Focussing on the career of the artist John Akomfrah, I propose that his audio-visual essays render montage allegorically to conceptualise history and critically address the afterlives of colonialism and slavery. Akomfrah’s works, I argue, demand interpretations which evaluate their theoretical implications. In response to this call and to Akomfrah’s expressed interest in the philosopher Walter Benjamin, my project stages an encounter between the two over their shared engagement with questions of allegory, history, and montage. My research is led by Akomfrah’s works; however, the development of the relation between Akomfrah and Benjamin is mutually illuminating. It unfolds over the course of project through close readings of a selection of Akomfrah’s and Benjamin’s works, leading to critical, historical insight on their intersecting critiques. While situated in different contexts, both Akomfrah and Benjamin challenge de-politicised, de-temporalised, positivist concepts of history and their attendant humanist tradition; both are concerned with the use of form and montage to produce a change of perspective; and for both allegory is key to their criticality. The encounter also reveals differences which I attend to. My thesis is woven through with readings of texts on post-coloniality, psychoanalysis, and diasporic histories; these allow me to elaborate my interpretations of Akomfrah’s practice. A vital theoretical concept for my project is ‘articulation’. Its use in a structuralist Marxist tradition figures an effort to think about social formation and the temporality of allegory. The concept enables my interpretations of montage, essayism, post-coloniality, and the translations of archival material in Akomfrah’s practice. I argue that, through the use of a time-based, mimetic medium, allegory, essayism, and multi-channel form, Akomfrah finds a unique position from which to explore the legacies of colonialism and slavery. In the process, his work uncovers the articulated process of colonial afterlives and gestures to their rearticulation and, therefore, to new forms of being historical.
