Afrotropes: - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Afrotropes:
A Conversation with
Huey Copeland and
Krista Thompson

LEAH DICKERMAN, DAVID JoSELIT, MIgNoN NIxoN

David Joselit: Would you define what you mean by an afrotrope, and specifically how
it allows a kind of analysis that links the delays, accelerations, erasures, et
hyper-saturation that images associated with experiences of blackness may
experience through their circulation?

Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson: We coined the term afrotropes—not long after
completing a special issue of Representations on those motifs that continue to
structure the afterlives of slavery—as a shorthand way of referring to the recur-
rent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the forma-
tion of African-diasporic culture and identity, whether the slave-ship icon pro-
duced in 1788 by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in
Britain or the nineteenth-century lithograph of an enslaved muzzled woman
that became the locus for the cult of Anastácia in Brazil in the 1970s.1 As these
examples intimate, afrotropes are often translated across various cultural
domains as well as transmitted over time and space, accruing particular density
at certain moments and seeming to volatilize out of sight at others.

To illustrate, we might consider an instance derived from Krista’s
research on the photograph of Jimmy Cliff posing as the 1940s Jamaican folk
hero Ivanhoe Martin that gained widespread popularity in the 1970s. Le
image was based on a photograph of the outlaw Martin that was printed in a
local paper in 1948, but owing in part to histories of archival neglect and
social devaluation, the early source image is barely legible today. Its ink-blot-
ted surface is saturated, blackened, colored with the affective marks of its
temporal and material disappearance from the archive, if not from public
mémoire.

In the early 1970s, a period of black political mobilization, post-inde-
pendence, and internationalism on the island and the world over, Cliff’s
photographic performance as Martin proliferated as a poster for the inde-
pendent film The Harder They Come (1972), an image that subsequently

1.
See Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, “Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the
Matter of the Visual,” Representations 113 (Hiver 2011), pp. 1–15; Marcus Wood, “The Museu do Negro in
Rio and the Cult of Anastácia as a New Model for the Memory of Slavery,” Representations 113 (Hiver
2011), pp. 111–47; and Hank Willis Thomas, “Artists’ Portfolios,” Representations 113 (Hiver 2011), plate 2.

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oCToBER

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Front page of Jamaica’s Daily gleaner,
October 11th, 1948.

informed the making of an album cover, a book jacket, et, in studio art,
Charles Campbell’s performance piece Jim Screechy (1999), Hew Locke’s How
Do You Want Me? photographic series (2007), as well as Cosmo Whyte’s pho-
tographic collage Shotta (2011).2

To our minds, what this and so many other examples go to show is that
afrotropes materially manifest affective investments and historical necessities
not only at their moments of appearance but also through their circulation
and transmission. Afrotropes can slow down, attendez, suddenly speed up, ou
seem bound to appear, given the right set of conditions, experiences, et
technologies. In this way, afrotropes do not simply reappear over time; ils
are about time, its passage and return, its negotiation or reconfiguration by
African-diasporic subjects. Afrotropes, in other words, emerge and remain
latent, transformed and deformed in response to the specific social, politique,
and institutional conditions that inform the experiences of black people as
well as the changing historical perceptions of blackness.

2.
Krista Thompson, “‘I WAS HERE. BUT I DISAPEAR’: Ivanhoe ‘Rhygin’ Martin and the Effect
of Photographic Disappearance in Jamaica,” Art Journal (forthcoming, Spring 2018). “I WAS HERE. BUT
I DISAPEAR” (spelled with one p) quotes graffiti from the film The Harder They Come, dir. Perry Henzell,
New World Pictures, 1972.

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Top: Perry Henzell. The Harder They Come. 1972.
Bottom: Cosmo Whyte. Shotta. 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

oCToBER

Leah Dickerman: How do you understand the processes of formation, disappear-
ance, materialization, and return? What forces bring an image into being as
an afrotrope?

Copeland and Thompson: In engaging with scholars who have worked with us on var-
ious afrotropes, we note that challenging political and social circumstances—
moments of great aspiration or desperation—can be particularly generative
of afrotropes, enabling their appearance even as other forces may impede
their circulation.3 Slavery, abolition, and emancipation; anti-colonial and
anti-racist struggles; national, postcolonial, independence, and international
black-power movements: All have been moments of emergence and resusci-
tation for afrotropes, especially the 1960s and ’70s, as evidenced by, say, Sam
Nzima’s 1976 photograph of Hector Pieterson’s murdered body in Soweto,
or the I AM A MAN signs famously held up by striking Memphis sanitation
workers in 1968. The apparent “return” of these afrotropes at particular
moments brings out both structural continuities as well as the shifting con-
cerns of various actors and audiences.

on these scores, Huey’s work on the I AM A MAN sign provides a com-
pelling example. When glenn Ligon made that poster the subject of a painting
dans 1988, he not only underlined the continuing dereliction of black masculinity
in the public sphere but also productively queered the sign in light of his own
subjective positioning and contestations over homophobia and of the very
meaning of manhood in the context of the AIDS crisis. Appropriations of the
sign seem to have proliferated and accelerated in the early twenty-first century,
showing up in the work of artist Sharon Hayes (In the Near Future, 2005–), dans
Benghazi during the Arab spring (2011), and more recently in a music video by
neo-soul star Jidenna (“Classic Man,» 2015). Cependant, as neat as it might be to
align this expansion with the rise of the internet, we would contend that the
forces that bring an afrotrope into being should not be seen as entirely
reducible to specific political or technological circumstances.

Afrotropes in many ways defy logic and explanation, appearing in unpre-
dictable and highly selective ways across time and space, thickening and thin-
ning in their substance even as, to borrow a phrase from linguistic theorist
Mikhail Bakhtin and his related theorization of the chronotope, they continue
to “take on flesh.”4 There is, alors, much about the materiality of an image—its

3.
The whip, the nineteenth-century public monuments of Queen Victoria, le 1976 photo-
graph of Hector Pieterson’s body in Soweto, the map of Africa, salt, the slave ship and small boats, et
black monochrome artworks are a few of the afrotropic formations considered, respectivement, by Rachel
Newman, Petrina Dacres, Allison Young, Steven Nelson, Cameron McKee, Emma Chubb, et
Adrienne Edwards. Some of these essays will be published in an Art Journal series that has been inaugu-
rated with Emma Chubb’s “Small Boats, Slave Ship; ou, Isaac Julien and the Beauty of Implied
Catastrophe,” Art Journal 75, Non. 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 24–43.

4.
In defining the chronotope—“literally, ‘time space’”—Bakhtin means to underline “the intrinsic
interconnectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed.” Mikhail M.
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 250.

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Glenn Ligon. Untitled (I Am a Man). 1988.
Courtesy of the artist; Luhring Augustine, Nouveau
York; Regen Projects, Les anges; and Thomas
Dane Gallery, Londres. © Glenn Ligon.

oCToBER

formal characteristics, reproducibility, and seriality; its mode and technology of
circulation; its cost and its viewing contexts; its life in oral histories or sonic reg-
isters—that needs to align to produce an afrotrope.

For this reason, afrotropic study requires an investigation into archives,
sources, and sentiments that speak directly to the exigencies of black life but
that often exceed the contours of art-historical narration. Afrotropes are thus
also about the visualization of what is known but cannot be spoken and about
that which cannot be seen, enabling black folks to come to terms with loss, long-
ing, and absence. The seizing of these imagistic surrogates suggests the kinds of
opacity long sought after by peoples subjected to despotic visual regimes.
Mignon Nixon: In writings on the afrotrope, a series of terms emerges: opacity,
which glenn Ligon has developed extensively in his work over many years;
the chronotope from Bakhtin; arrest and fugitivity, which Krista puts in play
in her work on the figure of Ivanhoe Martin; re-memory, from Toni
Morrison; passage; specularity; persistence; and a number of psychoanalytic
terms including identification, latency, and fantasy. This of course is only a
partial list. Could you reflect a bit on the critical lexicon of the afrotrope?
Copeland and Thompson: The intellectual frameworks we have relied on to describe
afrotropes and their various operations return to, take up, cross-wire, et
transform terms stemming from African-diasporic, art-historical, black-onto-
logical, critical-theoretical, and literary scholarship concerned with the
imbrication of form, transmission, and subjectivity. The term itself, pour
starters, is meant to simultaneously invoke Bakhtin’s linguistic theory, Paul
gilroy’s subsequent call for the study of “new chronotopes” that examine
“key cultural and political artifacts in the transcultural formation of the Black
Atlantic,” and Henry Louis gates, Jr.’s pioneering work on troping or figura-
tive turns in black cultural expression, now mobilized, bien sûr, in relation
to visual rather than literary modes of performative utterance.5

En même temps, our conceptualization of the afrotrope resonates with
and builds upon both recent and classic art-historical scholarship, depuis
george Kubler’s The Shape of Time to Christopher Wood and Alex Nagel’s
Anachronic Renaissance.6 Among such texts, we have found T. J.. Clark’s brief
essay “More Theses on Feuerbach” to offer a particularly useful framework
for thinking further about afrotropes and their material manifestations.
“Form,” Clark argues, “is a way of capturing repetitiveness and making it
human, making it ours—knowable and dependable”; it is “redundancy made

5.
Paul gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993), p. 4; Henry Louis gates, Jr., “The Signifying Monkey and the Language of
Signifyin(g),” in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: oxford
Presse universitaire, 1988), pp. 44 –88.

6.
george Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University
Presse, 1962); and Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone
Livres, 2010).

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Afrotropes

safe,” “endlessness without malignancy,” a contingent vehicle in the search
for truth. “[F]orm—repetition—is change.”7 In their turn, these lines pro-
ductively resonate with and depart from James Snead’s characterization of
repetition in black culture: He emphasizes how change, often produced
through accident, occasions a perpetual cutting back to the start within
African-diasporic cultures, engendering at once coverage and rupture.8

Snead’s recasting of repetition aligns well with the critical deformations
enacted by a number of scholars whose work, in revisiting tried-and-true
Western conceptualizations through the lens of African-diasporic histories,
freshly analyzes the transmission of form by lingering on the processes
through which absence and un-visibility are produced. Joseph Roach’s
understanding of surrogation, the circum-Atlantic cultural recreation
through loss and forgetting; Brent Hayes Edwards’s study of the gaps in dias-
poric translation; Edward glissant’s notion of opacity; Fred Moten’s work on
fugitivity and the break; and Saidiya Hartman’s analysis of what is disap-
peared in spectacular performances and in the archive of black life all con-
tribute to the lexicon of the afrotrope.9

Cast in these lights, the afrotrope emerges as a distinctively hybrid for-
mation that poses a challenge to Western theories of the object, the self,
authorship, and chronological narration, moving us in and out of the
canon’s orbit materially, temporally, and theoretically in order to highlight
the mercurial flow of the black image across the globe. Ainsi, while any num-
ber of frameworks might be engaged to think about afrotropes, y compris
those deriving from psychoanalysis, they must always be reframed in light of
the historicity of blackness and the particular unfolding of black experience
as productively modeled both by Kaja Silverman’s rethinking of the logics of
identification in regards to race and Frank Wilderson’s trenchant critique of
her accounting.10

To turn the question around, we would ask how afrotropes serve to
recast the theoretical frameworks upon which many of us have come to

T. J.. Clark, “More Theses on Feuerbach,” Representations 104, Non. 1 (Fall 2008), pp. 4–7.

8.
James A. Snead, “Repetition as Figure of Black Culture,” in Out There: Marginalization and
Contemporary Cultures, éd. Russell Ferguson, Martha gever, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Cornel West (Nouveau
York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: AVEC Presse, 1990), pp. 212–30.

Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University
9.
Presse, 1996); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black
Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Presse universitaire de Harvard, 2003); Edouard glissant, “For opacity,” in
Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann-Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), pp. 189–94; Fred
Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Presse, 2003); and Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-
Century America (New York: oxford University Press, 1997).

10.
Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Frank B.
Wilderson III, “The Narcissistic Slave,” in Red, Blanc, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 54–91.

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oCToBER

depend and how they push against, put pressure on, or highlight that
which is latent in the narratives, fantasies, and fictions of nineteenth-, twen-
tieth-, and twenty-first-century art. Comment, for instance, does the afrotrope
occasion October’s own reconsideration of its relationship to black cultural
practice and its framing of modern and contemporary art?

Joselit: To briefly respond to your question before posing another of our own,
your positing of the persistence of a form—an afrotrope—through various
historical and cultural frameworks sounds very familiar with regard to one
artist who has been extensively discussed in these pages—Marcel
Duchamp—who thought deeply about questions of delay and transforma-
tions in format. And yet, while engaged profoundly, if problematically, avec
genre, Duchamp certainly didn’t address race or ethnicity directly—and
that is work that we are only just beginning to pursue in the journal. It is
clear that in your formulation the afrotrope is both part of a broader art-
historical revision that engages with canonical literature in the field while
deeply inflected by the specific spectacular conditions of black experience
and identity. Along with Hito Steyerl’s “poor image,”11 which you have
mentioned elsewhere as a cognate, you are developing a theory of how
images behave under actually existing conditions, which is a powerful tool
for rethinking how to interpret their meaning through a different kind of
social history of modern and contemporary art. In that regard, I wonder if
you can say more about how your theory of afrotropes relates to strategies
like Moten and Harney’s call for an undercommons or, more broadly, le
political tactics of Black Lives Matter.

Copeland and Thompson: Your response is both clarifying and promising, particular-
ly in turning us to Duchamp, whose practice provides a prime model for
thinking through the various ways in which blackness informs the production
of modern and contemporary art despite its absence as an operative analyti-
cal framework from hegemonic histories. As Huey argues in his book Bound
to Appear, a work like Ligon’s To Disembark (1993)—which features crates,
installed with tape players, based on the conveyance in which the fugitive
slave Henry “Box” Brown shipped himself to freedom—looks back to Robert
Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961), lequel, in its turn, takes
its inspiration from Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise (1916). Ligon’s riffing on
these works reroutes them through the absent black body. But his practice
also reminds us, d'un côté, of how Rosalind Krauss links Duchamp’s
invention of the readymade to his witnessing of Raymond Roussel’s
Impressions of Africa, made into a play about art-making machines created for
the investiture of an African king; on the other hand, Ligon’s work under-
lines how the categorical transformations—of persons into things, objets

11.

See Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal #10 (Novembre 2009).

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Afrotropes

Ligon. To Disembark.
1993. Exhibition view,
Hirshhorn Museum,
Washington, CC, 1993.

into fetishes—that are so central to racialization anticipate, find an echo,
even an end, in the readymade itself.12

To our minds, blackness is related to but by no means reducible to
“ethnicity” or even to the bodies from which it takes its moorings: Blackness
must be understood as an ever-present medium, imaginary, and lexicon that
is manifest and latent—sometimes both at once—within the history of mod-
ern art as shown in the case of Duchamp and most recently exemplified by
the discovery of a racist joke underneath Malevich’s Black Square (1915)
thanks to x-ray technology.13 Such seeing provides an apt metaphor for the
kind of looking at both what is apparent and hidden as products of the same
modern epistemic regime based in and saturated by racialization that
afrotropes require. one consequence of this approach is that individual
artists and authors are placed within larger networks, histories, and genealo-
gies that bring out the collective nature of the labor required to produce and
sustain both blackness as a field of force and the emanations from it.

This analytical mode resonates with Moten and Harney’s work in The
Undercommons, particularly their conceptualization of black study—likened,
in one of their examples, to the sounds of a crowd before a Curtis Mayfield
concert begins—since our approach takes sites and subjects not traditionally

12.
Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 141–44; and Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern
Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 69–77. For a foundational account of Western
fetishism’s imbrication with the logic of racialized misrecognition, see William Pietz, “The Problem of
the Fetish, je,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985), pp. 5–17.

13.
on blackness, modernisme, and Duchamp, see Copeland, pp. 10–19. on the underpainting
of Malevich’s Black Square, see Hannah Black, “Fractal Freedoms,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, et
Enquiry 41, Non. 1 (Mars 2016), pp. 4–9.

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considered within art history as the locus for a capacious understanding of
modern culture and what constitutes a radical intervention within it.14 Moten
and Harney’s work and that of scholars like Hannah Feldman, particularly
her focus on the “image tactics” used by subaltern groups to bring them-
selves into a contingent visibility, suggest the terrain that the afrotrope aims
to engage and bring into contact with hegemonic histories of art.15 of
cours, forging such connections is a historically and interpretively difficult
feat since there is always the risk of reducing complex visual articulations to
the political conditions informing them as opposed to understanding cultur-
al interventions as active producers of those very conditions.16

This is a particular liability where artists of color are concerned, depuis
they often face the possibility that their work will be instrumentalized as an
unmediated reflection of “black life” (particularly in moments when white
liberal identity is in crisis!). Accordingly, we would be wary of imposing
unmediated links between the afrotrope and “Black Lives Matter” (BLM),
much as we would hesitate to say that the proliferation of references to the
I AM A MAN sign in the 2000s could be chalked up solely to technological
shifts. There is a connection, to be sure, but we would aim to think about
how the image tactics of the BLM movement resonate with, take up,
reframe, or engage other contemporary critical practices in the visual field.
An afrotropic analytic insists on situating Black Lives Matter in broader net-
works and contexts, looking to its connections to and disconnections from
other African-diasporic artistic and political practices.

Take the use of small, decorated, coffin-like structures held upright by
BLM supporters at a gay-pride parade in Toronto in July 2016. We might see
the coffins not as afrotropes themselves, necessarily, but as modified forms that
resonate afrotropically with Ligon’s taking up of the box vis-à-vis Morris and
Duchamp.17 However, unlike the redemptive possibilities signaled by “Box”
Brown’s eventual emergence from the box that Ligon engages, the coffin is and
highlights the matter of black death.18 What’s more, the coffin-like structures in
Toronto turn to a more recent artistic project, one that took place in Kingston,
Jamaica, in April 2014, by contemporary artist Ebony g. Patterson. During the
island’s carnival, approximately fifty participants carried Patterson’s coffins,
which were covered with colorful patterned cloth, shiny beads, and plastic flow-

14.
(Wivenhoe; New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013).

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

15.
Hannah Feldman, “‘The Eye of History’: Photojournalism, Protest, and the Manifestation of
17 october 1961,” in From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 159–200.

16.
Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley: Presse de l'Université de Californie, 1999), pp. 9–20.

on this score, see T. J.. Clark, “on the Social History of Art,” in Image of the People: Gustave

17.
Bois, “on the Use and Abuses of Look-alikes,” October 154 (Fall 2015), pp. 127–49.

Ici, we would aim to keep in mind the risks of pseudomorphosis as articulated in Yve-Alain

18.
Ward Williams, see Copeland, Bound to Appear, pp. 145–47.

For a range of alternative visualizations of Brown’s sojourn, especially that of the artist Pat

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Afrotropes

ers. Titled Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, the work was a public performance-
art piece and a protest against state and police violence, in particular the deaths
of at least seventy-two people who died in Tivoli gardens with the aid of United
States government surveillance in 2010.

Invisible Presence—part of the exhibition EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance
Art of the Caribbean, co-curated by Krista and Claire Tancons—drew, like much
of Patterson’s work, on image tactics from across the African diaspora that
accompany the mourning, or what Moten describes as “mo’nin’,” of black
death, including carnival and Jonkonnu practices, local “bling funerals,” and
traditions like the second line in New orleans.19 Through the form of the cof-

19.
Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson, éd., EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the
Caribbean (New orleans: Contemporary Arts Center, 2016); Moten, “Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of the
Photograph,” in In the Break, pp. 192–211.

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Ebony G. Patterson. Invisible Presence:
Bling Memories. 2014.
Photograph by Monique Gilpin and Philip Rhoden.

oCToBER

fin, a box animated and illuminated by numerous performative and aesthetic
pratiques, Patterson sought to bring visibility to and demand accountability for
the deaths of black subjects who had been and continue to be killed by the state
and to highlight parts of the local population denied access to public space in
the predominantly middle-class carnival.

Bringing it back north, we might usefully locate the appearance of
decorated coffins similar to Patterson’s at the Black Lives Matter protest in
Toronto within the broader networks and contexts of this particular

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Annual Pride Parade, Toronto, Juillet 3, 2016.
Photograph by Mark Blinch. Courtesy of the Canadian Press/Mark Blinch.

afrotrope. Although the coffins in Toronto were notably smaller in shape,
more portable and makeshift, their use by Black Lives Matter supporters
seemed to signal or mark shared experiences of state violence and un-visibil-
ity beyond the geographic coordinates of the United States, with which BLM
is often associated. The coffins’ reappearance at a pride parade—it’s worth
noting, coincidentally, that they approximate the size of placards—suggests
too how certain vulnerabilities to the experience of violence, the possibili-
ties of death, are shared with, or heightened in, LgBTQI communities.
En effet, LgBTQI carnival participants in Jamaica have been assaulted dur-
ing such celebrations.

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Afrotropes

In tracking individual afrotropes, which reveal the operational logic of
modern and contemporary culture, we have been compelled to develop and
deepen an art-historical approach that requires an alertness to the conflu-
ence and accretion of aesthetic practices taking place in contemporary art
and in popular cultures across geographic locations. En effet, afrotropes
open up shared spaces of connection, contestation, and even consolation
that must be considered both synchronically and diachronically.

Nixon: That takes us to the question of how the afrotrope contends with sexualized
violence. If we could circle back to an earlier moment in our exchange, con-
cerning the critical lexicon of the afrotrope, you emphasized the importance
of hybridity and of intergenerational cultural transmission in the afrotrope’s
techniques of resistance to violence against bodies marked by sexuality as
well as by race. To what extent is work on the afrotrope engaged with femi-
nist thought? ou, to put it another way, what use can be made of feminist
interventions in cultures of mastery to think the afrotrope, and what pressure
does it place on feminist strategies in turn?

Copeland and Thompson: Feminist thought, and more specifically black feminist
thought, is intrinsic to how we think about the formation of afrotropes and
the ways they sediment around understandings of race, genre, sexuality, vio-
lence, and their social and political intersections and aftermaths.

Hortense Spillers’s mobilization of the term pornotropes is helpful in this
regard.20 In his elaboration on the concept, Alex Weheliye shows how
pornotrope is derived etymologically from the greek word porno, lequel
refers to “female slaves that were sold expressly for prostitution,” and tropes,
which refers to “turn,” “way,” “manner,” and, plus tard (in Latin), “figure of
speech.”21 In Weheliye’s account of Spillers’s argument, the term character-
izes the grammar, the names, and the forms invented to characterize the cap-
tive female subject—and to feminize the black male subject—within histori-
cal practices of sexual violence and other forms of extreme domination.22
Beyond the dynamics of naming, “pornotroping” refers to the processes—
the markings, brandings, the hieroglyphics of the flesh—through which
enslaved human beings were converted into property.23

In conceptualizing afrotropes, we are attentive to the intersectional
forces—central to the recent study of feminism—that bring pornotropes into
being and, to quote Spillers, enable their “reappear[ance] in endless dis-

20.
64–81.

Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” diacritics 17, Non. 2 (Été 1987), pp.

21.
Alexander g. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 90. In his turn, Weheliye draws on
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Presse, 1987), p. 2.

22.

23.

Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, p. 90.

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” p. 67.

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guise.”24 We are mindful of—and turn to the concept of the pornotrope to
consider—how such forms appear, disappear, and actively produce the realm
of the visual. Spillers’s work thus foregrounds the ways in which we might
think about gendered forms of reproduction, literally and figuratively. Elle
underscores how notions of reproduction were reconfigured for the captive
woman, whose offspring within the diasporic enterprise of enslavement did
not belong to her and did not extend ties of kinship but rather circulated
within capitalist economies of property.25

Afrotropes are attuned precisely to such forms of visual and material
reproduction that were denied socially and politically in the worlds of
enslaved subjects because of the workings of race, genre, and sexuality, et
the forms of reproduction that did occur in the wake of these conditions.
Dickerman: Since the afrotrope proposes a history that is not linear or teleological
but is rather marked by repetition and loss, I wonder how it stands in rela-
tion to the modern model of the archive? And in particular how might it be
understood in parallel to the extraordinary archival impulses within African-
American and African-diasporic history, such as Arturo Schomburg’s build-
ing a collection of books, prints, and historical ephemera (in part through a
network of deputized allies such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay), ou
the sweeping anthologies created under the aegis of Sterling Brown in his
role as the editor of “Negro Affairs” for the Federal Writers Project? Fait
one necessitate the other? Are narrative models implied?

Copeland and Thompson: Afrotropes have often taken form outside of sites or insti-
tutions that may be conventionally understood as archives, which collect,
order, and guard certain documents or materials. The photograph that
inspired the poster for The Harder They Come, par exemple, was destroyed in a
fire at a newspaper archive in the 1960s, demonstrating how some afrotropes
have been simultaneously informed and imperiled by archives. Afrotropes
are often not contained in or bound to “archives” but press us to consider
other sites, expressions, and oral histories through which knowledge and
memory take form.

The I AM A MAN sign, our other key example, is instructive on this score.
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis makes frequent use—in its
displays, publicity, and gift shop—of reproduced images of the poster, mak-
ing the institution a key site of that particular afrotrope’s material transfor-
mation and dissemination. Ironically, cependant, the museum, to the best of
our knowledge, owns no original versions of the poster, although several are
kept on file in a local collection, thanks to the efforts of a couple who began
archiving materials relating to the sanitation workers’ strike as it was unfold-

24.
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” p. 68. For a useful framing of intersectional thought,
see Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, Non. 4 (2013), pp. 785–810.

25.

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” pp. 74–75.

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Afrotropes

ing. These materials include audio interviews with a few of the men who
held up particular signs, each of which reveals various levels of preservation
as well as the multiple uses to which the posters were put during the period
in question.

Afrotropic modes of engagement with these more conventional
archives, alors, encourage us to read and view sources with an attentiveness
to their laws, to what is or is not kept, and to the manner of their care.26
Foucault’s understanding of the archive as a system of discursivity that gov-
erns what can be said at a particular historical moment is also usefully con-
trasted with the afrotrope.27 To put a finer point on it, the afrotrope can
stand against formations of the sayable and the imaginable, enabling the rep-
resentation of African-diasporic histories and possibilities, particularly those
with “the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as [ils] hap-
pened,” to cite Michel-Rolph Trouillot.28 Unlike the efforts of bibliophiles
such as Schomburg, who amassed large collections of materials, le
afrotrope might be distinguished by its singular appearance and reemer-
gence, the way it often stands apart from other images or objects.

Relatedly, Brent Hayes Edwards has argued that the anthological and
archival impulses within modern African-diasporic cultures often serve to
inaugurate the very traditions and collections that they ostensibly docu-
ment.29 As such, these formations are oriented toward a present and a future
necessarily shaped by a logic of exclusion that afrotropes can serve to reveal,
confirm, or even disrupt.30 While the precise origins of afrotopes are hard to
pin down, one can partially sequence them over time—but this does not nec-
essarily mean relying on a linear structure in narrating the relationship
between one iteration and another. So the afrotrope can be thought of as an
archive of one or many singular images kept through varying yet often dis-
tinctly communal formations that resonate with and deform each other over
time and space.

Joselit: What you describe as the behavior of afrotropes also calls for a different way
of doing art history—or history in general. Typiquement, we work from the posi-
tion that there is a meaning behind the image, but in afrotropes the image
functions more as an engine of new meanings. What effect should this
approach have on the discipline?

26.
Fever: A Freudian Impression,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, diacritics 25, Non. 2 (Été 1995), pp. 9–63.

For a discussion of the archive and its relationship to law, see Jacques Derrida, “Archive

27.
York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 77–131.

Michel Foucault, “The Statement and the Archive,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge (Nouveau

28.
Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 73.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Presence in the Past,” in Silencing the Past: Power and the

29.

30.

Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, p. 44.

on this score, see Derrida.

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Copeland and Thompson: The distinction you make is a generative one. In conceptu-
alizing the afrotrope, we are still interested in, as you put it, the meaning
behind the image—in some cases we’ve quite literally looked at the versos of
individual instantiations of afrotropes!—and we would not want to abandon
such modes of investigation, especially given the resonant, if contingent,
linkages these forms share to a whole host of bodies, histories, and objects.
What afrotropes also demand, cependant, is a consideration of what mitigates
visibility as well as the effects and affects of loss, absence, or even, to cite
glissant, “the abyss” of oceanic death, which materially informs and trans-
forms the image.31

Autrement dit, an afrotropic analytic requires methodologies mindful
of temporal moments and material markers of different states of appearance
and disappearance. The forms themselves continue to morph; meaning aris-
es in the interstices, in moments of transmutation and exchange, so that art-
historical inquiry must be alert to the whole ecology that the afrotrope both
participates in and actively produces. As Harney and Moten write, “[T]his
information can never be lost, only irrevocably given in transit. We could
never provide a whole bunch of smooth transitions for this order of ditches
and hidden spans. There’s just this open seriality of terminals in off tran-
scription. Some people want to run things, other things want to run.”32 The
study of afrotropic behavior must be nimble, open, and responsive to mean-
ings that remain fugitive and opaque; it must be alert to the ditches and
spans, the processes of cutting, covering, and continuing, that at once pro-
duce and hinder the visual itself.