The Utopian Promise: John Akomfrah’s Poetics of the Archive

John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986) and The Stuart Hall Project (2012) bookend the British filmmaker’s career in a uniquely political sense. Both are implicitly concerned with the film archive, with the potential it accorded for poetic and political ends. Stuart Hall famously responded to the criticism of Handsworth Songs by Salman Rushdie at the time of the film’s release, championing the Black Audio Film Collective, which Akomfrah was a founding member of, in their attempts to forge a new cinematic language to represent post-migrant minorities. Akomfrah’s method, in both films, is interesting in this regard; using archival footage, it constructs a collage-based film used to challenge hegemonic constructions of sound and image with regard to political representation in film. This article addresses this method. It takes the ‘utopian promise’, which Akomfrah associates with the archive, as a starting point to explore the theoretical alignment between the archival image and the future. As a result, the article pushes against responses to Akomfrah films that have sought to situate their content as exclusively concerned with issues of political representation in the present, exploring an Akomfrah poetics that comes out of a utopian tradition of thought concerned with thinking about the future; or at least, the possibilities of the future.