Ancient Origins, Future Destinies: Blackness, the Word, and World Creativity

My book in progress is entitled Ancient Origins, Future Destinies: Blackness, the Word, and World Creativity.  With chapters on a wide range of texts from across the African diaspora – the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Dogon oral literature, the Yoruba Odu Ifa, the poetry of jazz musician Sun Ra, the poetry of Jay Wright, and the novels and essays of Ishmael Reed – this project has many aims.  I build on Anthony Braxton’s theorization of “world creativity” in his Tri-Axium Writings in at least four ways.  One, I provide a narrative about the development of world literature that firmly situates the contributions of Africa at the center – beginning with the early African origins of symbolization, speech, language, and writing; moving to the first elaborately written literary work of human history (the Pyramid Texts); tracing a line to the spectacular literary experiments of West Africa (where primordial signs thought in the mind of the Creator provide the template for all existence); and ending with African American works that draw on and amplify all of these influences.  Two, I employ “world creativity” as a concept to understand the deep unity of modes of human meaning-making, and I explicate how all of the chosen texts analyzed in this project are composite fusions of many disciplines, including music, dance, ritual, physics, and painting.  Three, I provide a methodology to articulate how literary texts reveal the innumerable ways in which all cultural groups in the world are interwoven on the loom of African origins.  Fourth, this methodology pushes its users toward our “future destinies,” as it understands the creative process as a force that encourages human beings to individually and collectively strive for enlightenment and unification with ourselves, other living beings, and the wider ecological, planetary, and cosmic frameworks in which we live.  All of these strands of the project are unified by an elaboration of the metaphysics of blackness, which for me is a cosmological concept not reducible to the flat sociopolitical meanings that have been ascribed to it.  Blackness is the formless void of potentiality from which everything emerges; it is the hidden link connecting the depths of outer space, the womb, and the primeval ocean; it is the doorway to the collective unconscious, genius, and spiritual illumination; it is the tradition that joins speculations about Kemet as “the Black Land” to the multi-dimensional complexities of Sun Ra’s astro-black mythology.