Edward George: ‘You can’t have Afrofuturism without some ambience of a fascist thinking creeping in’

Edward George vividly remembers when he was first abducted – his word – by music. It was 1973 and he was 10 – the comics-loving son of Dominican immigrants flogging copies of West Indian World newspaper at Ridley Road market in Dalston, London. “It being the East End there was a lot of shouting. Turks, Asians, Caribbean folk. Noise. Jewish shops selling reggae. Because I was little, my sense of space and smell was always heightened. Suddenly there was this other sound. It was as if someone had just pulled a three-dimensional space apart, stuck my head inside it, and gone. ‘Look! A whole other world! Frightening, isn’t it?’ That was dub. That was the future.”

Dub, associated with singular producers such as King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, is a form of reggae in which tracks have their vocals stripped or distorted. Drum and bass are emphasised. Heavy use is made of echo and reverb. The results are often eerie, vertiginous, freighted with a sense of displacement and loss. The same could be said about the work George made as part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of seven young black Britons who bonded at Portsmouth polytechnic in the early 1980s and, until they disbanded in 1998, made a series of experimental, potently melancholic films (among them Handsworth Songs and Twilight City) that pondered the legacies of imperialism.

Black Audio is most often associated with John Akomfrah, who has gone on to become a major figure in contemporary art. But George, though lesser known, was the writer, researcher and presenter of one of its most enduringly resonant features, The Last Angel of History. The 1996 film is a remarkable act of assemblage in which a stellar cast – genre-defining musicians such as George Clinton and Derrick May, science fiction writers Octavia Butler and Samuel R Delany, cultural theorists Kodwo Eshun and Greg Tate, astronaut Bernard Harris and Star Trek actor Nichelle Nichols – discuss the inherited traumas of transatlantic slavery and how they feed into Black people’s investment in outer space. It argues that Black music has a radical underground in which outsider artists – among them Sun Ra, Lee Perry, Clinton himself – have hatched new rhythms and styles to explore themes of marginality and alienation.

Last Angel is not only a film about science fiction but, partly influenced by Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, it features a character called the “data thief” who travels back from the year 2195 to probe the failure of the Ghanaian revolution. If this all sounds hugely ambitious, Icarean even, that’s part of its appeal. It played a crucial role in popularising Afrofuturism – a term first coined by white theorist Mark Dery, and now used to describe countless exhibitions, film series and even films (such as the feudalism-romanticising Black Panther) in which the term is used breezily, a floating signifier for something to do with technophilia, empowerment, a vague and breezy form of utopianism. “Because of the ways it uses the archive, its montage, its commentary – the film has become a codex of futurity,” says George.

“If you want to fetishise futurity less, you have to go back to the plantations and to the slaves themselves: a lot of the songs that they were singing were literally about a tomorrow. These were cast in the metaphysical language of the day – that of the Bible – which was an act of mastery in itself. More than that, look at Italian futurism in the early 20th century: it opened out on to all kinds of fascism. You can’t have futurity, or futurism, or Afrofuturism, without some ambience of a fascist thinking creeping in.”

George himself cuts an appealing, enigmatic figure in Last Angel. He moves across unnamed, vaguely post-apocalyptic landscapes in a state of reverie and rumination. He sports shades, talks slowly, doesn’t directly address the camera, mulls over ideas rather than declaiming them furiously. Such an essayistic approach ran counter to the confrontational bolshiness of many mid-1990s arts documentaries. It also avoided the hectoring, speak-truth-to-power cliches of much contemporary television. “In Black cultural practice, you don’t get to see or hear the spaces of thought very often. We wanted to show thought in motion, thought actually taking place.

“One of the things about being Black and working class – and you get this a lot with kids now – is that they speak very quickly,” he adds. “Same with MCs: they put a lot of information in very few bars. I think that’s because we’re used to internalising an idea that we shouldn’t speak too much, if at all. And if we speak, we do it in a way to fill a very short space of time because there’s not a lot of time for us in the world. Presenting pauses and little gaps in Last Angel, both in thinking and in speech, is opposed to that policing of Black thought.”

George may mock himself as a “Hackney knuckle-dragger”, but he laces his conversation with references to Jacques Derrida and CLR James. “My hero Mark E Smith was known as Carry Bag Man and I started carrying bags filled with all the records I’d bought that day or the books I was reading – things like the Semiotext(e) edition of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.” In their day, part of what made Black Audio’s output so unusual was their heady syntheses of Afrodiasporic and European critical theory, their postmodern ease with navigating both high and low culture. George is unapologetic about this kinetic intellectualism – not least at a time when some academics call for curriculums to be “decolonised” and when Dominic Raab mocks Angela Rayner for attending the opera.

“Read CLR James’s Black Studies and the New Contemporary Student from 1969,” says George. “There, even from within the Black radical tradition, he’s critical of the idea that people of colour should only read work by people of colour. For him, it’s a kind of apartheid thinking. “For me, growing up, literacy was aspiration, a mode of mastery. My mum never said, ‘Why are you reading The History of the Third Reich?’ There’s cynical manipulation at play here: the idea that learning is something that should have a limit that’s either to do with class or race, or that you shouldn’t be reading Walter Benjamin because he’s white? Come on!”

Gangsta Gangsta, George’s next film, was a meditation on the life of American rapper Tupac Shakur that was prefaced by a quote from Benjamin. He describes it as a “hardboiled documentary from a progressive perspective”, one influenced “by Sam Fuller as much as Chris Marker”. Shot in 1996, Shakur was already undergoing canonisation in America. What insights could a British film-maker add?

“The hip-hop nation was still being formed in 1998. It was triumphalist. It wanted to remember him as a radical, as a Bob Marley. But I’d grown up in London, the first Black Audio film Signs of Empire was made up of photographs of imperial statues and monuments: the detritus of loss was a feature of our work.” George says he was drawn to the rapper’s “cloud of immanent violence” and his “politics of rage” which, he believed, were tied up with Black nationalist politics (Shakur’s parents were activists): “Failure produced him and a failure to harness anger destroyed him.”

Since Black Audio disbanded, George has been busy, if spectral. He has made visual art (alongside Anna Piva) as part of multimedia duo Flow Motion; as Hallucinator, he released dub-techno records on the influential Basic Channel label; recently he finished a book, Dub Housing, which is a drifting, Eugène Atget-inflected evocation of Covid-era life on the Broadwater Farm estate where he has lived since 1985. “It’s rotting, the limits of the architecture are apparent, part of it depopulated. It’s in the process of becoming a ruin.”

Closest to his heart is The Strangeness of Dub, an ongoing series of immersive, formidably researched radio essays in which he explores the histories, philosophies and sociologies of his beloved music. As part of a two-night retrospective at the Barbican’s Edge of the Centre series, he will record a live episode entitled Genealogies of Rock Against Racism. “Rock Against Racism at the end of the 1970s was anti-fascist sonic warfare,” he chuckles. “It was white people doing what they should have been doing since 1956. It opened up a parallel world in which Elvis Presley went on the Ed Sullivan Show and said, ‘I’m Elvis Presley. Have you heard of a woman called Rosa Parks? Isn’t it time Black folks had the vote?’”