians and the Rastas-in-Space projected by Hollywood films and sci-fi authors (big thanks to everyone who helped me catalog<\/a> the myriad instances of this trope). <\/p>\n

The article\/magazine is not available digitally, just as good ol’ print-on-paper. And all the back issues of Woofah<\/em> have sold out, so if you want to snatch up a copy head over to the Woofah<\/em> site<\/a>. Meantime, here’s a juicy quote to whet the appetite: <\/p>\n

“It’s amazing how we never die.” \u2013 Sizzla <\/p>\n

The impossible survivalism expressed in a line like Sizzla\u2019s refers of course to the contemporary, to the postmillennial perseverance of the perennially persecuted, a dubiously \u201cchosen\u201d people. \u201c4000 years,\u201d he intones, \u201cyet no one cares,\u201d projecting a legacy of slavery well into the past by yoking the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the plight of the ancient Israelites. <\/p>\n

But he could as easily be projecting into the future, joining a contrapuntal chorus of writers, producers, and artists who have imagined \u201ctechgnostic\u201d Rastafarians in any number of possible futures and alternate universes. Reggae musicians and Rastafarians themselves have, of course, contributed the lion\u2019s share of such visions, bending to their own earthy, deconstructionist purposes the devilish tricknologies they view with a healthy skepticism, turning recordings inside-out and Bibles \u201cupside-down,\u201d as British-Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall once put it. Putting on \u201ciron shirts\u201d to chase Satan from earth. Meeting Space Invaders on their own turf. Dubbing culture into a parallel universe. <\/p>\n

Taking their cue from this prophetic-dystopic tradition, right around the time that reggae and Rastafari were colonizing metropolitan spaces and media (\u201cin reverse,\u201d as Miss Louise Bennett once put it), white cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling performed their own dubbing of possible worlds, bringing remarkably colorful and unkempt futures to life through the ironic shock of dreads at the controls. If we read them generously, we might hear how, by amplifying the additive rhythms of resilient Rasta technicians, these authors remixed sci-fi\u2019s supposedly \u201craceless\u201d futures which, by default, nearly always looked white, clean, covered in chrome. In cyberpunk\u2019s dread futures, rather, archipelagos of black self-sufficiency \u2013 colonies called Zion, islands in the net \u2013 take root on the margins of unevenly developed worlds. Today\u2019s planet of slums prefigure tomorrow\u2019s improvised cybershantytowns. Rastafari stands alone. <\/p>\n

Alien and alienated, these Rastas in space \u2013 as imagined both by reggae visionaries and sci-fi writers \u2013 appear as key avatars in what some have dubbed Afrofuturism, a field of cultural production inspired by Afrodiasporic musicians, writers of black (science) fiction, and cyberpunk authors, among others. On both sides of the Black Atlantic, cultural theorists such as Mark Dery and Kodwo Eshun have outlined and elaborated what sci-fi scholar Lisa Yaszek describes, in an essay on Ralph Ellison, as \u201can intellectual aesthetic movement concerned with the relations of science, technology, and race [which] appropriates the narrative techniques of science fiction to put a black face on the future. In doing so, it combats those whitewashed visions of tomorrow generated by a global \u2018futures industry\u2019 that equates blackness with the failure of progress and technological catastrophe.\u201d <\/p>\n

And yet, the other side of the coin to this critical challenge offers a funhouse-mirror distortion of dread. Just as 1950s science fiction films gave us now quaint images of their own anxieties projected into future worlds and onto alien races, Hollywood\u2019s increasingly dreadlocked aliens of the last two decades, a timeline tracing seismic shifts in Caribbean-US demographics, gives us the postcolonial American version of sci-fi\u2019s classically temporal\/present vision of the future. Dreadful images, no doubt. But in a very different way than one finds in reggae or even cyberpunk (which nevertheless shares some strategies with Hollywood), filmic representations mobilize Rastafarian symbols \u2013 especially \u2018locks \u2013 primarily to conjure fear, danger, and militant difference. <\/p>\n

This is a story, then, of an other-worldy Jamaican music industry exchanging images and ideas with Babylonian regimes of representation. Dealing with the devil. Trading in futures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Access the article as a PDF<\/a> here. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest Woofah — a UK-based magazine covering the latest and greatest in bass culture — is finally out, and it’s a big, glossy whopper of an issue. What’s more, yours truly has a thinky-piece in it exploring the fraught relationship between Afrofuturist reggae musicians and the Rastas-in-Space projected by Hollywood films and sci-fi authors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[233,269,402,63,57,408,425,107],"class_list":["post-3129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-film","tag-futurism","tag-jamaica","tag-litcrit","tag-race","tag-reggae","tag-sci-fi","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3129"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9007,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129\/revisions\/9007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}