Postcolonial Trauerspiel: Black Audio Film Collective

Through a close reading of the film Testament (1988), about a woman who makes a journey of return to Ghana after years of political exile, this chapter investigates montage strategies that are distinctive to the poetic handling of archival materials in the Black Audio Film Collective oeuvre. In view of John Akomfrah’s notion of “black necrophilia,” which unsettles the psychoanalytic distinction between mourning and melancholia so as to address the ghosts of colonial history, the analysis closely engages Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, which arose from his reading of allegory in baroque mourning plays as revealing the “fallen” condition of a secular modernity that must continually grapple with the human condition of transience and decay.