Ghada Habib

Research interests

Focussing on the career of the artist John Akomfrah, my doctoral project Articulation, Montage, and Post-Colonial Historicity in the Audio-Visual Essays of John Akomfrah proposed that his audio-visual essays render montage allegorically to conceptualise history and critically address the afterlives of colonialism and slavery. Akomfrah’s works, I argued, demand interpretations which evaluate their theoretical implications. In response to this call and to Akomfrah’s expressed interest in the philosopher Walter Benjamin, my project staged an encounter between the two over their shared engagement with questions of allegory, history, and montage. My research was led by Akomfrah’s works; however, the development of the relation between Akomfrah and Benjamin was mutually illuminating. It unfolded over the course of project through close readings of a selection of Akomfrah’s and Benjamin’s works, leading to critical, historical insight on their intersecting critiques. While situated in different contexts, both Akomfrah and Benjamin challenge de-politicised, de-temporalized, positivist concepts of history and their attendant humanist tradition; both are concerned with the use of form and montage to transform perspective; and for both allegory is key to their criticality. The encounter also reveals differences which I attended to. A concept of ‘articulation’ was central to this project, enabling my interpretations of montage, essayism, post-coloniality, and translations of archival material in Akomfrah’s practice. Attending to these aspects of the practice, I argued that, through his use of a time-based, mimetic medium, allegory, essayism, and multi-channel form, Akomfrah finds a unique position from which to explore the legacies of colonialism and slavery. In the process, his work uncovers the articulated process of colonial afterlives, and gestures to their rearticulation and to new forms of being historical.

This project was supported by the AHRC funded doctoral training partnership, White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities.

As a Visiting Research Fellow, I continue to work on the practice of John Akomfrah. My current research is concerned with elaborating Akomfrah’s de-anthropocentric approach to history and exploring the relevance of Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity.