Minor Music at the End of the World 
Additional credits and Special Thanks

Short Film featuring Okwui Okpokwasili
Directed by Arthur Jafa
AC: Sammy Leonard
Key Grip: Alphonse Silvestri
Gaffer: Che Roacher
Studio Assistant: Atheel Elmalik
Color Correction: Kyungchan Min, Color Collective
Equipment Rentals: Brooklyn Lighting & Grip, Hand Held Films, Lightbulb Rentals

Special Thanks
Bernard Schwartz, Andre Holland, Lynn Nottage, Claudia Rankine, Precious Okoyomon, Okwui Okpokwasili, Gavin Brown and Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Ostia Antica, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics, Park Avenue Armory, THE OFFICE, Lesley Phlek, Kearra Gopee, Ainsley Kaas, Sterling Hedges, Erin Markey, Wesley Harris, Melinda Nugent, Irondale, Mercury Store, Color Collective, Brooklyn Lighting & Grip, Hand Held Films, Lightbulb Rentals

Movement I Montage - Quoted Film Credits
Clips appearing in the Movement I: The End of White Supremacy montage are sourced from the following films:

  • Within Our Gates, dir. Oscar Micheaux (1920)
  • The Passion of Joan of Arc, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928)
  • Native Son, dir. Pierre Chenal (1951)
  • The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, dir. Ranald MacDougall (1959)
  • La Jetee, dir. Chris Marker (1962)
  • Night of the Living Dead, dir. George A. Romero (1968)
  • I am Legend, dir. Francis Lawrence (2007)

These film citations - presented without sound and projected behind the stage performer - appear in compliance with the quotation exception of Article 15a Dutch Copyright Act. The montage clips (total duration: 5m39s) comprise approximately 20% of Movement I and 4.5% of the entire work (Minor Music at the End of the World). The inclusion of these quotations is based on works lawfully made public and presented in limited excerpts proportional to the original works for the purpose of scholarly treatise and social polemic.

Further Program Notes on the Movement I: The End of White Supremacy Film Montage:

Minor Music is a staged discourse, a speculative work intended to facilitate critical reflection and a public exchange of ideas. Saidiya Hartman (De Groene, 25.9.2025, p. 10)

[Minor Music] is part of a broader critical discourse, but in an artistic form. John Akomfrah, interviewing Saidiya Hartman  (De Groene, 25.9.2025, p. 8)

Minor Music at the End of the World, transposes Saidiya Hartman’s well-documented practice of critical fabulation (where historical narrative and critical research are combined to address gaps in the historical record)  into a  live performance that merges theater, film, dance, and other elements. As an extension of this practice, Movement 1 of Minor Music at the End of the World features a montage of short clips from publicly-released films. Citation of widely reproduced references from W.E.B. Du Bois’ short story, “The Comet” are interspersed  with the film excerpts that reflect the how  these concepts have been widely adopted and interpreted in cinematic works in the century since and illustrates the central  scholarly and social polemic of Minor Music at the End of the World and the scholarly essay, “The End of White Supremacy,” on which it is based,

The central tropes and thematic elements on which this argument are based:

  • that an apocalypse brings about relative freedom for a black man in the enclosure of the white world (Night of the Living Dead, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, I am Legend); 
  • that the recurring trope of interracial love creates a moment of a temporary reprieve before the racial order is reclaimed (The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Native Son);
  • that the Du Boisian narratives have been taken up widely in early classic cinema (World, Flesh, Devil)
  • that early and classic cinema has been an important vehicle for exploring and enunciating ‘the end of the world’ (as apocalypse, as source of hope, as potential freedom/liberation from white supremacy) and it offers unique and complex interpretative frameworks for arguing for and against the implications of political conflict (Within Our Gates, La Jetee, Passion of Joan of Arc)
     

The performance is intended to stage a public debate on these issues in the context of creative artistic expression with the lead performer performing Hartman’s texts while using the expressive gestures of the film clips to provoke a confrontation with the deeply affecting political stakes of this debate. The artists re-interprets these gestures within the performance in ways that suggest the actor is confronting the film clips and grappling with their interpretations of the end of the world in ways that reference both the history of cinema and public narratives that have unfolded since the publication of Du Bois’essays.

Clips appearing in the montage are sourced from the following films:

  • Within Our Gates, dir. Oscar Micheaux (1920)
  • The Passion of Joan of Arc, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928)
  • Native Son, dir. Pierre Chenal (1951)
  • The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, dir. Ranald MacDougall (1959)
  • La Jetee, dir. Chris Marker (1962)
  • Night of the Living Dead, dir. George A. Romero (1968)
  • I am Legend, dir. Francis Lawrence (2007)

These film citations - presented without sound and projected behind the stage performer - appear in compliance with the quotation exception of Article 15a Dutch Copyright Act. The montage clips (total duration: 5m39s) comprise approximately 20% of Movement I and 4.5% of the entire work (Minor Music at the End of the World). The inclusion of these quotations is based on works lawfully made public and presented in limited excerpts proportional to the original works for the purpose of scholarly treatise and social polemic.

ADDITIONAL PRESS SUPPORTING THE ARTIST’S EXPRESSION OF SCHOLARLY TREATISE/CRITICAL ARGUMENTS

On the one hand, there is the critical space created by great thinkers and cultural figures, and on the other, there is attention to the pressures posed by issues like the climate crisis and the pandemic, and how they intersect with the existing structures of inequality that shape our lives. This is the collection of topics I explore in Movement 1: The End of White Supremacy, my reinterpretation of W.E.B. Du Bois's speculative story The Comet (1920). How do we imagine the end of this social order? The end of the violence and brutality that underlies it? How do we imagine the end of racial capitalism? A redundant term, perhaps: capitalism emerges in the context of transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism; it appears on the world stage with a racial character. The experience of slavery, racism, anti-Blackness, and capitalism determine how we live and die. In what ways can we escape these constraints? How can we pose open questions that initiate or fuel a transformation, or that cause us to arrange things differently? Saidiya Hartman (De Groene, 25.9.2025, p. 8)

In The Comet, when the racial order collapses, a minor music resonates in the landscape. And we know that when Du Bois proclaimed the great contributions of Black people to American civilization, he emphasized "the gift of song," which was as great as "the gift of labor." There are volumes of philosophy contained in that minor music. From seventeenth-century slave songs that resonate in the sound of the 21st century. And just as in slave songs and stories, one of the central questions that Minor Music poses is: what blossoms in the black morning? What is born in the aftermath of the disaster? Today we see those who want to destroy the liberal-democratic order for the simple reason that they prefer fascism, oligarchy, or totalitarianism. And then there are those who simply cannot imagine an order of things better than the current one. Fortunately, there are others, eager to imagine what might emerge in the void left by this cruel world, who never stop dreaming of what forms of coexistence might take its place. Saidiya Hartman  (De Groene, 25.9.2025, p. 10)

In W.E.B. Du Bois's science fiction story, the end of the world is a comet. A comet crashes into Earth, leaving a Black man from the working class as the sole survivor in upstate New York, where he also saves the life of a white middle-class woman. In the Bosnian film Quo Vadis Aida?, the end of the world is the fall of Srebrenica, when the fictional interpreter Aida tries to save her husband and sons by getting them on the evacuation list. For my parents, the end of the world is the stadium where fleeing families are lured, supposedly a safe haven, where upon arrival it turns out that every day new people are picked up who never return. The zero point is the fire that was opened on the crowd a few days later.  There's no easy way to tell about genocide, but speculative nonfiction is one way. Nonfiction that allows for imagination to fill in the gaps that were violently shot through the past or your life story. A speculative nonfiction that is socially critical.

It's a practice Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation. Also because the kind of suffering that is experienced at the end of the world feels so absurd that it transcends human understanding. As absurd as it is to anxiously hold the 1948 UN definition of genocide against the facts like a ruler, until the facts meet the definition. The end of the world is science fiction, an imagined probability, until it becomes reality. It's not common to link the history of slavery to other histories of genocide, to see the exploitation of Africans as a genocidal act, something with which we end the human world. 

Jafa: "I once asked a friend: why do you think we're in this situation? Why do Black people suffer in a special way? Why has our grief for seven hundred years almost seemed predestined? She said: Because we fell away from the way. We were the first—the first people, the first sons, the first everything. We were also the first rapists. The first imperialists. Everything that humanity is, in any form, stems from us." Munganyende on Arthur Jafa’s Contribution to “Minor Music at the End of the World”  (De Groene, 25.9.2025, p. 16)