Pirates Choice

The sixth chapter shows how new technologies have given rise to a set of practices that pirate, informalize and distribute the sonic archives of transnational black solidarity traced throughout the book, potentially opening participation in pan-African imaginaries to new subjects. Beginning by examining pirated audio technologies in two Senegalese films, Camp de Thiaroye (1987) and Ça Twiste àò Poponguine (1992), the chapter notes how nostalgic evocations of gramophone listening recall the heady political possibilities of earlier moments before moving to three more recent works. Music forges new publics in Akomfrah’s 1987 film, The Last Angel of History, which traces the “mothership connection” between Africa and experimental diasporic music. Ken Bugul’s 2005 novel Rue Félix-Faure relies on a blues soundtrack for an emerging transnational feminist solidarity. And the Heliocentrics’s internet radio project, the Pan-African Space Station, hacks into the future archive of solidarity as an exploration mission that has yet to dock.

Art · Art history · Blues · Humanities · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Punk · Sociology · Solidarity · Visual arts · African history and culture studies · Law