Global Black Speculative Collage

Since the turn of this century, artists of African descent have worked to refract the relation between Black Studies and African Studies, often blurring the lines between these two fields. Braiding together the speculative mode and the practice of collage, Chino Amobi’s 2017 electronic music album Paradiso and Wangechi Mutu’s 2014 multimedia painting series Nguva na Nyoka cultivate opacity, otherworldliness, fragmentation, and disorder. The author examines how these works offer singular lenses into questions of gender, antiblackness, and global black belonging that reframe distinctions between blackness and Africanness in our time.