Angelic Aliens in Alternative Realities

Blog #3

Angelic Aliens in Alternative Realities

Akomfrah’s film, Last Angel of History addresses and examines the "cultural dislocation, alienation, and estrangement" of African- diasporic cultures, and subsequently questions the line between social reality and science fiction. In this film, scattered and displaced blacks [of African decent] are suggested to hold an attitude of a sort of wandering homelessness- in the sense that they lack a true homeland where they feel comfortable and historically connected. Instead, Blacks exist as “aliens” searching for their culture and “place”, historically as well as in the future.

Some African [descended from Africa] musicians have expressed this sense of cultural Diaspora through original and innovative “afrofuturistic” music, which often combines multiple genres of musical technique and sound, as well as techno, machine-like “futuristic” elements. Several of these artists go as far as to make suggestions about the relationship/ role of blacks in space, both historically and in the future. Two important afrofuturistic artists who are addressed by the film are: Sun Ra and George Clinton. Both of these musicians use “space” vehicles for music and suggest that black people are in a sense, “decedents from the stars”.

Sun Ra asserts a connection between the myths of ancient Egypt and the future, claiming the historic place of Africans to be beyond that which is presently recognized. He suggests the “Black” homeland is actually in another galaxy, and that he himself is a time traveler from space. George Clinton, whom is considered by some to be the “father” of funkadelic [electronic funk] music, also promotes a relationship between blacks and space; he travels from space in “the Mothership” to spread his psychedelic funk gospel.


Akomfrah imagines a "Data Thief" trickster figure who may travel across time and space with the Afrofuturist aim of recovering black cultural history while also imagining and posing alternative realities which resist oppression, racism, and cultural decay. In this action of recalling the past, yet moving toward the future, this "Data Thief," in a sense, becomes somewhat of an angel.

This notion of a “Data Thief” boldly suggested a reference/ similarity to the “gene trader” extraterrestrials of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy. If this comparison can be made, then it suggests not only an alternate reality in which the “alien” African race is superior, but instead of using their powers to abuse and enslave, they compassionately preserve the disadvantaged, dislocated human race all while objectively and patiently insisting on a “trade” which ultimately intends to incorporate, yet still eliminate their race. This idea of an alternate course of history which results in a different version of the present t is important because it corresponds to the film’s assertion that, “Science fiction doesn’t try to tell the future, rather a distortion of the present”. In applying this concept to Butler’s trilogy, the suggestion is then that the “alien” race which is representative of the African/ Black race is essentially a race of “angels” who strive to preserve the “data” of past/other races in their projects and plans for the future. “Some of what makes us human will survive, just as some of what makes them oankali will survive.” (Butler p. 282)


Also, in considering the "cultural dislocation, alienation, and estrangement" reality of African- diasporic cultures, this film questions the line between social reality and science fiction, as many science fiction stories deal with the experience of feeling displaced and estranged from any stable, familiar environment/ situation, as well as looming uncertainty and lack of control over one’s future. Just as this theme is explored in Butler’s Trilogy, it is also central to The Space Traders, by Derrick Bell, in which a superior extraterrestrial race visits a damaged, toxic planet Earth and offers the United States the “trade” of gold, the overall restoration of the environment, and a safe nuclear engine and alternative fuel (among other things) in exchange for all the US African Americans. The alien race reveals no motive or suggestion of their intentions for the 20 million Black American citizens they request, and the country must decide whether to make the “trade” or not. In this case, the [African American] race must also face a terrifying fate over which they have no concept of or control over. Within this science fiction story, the “Last Angel” motive of presenting a “distortion of the present, rather than a prediction of the future” is even addressed by the characters themselves, who imagine not only an altered present reality, but the implications and future consequences of such an alternative.
“But, Gleason,” his wife asked, “Would our lives have really been better had we fooled the country into voting against the trade? If the Space Traders were to depart, carrying away with them what they and everyone else says can solve our major domestic problems, wouldn’t people increasingly blame us blacks for increases in debt, pollution, and fuel shortages? We might have saved ourselves- but only to face here a fate as dire as any we face in space.” (Bell p. 354)