L’Afrofuturismo e la crisi dell’umanesimo: prospettive recenti, visioni attuali e linguaggi futuri in Kodwo Eshun, John Akomfrah e nella musica techno

Abstract

The essay outlines the origins of Afrofuturism, comparing the philosophical and musical theories of one of its founders, Kodwo Eshun, with the languages that best express the aesthetics, the perspectives and the diasporic nature of Afrofuturism. First of all, the artistic work by director John Akomfrah, and secondarily the essential contribution of techno music as the emblem of hybridization between past and future through the black rhythms extrapolated from electronic machines in the deindustrialized city of Detroit at the end of the Nineties. Starting from the matrix it is possible to see through the significance of the afrofuturist mainstream wave of the recent years, taking into account the contemporary crisis of western humanism, which risks colonizing afrofuturism and to translate it into a new exoticism.