The poetics of reclamation have long been Anthony Joseph’s artistic lodestar. His corpus eschews fixity, expanding at the volatile juncture where history and futurity, oral tradition and avant-garde formalism, Caribbean epistemologies and radical ecologies intersect. His latest work, the incantatory and topographical 'Rowing Up River to Get Our Names Back', mobilizes language as an act of retrieval and sound as a place of resistance. Produced by Dave Okumu, who aptly navigates diasporic jazz abstraction and dubwise spatiality, the album resists linearity, instead oscillating between the subterranean and celestial. What emerges is a layered and recursive aural palimpsest that presses against the boundaries of its form.
The transatlantic dialectic has long informed Joseph’s artistic interests. Born in Trinidad and now a resident of the UK, he moves between poetry, fiction, and music. His practice resists containment, favoring motion, improvisation, and the porous edges of discipline. Alongside figures like Okumu, Shabaka Hutchings, and Camae Ayewa, he enacts a decolonial interrogation of sound’s relationship to history, memory, and speculation. Though Joseph’s literary output, from the epic 'The African Origins of UFOs' (2006) to the sonnets of his 'Sonnets for Albert' (2022), inhabit the destabilized temporalities of Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics and Wilson Harris’s mythopoetic historiography, his intentions find their fullest realization through music, particularly the hybridized domain of spoken-word jazz. From 'Leggo de Lion' (2007) to 'People of the Sun' (2018), his oeuvre is stacked with epistemic ruptures within Black British experimentalist tradition, forging a synthesis of jazz and dub poetry.
The album opens with Satellite, a composition that signals its cosmic reach. Joseph’s baritone orbits Okumu’s elliptical bassline and Eska Mtungwazi’s phantasmal vocals. Here, Afrofuturism is a fundamental ontological premise:
With such words, Joseph articulates a grammar of motion where Black temporality is not exile but radical relationality.
In fact, Afrofuturist modalities can be found across the album’s architecture, but, to his credit, Joseph’s particular articulations resist the pull of its more familiar configurations. Joseph’s vision of the future is inseparable from the weight of history, not an escape from it. Where Sun Ra and George Clinton crafted interstellar mythologies as sites of liberation, Joseph is anchored in the here and now, sifting through the past for the buried, fractured, or erased. In other words, his futurism insists on reworking history from within.
The album's conceptual and rhythmic nucleus is the triad of Tony, 'A Juba for Janet', and 'Churches of Sound' (The Benítez Rojo). 'Tony is a reverent' lament to the Afrobeat polymath Tony Allen. Its percussion and brass interlock in an oscillatory groove that collapses the transatlantic continuum between Lagos and Port of Spain. “He was duplicitous / a conjure man / with seven hands,” Joseph chants, invoking Allen as simultaneously a spectral presence and rhythmic architect.
Churches of Sound (The Benítez Rojo) is named after Cuban theorist Antonio Benítez Rojo, whose The Repeating Island posits the Caribbean as a recursive site of cultural reinvention. Joseph transposes this theory into the auditory register, layering field recordings and percussion into an acoustic collage of eras where calypso meets Ghanaian independence.
The album’s penultimate track, An Afrofuturist Poem, distills its conceptual core into a minimalist, dub-inflected groove. Over it, Joseph issues his most explicit theoretical intervention: “We must arrive new mythologies / and syntax / and modes of expression / which are fixed beyond comparison / to alien transmission.” Here, Afrofuturism is reconceptualized as linguistic insurgency in the tradition of Amiri Baraka, where language itself is the terrain of revolution.
Ultimately, Rowing Up River to Get Our Names Back resists resolution. It operates in flux, mapping the unstable coordinates of history’s undertow. In the end, it is a demand to be heard and, above all, a summons to row against the current toward that which echoes beyond the limits of time.
