In the Black fantastic

The worlds of a "Black fantastic" are surely the worlds we need: places where Black life arrives fantastically confident, in embrace of any manner of technology, spiritually grounded, ready to defend the world, and moving beyond gendered regulations or sects. Writer and curator Ekow Eshun's catalog publication, created in response to his 2022 Hayward Gallery exhibition In the Black Fantastic, offers a carefully curated peek into the expansive imaginations of dozens of influential contemporary artists who work with the Black form. Eshun has created an arresting visual catalog with an imaginative concept that matches the expansive vision of its artist cohort alongside five short pieces commissioned or compiled for the book. This book serves as an extension to the successful show that Eshun curated, which ran from June to September 2022. Eshun writes in the way that curators always must, introducing fairly basic ideas that are certainly familiar to most academics working in these areas, for instance, W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness being well known to Black studies scholars, or J. M. W. Turner's painting The Slave Ship (1840), originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying -- Typhoon Coming On, being well known to scholars of art history. Happily, Eshun jump-cuts often, moving quickly from obvious source material to the requisite descriptions of the objects included in the show to historical renderings that distinguish Afrofuturism from magic realism or the titular realm of the Black fantastic. As scholarship, Eshun's introductory essay follows its own star, choosing fifty or so literary, moving-image, or visual object events to craft a genealogy. This movement across time and genre arrives well written, to be sure, but so incredibly selective and personal to the author as to be nearly impenetrable as art history. Readers will note that there must be an infinite number of ways to choose objects and events of interest to the assembly that is the Black fantastic, and Eshun's approach to navigating through time and artworks certainly compels. Other texts in the book are exceedingly short and to the point. Eshun divides the volume into three broad sections, each with a different thematic focus and a brief introductory essay: "Invocation" connects fantasy across independent and Hollywood films and music videos, "Migration" is concerned with space travel, and "Liberation" touches on utopia as personal liberty. These tiny essays provide the bridge between commissioned works from Kameelah L. Martin and Michelle D. Commander and short excerpts from previously published texts by Adriano Elia, W. Ian Bourland, and Tobias Wofford. These excerpts are printed with excitement as smaller-format flat paper inserts, magically set off from the glossy, coffee-table format of the main book. MIT Press publishes beautiful books, indeed. The inserts and the essays go a bit deeper into ideas of contemporary thought than Eshun allows himself. Martin wonders at "conjure feminism," an "epistemological framework for understanding Black women's work and experiences" that "privileges women's sacred knowledge and folkloric practices of spirit work" (p. 139). This persuasive short essay lists Black women engaged in conjuring moments, or Black feminist voodoo aesthetics, across historical eras and locations. Examples lead to the assertion that these aesthetics are only available to an in-group fluent in "the experiential knowledge and spiritual practices of Black women" (p. 144). Commander explores tales of flying Africans, prevalent in any rendering of African diasporic literature, beginning with data points that design space allocated for captive Africans on ships like the Brookes, which launched from Liverpool in 1871. The focus on flight here covers the same basic points that Commander treats in the fantastic book Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (2017). Here, Commander's poetic ending reminds readers that "The water brought us. We must remember to ride the air" (p. 224). In all, the writing here is very basic for advanced researchers or students in any discipline, excepting those who have no point of entry for Black studies or art history. For most Choice readers, though, these are appetizing bits that point toward the need for more in-depth reading and thinking with the dozens of other texts included in the very helpful "Film, Music and Reading Lists" at the end, presumably compiled by Eshun. This terrific contribution includes the basic texts in all three genres that might constitute an opening array of speculative future documentation. While still an excessively subjective list of "favorites" that someone has assembled, the unexpected and passed-over gems collected here are worth careful consideration to any reader. Above all, In the Black Fantastic is a dynamic art show catalogue and visual essay. Its excellent layout, nuanced color quality, and sophisticated printing execution provide the needed coherence and substance for any reader to peruse. For those who have never seen work by Nick Cave, Sedrick Chisom, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke, Wangechi Mutu, Rashaad Newsome, Chris Ofili, Tabita Rezaire, Cauleen Smith, Lina Iris Viktor, or Kara Walker, the volume includes representations of objects by them that were featured in the 2022 show. They are, in a word, spectacular, each and every one. The book does not linger over the works of these star artists though; it continues to offer over two hundred images by artists working within Eshun's line of sight. If anything, the volume suffers from an abundance of provocative and compelling imagery representing artworks that could never be contained in a single museum show, or perhaps a single publication, anywhere. This is undoubtedly the overwhelming sensory challenge offered by In the Black Fantastic: hundreds of incredible images are offered up within its three hundred pages. Most of the images are not referenced in the slight writings referred to above. Instead, Eshun clearly expects readers to find their own way imagining worlds beyond worlds of Black creativity. Any page might provoke a lingering in time within the imagination of the artist's work at hand. Taken together, the multiplicity of patterns confirms an incalculable potential of Black multiplicities. Remarkable cover art from novels float near exceedingly well-reproduced visual artworks. Photographs of dynamic sculptures arrive near movie stills or advertisement posters. Dozens of LP album art wind through the bustling assemblage, asserting the visual dynamism of an often overlooked form of popular art. Readers can spend hours and hours with these rich, eventful images. Choosing favorites seems crass. That said, Fabrice Monteiro's Untitled #6 (from The Missing Link series), 2014, offers an incredible vision of future-past survivorship, a man and child resplendent in black-and-white fashion suitable for a sandstorm or a sublime social gathering. The child stares at readers, while the man, masked up beyond his nose, looks with passionate resolve toward off-camera events along an unknowable horizon. A multi-generational Black future of care and communion in costuming and stance, indeed. Readers can turn to any page--literally, any page!--and be amazed by visions of beyond. Puleng Mongale's Indlela Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili (Ask Those Who Have Gone Before), 2020, feels at first glance like some sort of AI-generated acceleration of a single figure. Spending time with the image, readers can only marvel at its simultaneous embrace of and resistance to symmetry: the ways the central figure recurs as if in a multi-dimensional arrival across time, holding a shining yellow full moon gently while offering their gaze toward us in knowing admiration and supplication. "We can do better," the central figure seems to implore, even as darkening skies and mountains give way to an expansive sea at mid-tide, crashing rocks on an impossible, otherworldly shoreline. This description pales in comparison to the actual image, to say nothing of the thirty-two manifestations of the central image standing to encourage readers' response. Like nearly everything in this volume, the image is remarkable in every respect. Oddly, some images receive explanatory labels, as they might in a gallery exhibition, while most do not. The labels read the same way they would in a museum: confident, clear, and a bit basic, as if to be accessible to casual visitors. This is a challenge that curators face regularly: museums and their catalogues are generally designed to be understandable to anyone who might face their contents, while higher-level academic writing might assume a level of familiarity with basic and intermediate concepts that need not be repeated in publication. Reading along, it becomes difficult to know whether Eshun might want to write something a bit more nuanced and substantial than the shorthand literary passages here convey. As an example, a passage on the TV drama series Lovecraft Country states that the series "invited consideration of the nightmare realities of racialized America and also offered a reckoning with the legacy of Lovecraft, a hugely influential author who was also an avowed racist" (p. 122). No matter, the achievement of this volume is in the curation of its images and the careful layout and attention to visual detail. In the Black Fantastic predicts a future of art curation and its publication that encourages imaginative reasoning from worldview to worldview, with collisions of ideas among a diverse group of artists brought in tension to each other by an author committed to expand our shared understanding of what it means to explore galaxies of adventurous, compelling Black thought. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Thomas F. DeFrantz, Northwestern University