An Analysis and Comparison of Capitalist Realism - and its Potential Alternative, Afrofuturism, Through an Exploration of Music and Art

Abstract

Capitalist realism traps people in a seemingly endless present. This stops culture from evolving because artists are not engaging with and reproducing artistic and cultural works from the past in meaningful ways. It has erased the past, is dictating the present and is constraining possible futures. In the past, cultures evolved by introducing new members to previously created works and traditions. This is no longer happening under capitalist realism because everything is assigned an economic value and is stripped of its generative cultural value. This renders cultural works into static icons. However, there is an alternative to capitalist realism - Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism proposes an alternative to capitalist realism by facilitating glimpses of the sheath that masks people from the Real. Mark Fisher describes the Lacanian Real as, “what any reality must suppress in order to sustain itself” (2009, p. 19). Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative? and Kodwo Eshun’s 2003 article “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism” will be mobilized as the main texts in this exploration of the tensions between the two ideologies. The present paper analyzes capitalist realism as an ideology and compares how both Afrofuturism and capitalist realism use images and sound as a method in different ways. Finally, it presents hope for a different future where a non-capitalist world is imaginable by examining contemporary Afrofuturist art.