The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology

Abstract

There has always been an intrinsically “hauntological” dimension to recorded music. But Derrida’s concept of hauntology has gained a new currency in the 21st century, when music has lost its sense of futurism, and succumbed to the pastiche-and retro-time of postmodernity. The emergence of a 21st century sonic hauntology is a sign that “white” culture can no longer escape the temporal disjunctions that have been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience since Africans were first abducted by slavers and projected from their own lifeworld into the abstract space-time of Capital. Time was always-already out of joint for the slave, and Afrofuturism and hauntology can now be heard as two versions of the same condition.