Digitopia and the spectres of diaspora

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article (an edited transcript of the keynote address given by John Akomfrah at the ‘Re-presenting Diasporas’ conference in Exeter, July 2007) explores a series of debates, practices and challenges that have taken place in the last twenty years or so within an area of study that could be loosely defined as a cinema of the black diasporas. It begins with the premise that questions of diasporic identities and diasporic or postcolonial cinema are, in fact, already implicit in debates around the emergence and development of digital cinema. It considers the possibilities and implications of this overlap between the diasporic and the digital by analysing three ‘conceptual tyrannies’: ‘the tyranny of propriety’, ‘the tyranny of time’ (or how to render looking at the ontology digital-diaspora more forceful) and ‘the tyranny of history’ — viewing them in relation to Akomfrah's own work since the 1980s with the Black Audio Film Collective and, more recently, Smoking Dogs Films. It finishes by imagining the possibilities for cinema's digital futures through ‘new’ (black) diasporic histories of cinema.