Inhabiting a Black Planet
Pan-Africa: Journal of African Life and Thought 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1947)
Ras Makonnen
After a decade living on the Pacific Coast of North America, I returned to living Chicago earlier this month. Auspiciously, I was lucky to spend much of my first week back immersed in Panafrica Days—a vibrant series of events and activities jointly organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Black Arts Consortium at Northwestern University, Chicago Humanities, and the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago. This multi-institutional, city-spanning celebration honored the artists, thinkers, and collaborators of Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica.
Billed as the first major exhibition to survey Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica assembled some 350 objects, spanning the 1920s to the present, created by artists across four continents—Africa, North and South America, and Europe. Panafrica, the promised land invoked in the exhibition’s title, was presented as a “conceptual space where arguments about decolonization, solidarity, and freedom are advanced and negotiated in pursuit of an emancipatory future.”
During her headlining artist’s talk, Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu presented a film referencing the man-eating lions of Tsavo, who terrorized the British Empire’s Kenya-Uganda Railway project, devouring construction workers along its path. I wondered if she knew that their taxidermied bodies are housed in the Field Museum of Chicago—remnants of a history in which imperial conquest transforms dangerous beasts into decorative specimens, preserving them as trophies even as it seeks to strip them of their power.
Earlier, Jamaican artist Ebony Patterson spoke about her work—coffins crafted to be carried by assembled revelers in a procession during carnival mass in Kingston—now lying motionless under stark lights in the exhibition space, their vitality drained by the white cube.
Sometimes, encountering works by Afro-diasporic and Black artists in museum spaces, I feel as though I am standing before the cadavers of man-eating lions—creatures that once thwarted the machinations of Empire but whom I now meet only in death.
Part of what was marvelous about Panafrica Days was that, here, I encountered the lions alive—not as museum artifacts, but in the flesh. The artists were present, dangerous; caged and tamed as they may have been by the institutional context, they could still lash out and do damage. And that is what I was there for.
Had there been time for questions, I would have asked Mutu: Do you feel like your art is dead in spaces like this? If so, how do you reanimate the corpses of art in the museum—beyond a convening like this?
“Tucked within an arresting collection of taxidermied mammals of Africa in the Rice Gallery, the man-eating lions of Tsavo are two of the Field Museum’s most famous residents—and also the most infamous. […] In March 1898, the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo (SAH-vo) River in Kenya. But the project took a deadly turn when, over the next nine months, two maneless male lions mysteriously developed a taste for humans and went on a killing spree.”
Ebony G. Patterson, Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014, 50 coffins, fabric, acrylic paint, adhesive, crochet doilies, fabric appliques, fabric flowers, fringe, glitter, pinus palustris, lace, rhinestones, ribbon, tassels, dimensions variable.
Panafrica and Its Tensions
Here, we are in a museum and an archive—where ideas of Panafrica emerge through the critical, reflective practice of cataloging, conservation, and curation. But I wonder: Where does Panafrica emerge from below, through the circulation of people, sights, and sounds across spaces that exist outside the logics of cataloging, conservation, and curation?
At the museum and archive, we contend with Panafrica as an idea—a discourse in motion, shaped by the diaspora’s ongoing debates over its legitimacy, defining contours, origins, and evolution. A site of contestation, it emerges through competing genealogies and shifting articulations, continuously reconfigured by historical movements and contemporary struggles.
All the while, we imagine Panafrica as a network of institutions—an architecture linking the diaspora through political, social, and economic projects: the African Union, transnational cultural and educational affiliations, and networks of solidarity. These institutions embody conflicting and, at times, contradictory ideas—some anchored in long-standing ideological formations, others forged in the crucible of institution-building, adapting to new conditions, and renegotiating their meanings over time.
But beyond ideas and institutions, we—the diasporic peoples occupying this space—constitute Panafrica as a living force. A proliferation of visual, sonic, and embodied gestures circulates among self-identifying diasporic populations that both differ from and defer to one another, irrespective of whether they hold coherent ideas of Panafrica or what those ideas may be. Musical idioms, fashions, hairstyles, dance steps, grooming practices, body modifications, manners of address, vernaculars, friendships, patron-client relations, romantic bonds, sexual liaisons—practices that move without permission, beyond the bounds of institutions. At times, these expressions extend the reach of institutionalized Panafricanism, reinforcing its narratives and amplifying its influence; at others, they flout established ideas and institutions, subverting authority, unsettling fixed articulations, and generating alternative, para-institutional, and informal modes of diasporic affiliation and exchange.
The All African People’s Community passport was part of a conceptual artwork by Dread Scott titled All African People’s Consulate (2024). Scott describes the piece as “a functioning consulate for an imaginary Pan-African, Afrofuturist union of countries, promoting cultural and diplomatic relations. […] In the Consulate, visitors can apply for an All African People’s Community passport or visa. They will interview with Consulate staff, where they will discuss their relationship to Africa, their family history of migration, and more. For those of African descent, the Consulate facilitates their citizenship in this futurist, globalist community, presenting them with a personalized passport. Others receive a visa allowing them to visit.”
For instance, the uses and abuses—through homages and samples—of the breaks in James Brown records have been instrumental in producing Panafrica as a living force. These rhythmic ruptures, lifted and reanimated across time and space, were not only sampled in US hip-hop, UK jungle, and Black electronic musics across the globe but also inspired drummers in Continental African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Brazilian traditions. From Lagos to Kingston to São Paulo, the percussive sensibilities of Brown’s grooves have been studied, adapted, and extended—heard in funky elaborations of highlife, reggae, rumba, samba, and beyond. These breaks, in their migrations and mutations, embody a transnational pulse that moves across circuits of diasporic sound—involving a material infrastructure of record distributors and sellers, radio stations, recording studios, dancehalls, and performance venues, and a human infrastructure of musicians, DJs, producers, listeners, and party goers—forging resonances that elude containment yet remain central to the lived experience of Panafricanism.
The tension between ideas, institutions, and living forces was on full display throughout Panafrica Days—not as an abstract intellectual concern, but as a struggle over how Panafrica lives and thrives and where it dies.
When it came to ideas, Louis Chude-Sokei’s closing remarks at the opening symposium laid bare the fraught nature of Panafricanism, reflecting on a century of texts in which Continental Africans argued that Africans in the Americas were not truly African, and noting the persistent difficulties of forging a shared identity among Afro-Caribbeans, Continental Africans, Afro-Latinos, and Afro-Americans.
The institutional perils and promises of Pan-Africanism were perhaps best encapsulated by The All Africa Passport by artist Dred Scott, alongside curator Koyo Kouoh’s assertion in her keynote address that her Panafricanism is an institutionalism. What was most striking about both was that Scott’s work and Kouoh’s statement were each born from reflections on the absence of robust and autonomous institutional networks capable of catalyzing new ideas of Panafrica and activating its living forces.
Perhaps the piece most attuned to these living forces in the exhibition was Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy by The Otolith Group—“an audiovisual investigation into the gestures, geometries, grammars, and geographies that shape the films of Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty.” A grand mural, the work diagrammed the circulation of places, players, and cine-mathematical patterns within their films. For me, it functioned as a demonstration of method—an approach to visual studies that considers Panafrica as a living force that precedes, exceeds, and succeeds both ideas and institutions of Panafrica.
The Otolith Group, detail of “Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Interscalar Energy,” 2024, at the Art Institute of Chicago/Photo: the Art Institute of Chicago
But alongside the study of Panafrica as a living force, there remains the question of its stewardship—the challenge of channeling this force toward the emancipatory futures envisioned by those it animates. This is not solely a matter of ideas and institutions; it is also a question of how relations of production shape and are shaped by productive forces.
To this end, I found myself wanting more insight into the actual process of producing Project a Black Planet. How did the 350 objects arrive in that space? How did the artists, thinkers, and collaborators come together in the process of shaping the exhibition? How did US- and Europe-based artists, with privileged passports, institutional backing, and greater mobility, make use of that mobility? How did Continental African artists navigate infrastructural and mobility disadvantages? What conflicts arose in the process, and how were they resolved—or left unresolved?
Sun Ra rehearsing at FESTAC 77. from Last Day in Lagos by Marilyn Nance. “From January 15 to February 12, 1977, more than 15,000 artists, intellectuals and performers from 55 nations worldwide gathered in Lagos, Nigeria for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, also known as FESTAC’77.”
Listening to Marilyn Nance present and then speaking with her about her book Last Day in Lagos, which documents FESTAC 77—the 1977 World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture—reinforced the need for Panafrica Days to foreground the documents, artifacts, and narratives of its own process. Nance’s stories and photo documentation of the behind-the-scenes realities at the festival spoke to all of these questions in intimate ways. I would have loved to see similar stories and documentation of the processes through which Panafrica Days and Project a Black Planet were conceived and realized.
In reflecting on Panafrica Days and Project a Black Planet, I am left with a sense of both urgency and possibility. The exhibition and its associated events illuminated the ways in which Panafrica is not merely a static concept but a dynamic field of struggle—an idea in motion, an evolving set of institutions, and a living force lived and enacted across geographies and histories. The tensions between these dimensions—between ideas and infrastructures, between institutionalized narratives and fugitive practices, between privileged mobility and constrained access—were not just theoretical concerns but lived realities shaping the very conditions of artistic production, curation, and circulation.
Yet, if Panafrica is to thrive as more than an archive of past struggles or a symbolic gesture toward unity, its study must be accompanied by an interrogation of the material conditions and living forces that enable or obstruct its realization. Just as James Brown’s breaks did not simply travel through sound but through the infrastructures of recording studios, radio stations, and dancehalls, so too must the future of Panafrica be understood as entangled with the networks—both formal and informal—that sustain it. The challenge ahead is not just one of representation but of action: how to build the institutional pathways that catalyze new modes of solidarity while preserving the insurgent vitality of movements that refuse containment.
If Project a Black Planet asked us to consider Panafrica as a conceptual space of decolonial possibility, the next step is to ask how to render that space inhabitable—not just in exhibitions and symposia, but in the infrastructures, relations, and struggles that make another world possible. The task before us is not only to document, exhibit, or theorize Panafrica but to keep its living forces in motion—living, shifting, and insurgent, refusing enclosure, and continuously remaking itself in the world.
