The 11th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award-Winning Essay Répéter le futur: Histoires potentielles et résistance dans Liberty: A Universal Chronology of Black Protest (2016) d'Omar Victor Diop

The camera, it has long been established, was one of the many tools of colonization on the African continent, and photography served to contrast the idea of a uniquely Euro-American modernity with a uniquely African pastness that persisted into the present. What has been less studied, Richard Vokes and Dan Newberry argue, is how photography was nevertheless deployed to imagine, visualize, and embody possible futures for and by African peoples. This article examines how contemporary Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop performs African photographic futures through his series Liberty: A Universal Chronology of Black Protest (2016). Liberty is composed of sixteen highly stylized photographs in which Diop stages scenes from over two centuries of struggles for racial and economic equality across the African continent and its diaspora. Each photograph is digitally composed of multiple takes, so that Diop or his female counterpart appear multiple times in a single image. At first glance, the series may appear to tell a linear, chronological narrative that renders and remembers a corrective history of Black emancipation in and beyond the African continent. However, reading Diop's photographic techniques through the frameworks of twinning and syncopation reveals that Liberty functions not as a retelling of the past but as a rehearsal of a future liberation. Informed by both Angela Naimou and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's complementary theorizations of rehearsal as a narrative mode of writing potential histories, as well as Tina Campt's analysis of the future anterior strategies of liberation that define Black visuality, this paper argues that the Liberty series materializes past and future Afro-diasporic networks of protest that break with the narratives of postcolonial failures, while holding space for the ongoing labor of Black liberation.