13th International Triennial Symposium on African Art

 

African Art:

Roots and Routes

 

Thirteenth Triennial Symposium on African Art

31 March–3 April 2004

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

 

Organized by the Arts Council of the

African Studies Association

ACASA

 

 

ABSTRACTS

 

I-1 African Textiles in Fashion, Art, Trade, and Thought

Chair: Tavy D. Aherne (Indiana University, USA)

 

Textiles, due to their nature as easily transportable and widely desired commodities, cross boundaries that are not only geographical, but also political, cultural, social, ethnic, economic, and gendered. Thus, they are particularly useful for dealing with such complex domains as the exchange of ideas and practices, and the manipulation and negotiation of ethnicity. The functions of cloths may fluctuate, as part of ongoing, ever-changing processes which reflect new concerns, inspirations, and patronage. Paper proposals are requested from individuals studying textiles' changing contexts over time, space, and across cultures, to create new forms, interpretations, meanings, and contexts of use.

 

Lambamena: From Malagasy Funeral Textiles to Contemporary Art

Rebecca Green (Bowling Green State University, USA)

Textiles in highland Madagascar are primary signifiers of one’s ethnic, national, and moral identity.  As burial shrouds, they are arguably the most efficacious and powerful communicative device during interaction with the all-powerful and omnipresent ancestral and spiritual world.  Yet new materials are currently being employed as burial shrouds during funerary ceremonies, and the silks traditionally used for shrouds are being incorporated within new modes of expression in non-traditional contexts.  Artists, designers, and individuals are mining the materials, techniques, symbols, and symbolism of traditional highland Malagasy culture to create new expressions of identity.

 

 

 

 

 

Taariika Ngara: Histories of Indigo Textiles' Creation and Trade in the Futa Jallon, Guinea

Tavy D. Aherne (Indiana University, USA)

 

This paper will discuss social and artistic aspects of the contemporary creation and trade in Guinean indigo-dyed textiles (gudhe ngara). Looking at "taariika ngara" (local stories or histories of indigo production) in the Futa Jallon, I propose how dye technologies spread into the region and ultimately to a number of different ethnic groups. As these cloths began to be produced for and by a larger and more diverse population, the significance and usage of the cloths changed. Over time, the context of Guinean gudhe ngara  moved from vital cultural object, to consumer good, to ethnic and regional identifier, to national emblem.

 

The Importance of a “Sankofa” Sensibility: Contemporary West African

Textiles on the Art Market

Sarah Lewis (Oxford University, UK)

 

 

I-2  AIDS Art: The Visualization of a Southern African Pandemic

Co-chairs: Pamela Allara (Brandeis University, USA); Kyle D. Kauffman (Wellesley College, USA)

 

HIV/Aids is arguably the most significant social, economic, and political issue facing South Africa today.  Yet, few visual artists have engaged meaningfully with the subject in their work.  This is in stark contrast to the way South African artists confronted other major social evils, such as apartheid.

Before 1994, much of the art produced in South Africa was confrontational and political in nature.  For the politically engaged artists under apartheid there was no doubt about the identity of the target. After 1994, both the challenges and the possibilities have become more complex, ambivalent, and unpredictable. The course of South African art changed from confrontation to reconciliation and during the honeymoon years of the new democracy there were calls for artists to put aside political considerations and to find new themes and images.  Indeed, it seemed that  a number of artists with powerful messages in the pre-1994 era had lost their voices. Some turned inward to explore personal narratives and dramas, investigating identity, sexual and gender politics and roles, while others delved into history and memory.

Few artists have confronted the Aids crisis. Why? There is a range of possible answers. Perhaps, many artists do not feel the deep personal connection to the issue of Aids that they did to apartheid. Perhaps, after the struggle for political liberation, socially engaged artists were tired and felt the need for more personal, non-political subjects for their work.  Another possible reason could be that white artists, who comprise the majority of commercially successful artists in South Africa, do not feel they can reasonable speak for the black majority, the group most affected by Aids.  In addition, black artists may find the subject a very difficult issue, involving sexual practices that are hard to change in a patriarchal culture.  Or, perhaps it is even that in an increasingly open and market-oriented art scene some artists feel that if they produce works on the topic of Aids that they will not be sellable.  Whatever the reasons, the production of art works on the subject of HIV/Aids is surprising low, given the importance and impact on society.

 

AIDS and Activism: Who Is Getting the Message?

Pamela Allara (Brandeis University, USA)

In the absence of government leadership, numerous NGOs and private charities have engaged actively in grassroots projects to educate South Africans about the AIDS pandemic. Many of these projects, for example Paper Prayers in Johannesburg, MonkeyBiz in Cape Town, and the Memory Box and Siyazama Projects in Durban, have been founded by white women and/or are linked to poverty alleviation projects. In every case, the vast majority of participants are poor, black women. One question this paper will ask is whether targeting educational programs to women is the most sensible approach to combating the devastation caused by the disease.

            The beautiful embroidery and beadwork addressing AIDS is marketed to a primarily white affluent audience. How are these ‘handicrafts’ interpreted by the purchasers? Do these products serve to change attitudes and practices within the women’s own communities? How have NGOs and the art market influenced the targeting of women?

            If the prevention and curbing of the pandemic requires a radical change in sexual practices, including the abandonment of male sexual privilege, which projects are directed primarily toward men? Why has there so little art on the subject been made by black males? Are billboard projects such as Love Life and Break the Silence the primary vehicles for communicating information about the pandemic to men? Are there significant differences in the types of messages created on billboard or craft-based projects? Is activist art about AIDS gendered, and if so, are there negative consequences?

 

Art and Audience: Organizing Exhibitions about Aids and Art

Kyle D. Kauffman (Wellesley College, USA)

The current HIV/Aids pandemic constitutes the most serious social problem facing the African continent, but until very recently, few artists have confronted it.  Surprisingly few art works, and even fewer exhibitions, have been produced to confront the crisis.  While in many parts of Africa artists have tackled difficult social issues, such as Apartheid in South Africa, HIV/Aids has received much less attention.

            This paper looks at some of the HIV/Aids art exhibitions that have taken place in recent years and will highlight works shown at a recent show, AIDSART/SOUTH AFRICA.  In addition, the paper will address some of the possible issues surrounding the paucity of art dealing with the subject of HIV/Aids.

 

HIV/AIDS Education through Traditional Song and Dance in Swaziland

Betty Sibongile Ntshangase (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK)

The paper will discuss how the HIV/AIDS epidemic is addressed by means of traditional song and dance in Swaziland. I have chosen this topic because Swaziland is presently torn between conflicting forces, all vying for immediate attention. On the one hand, as a move to reclaim and maintain the Swazi sense of identity, there is a loud outcry, even from the monarch for the people to go back to their roots by reviving all forms of Swazi culture. Part of the culture is easier displayed in the performance of Swazi song and dance. This has been even incorporated into school activities, whereby schools engage in cultural singing and dance competitions. On the other hand, the country is facing a crisis whereby the percentage of deaths resulting from HIV/AIDS is escalating every day, and this causes concerns for the country’s future, as this has resulted in economic suffrage as well. This problem has therefore raised concerns to a great number of Swazi nationals, especially women because there are other very strong aspects of Swazi culture, which are linked to the spread of HIV/AIDS. The paper will make reference to some previous studies that have been conducted in Swaziland, which investigated the attitudes of Swazi people generally, and then specifically men and women. This will also include the strategies, which have been employed by the Swazi government, Non Governmental Organizations, and International Organizations in an attempt to combat HIV/AIDS. Next will be a discussion of the role and significance of traditional song and dance in Swaziland as both form of entertainment and means of communication. There will be case studies of the few theatre groups in the country, schools’ cultural teams, and individual Swazi artists who have engaged in song and dance performance for the purpose of both entertainment and sharing knowledge to help combat HIV/AIDS. Finally, the conclusion will reflect how HIV/AIDS is a great controversial issue in Swaziland requiring the entire Swazi nation starting from labadzala, the elders to consider HIV/AIDS as an important issue that needs urgent attention, which could even lead to alterations in the Swazi culture.

 

Darkened Mirrors and Transparent Roads: Divinatory Visions of HIV/AIDS

Mark Auslander (Brandeis University, USA)

In this paper I consider revelatory visions of HIV/AIDS by southern African local healers and diviners as points of departure for understanding recent artistic initiatives in the region. I begin by reviewing some of the intriguing parallels between art and divinatory practice. Levi-Strauss notes that art is predicated upon the progressive suppression of the complete sensorium, eliminating certain experiential dimensions in order to foreground others. Similarly, diviners almost always structure their performance spaces in order to limit the focus of attention; the entire universe, in effect, is reduced down to a magic mirror, a bowl of water, wooden board, a set of cast bones, a trembling voice in a darkened room. For all their differences, art and divination are founded on the paradoxical notion that one’s ultimate vision is expanded through the intensive, disciplined narrowing of perception.

Eastern Zambian male diviners seeking to explicate the current AIDS pandemic and heal or protect their clients often allude to visions of blocked or invisible roadways which appear as shadowy or opaque reflections in their divinatory mirrors. These scenarios refer not only to anxieties over unregulated rural-urban movement along regional highways (along which AIDS is often thought be transmitted, by and to women who have escaped senior male jural and economic encompassment ) but also to purportedly corrupted interior pathways within the bodies of women. Diviners at times attempt to “straighten” these interior and exterior pathways through ritual practices organized around geometrically organized performance spaces, “illuminated” by magical mirrors and other optical technologies, in order to produce “clear” and “purifying” visions of individual bodies, the local body politic, and the dynamic relations between the living and the dead. To what extent, I ask, may recent artistic and aesthetic undertakings, such as AIDS “memory boxes” and stitched visual narratives, be understood in comparable terms, creating efficacious microcosmic and macrocosmic healing visions within disciplined, confined spaces?

 

I-3  Congo? Carabali?—Images of African Identity in the Diaspora (Part 1)

Co-chairs: Judith Bettelheim (San Francisco State University, USA);  Kristine Juncker (Columbia University, USA)

 

“Él que no tiene de Congo tiene de Carabalí.”  “He who does not have Congo [in him], has Carabali.”  This popular Cuban proverb presents several important contradictions.  Can BaKongo, Carabali, or other African roots actually be identified in the Diaspora?   Or how do artists and artworks in the Diaspora come to terms with mestizaje, ethnic and cultural diversity and mixture, and simultaneously celebrate the inheritance of specific cultural origins?  This panel seeks to discuss the issue of African identity in the Diaspora, and the ways in which identities are sought, created and defined through contemporary or historic arts.

 

The Best Friends of the House: Spiritual Dolls as Ancestral Conduits in the Casa de Obatala

Steve Quintana (Boston, MA, USA), Anna Wexler (Springfield College, USA)

Santero Steve Quintana and Anna Wexler will discuss the fabrication and care of spiritual dolls as conduits of ancestral presence in the Casa de Obatala in Dorchester, MA.  Based upon an interview on this theme with Anna Wexler published in 2001, Mr. Quintana will trace a family legacy that began with the dolls made and used by his grandmother and great grandmother in their practice as spiritualist mediums in Havana in the 1940’s.  This legacy encompassed dolls that incarnated specific deceased family members as well as more generalized spirit guides (such as Congo and Gitana dolls) identified with popular images of Africanos de nacion and other spiritually endowed ethnic groups in Cuban history.  Mr. Quintana will explore his own use of dolls enfolded into his work with the Orichas as a Priest of Obatala while remaining intimately linked to the spiritualist practice and presence of his Afro-Cuban ancestors.  Anna Wexler will discuss the impact of what she has learned about the fabrication and potencies of spiritual dolls from Mr. Quintana in terms of problematic ancestral legacies explored in her multimedia performance work.

 

How African Roots Grow in Haitian Soil: Kreyol Arts in Haiti

LeGrace Benson, Arts of Haiti Research Project (Ithaca, NY, USA)

Writers on Haitian art from mid-twentieth century forward discuss the presence of African visual motifs and religious objects in the arts of Haiti.  Often these are viewed as conserved continuities, with origins traced back to homelands in Africa primarily on the basis of similarities of form and of usage in Vodou ceremonies.  While these are consequential, there are aspects of Haitian art that arguably demonstrate deeper concepts of African cosmologies bound into a “creolization” process that, in Haiti, shows some unusual characteristics.

 

Afro-Cuba Keeps Calling Me

Ben Jones (New Jersey City State University, USA)

My talk will be on the influence of Yoruba orishas on my artwork. I have been traveling to Cuba since 1977, and have been there about forty
times. Everytime I return home from Cuba, I feel an immediate yearning to return. It's primarily been the Afro-Cuban culture and the spirit of the people that continually call me back to Cuba.

As a former dancer of the Chuck Davis Company (formerly based  in New York City), I was richly exposed to Yoruba and various other African religions and rituals. Africa and it's spiritual belief systems have always had a strong influence in my work. My interest in the African diaspora led me to Cuba and to the Yoruba derived religions there. Shango and Obatala are frequently used as metaphors in my artwork.

My presentation will focus on the influence of some the Yoruba orishas and African spiritual belief systems on my work. I try to take in the influence of places like Africa and Cuba on the African diaspora.

 

 

I-4  The African Museum in the New Millennium

Co-Chairs: Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani (West African Museum Programme, Dakar, Senegal); Agbenyega Adedze (Illinois State University, USA)

 

The museum occupies a very important segment of the African cultural landscape; however, many museum professionals fail to utilize these institutions to their full potential due to the myriad problems besetting them. Several meetings, conferences, and workshops have been organized since the inception of museums in Africa where the recurrent problems are debated without any concrete solutions. The present panel "The African Museum in the New Millennium" seeks to exhort African museum professionals to critically examine historically the various facets of this all-important cultural establishment. They will provide a comprehensive analysis relevant to the revival and renaissance of African museums. Panelist would be encouraged to propose cost effective African solutions for their museums rather than external ideas that may not be relevant to Africa. While ensuring that all the regions of Africa are covered in the various topics, participants are advised to provide a vision that will carry the African museum through the 21st century.

 

Definitions and Legal Status of Museums in Africa

Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani (West African Museums Programme, Dakar, Senegal)

The last decade saw the creation of new private, regional and community-based museums in West Africa with local communities attempting to re-appropriate their culture and history. Private and community-based museums--through their flexibility, their capacity to promote the involvement of communities, and their knowledge of the local environment--could be considered as partners for the implementation of innovative programmes for museums in West Africa. They have an important role to play in the future of museums. They could be catalysts for a greater participation and a better integration of communities in preserving local culture and cultural and natural heritage in general. However, private and community museums face a number of serious institutional issues.

In my presentation I will explore the legal and institutional status of private and community-based museums in West Africa, identify their institutional and financial capacities and constraints, and propose a programme to support their institutional needs.

 

Putting the African Museums into International Perspective

Merrick Posnanskiy (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

The larger number of African museums display their past within a local perspective with the exception of a few exhibitions on hominid ancestry and more recently rock art. For good history and an educational benefit it is important to place the past, and the artifacts of Africa, within a broad World perspective. The purpose of this paper is to indicate how this might be achieved. The paper focuses on some of the more spectacular historical monuments such as the colonial forts on both the East and West African coasts, placing them within the context of the maritime economic and colonial system of the 16th - 18th century. Comparisons are made with Portuguese monuments in India and the far east. Other structures of interest that will be considered are terraces found in the Philippines, early mosques and colonial architecture from both Vietnam and Francophone Africa. By depicting Africa's monuments in African museums in a World, as opposed to a regional or even an African perspective, it is hoped that visitors will be able to distinguish local from universal characteristics and expand their interest in a more universal history.

 

Tradition meets Technology: African Museums Facing the Challenges

Lorna Abungu (Africom, Nairobi, Kenya)

Museums around the world are without a doubt catching up on the latest Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). In Africa, however, poor national communications infrastructures, lack of national and institutional ICT policies, expensive dial-up (phone) and Internet Service provider (ISP) rates, and the high cost of equipment have hampered the use of ICTs in most African museums. In 1999, it was estimated that 50 out of 53 African countries had direct Internet access (BBC News online, 1999). This however does not mean that all African museums are able to take advantage of what appears to be a high connectivity rate.

By acknowledging the existence of a ‘Digital Divide’, museums on the African continent can help to bridge it by striving to create and provide access to important digital information; this can be done through lobbying of national governments and creating programmes that are relevant to national development. The museums can help to find the means to overcome the obstacles to access on both local and national levels.

This paper discusses the role of museums in Africa today, and how some of them are using NICTs to expand educational and exhibition possibilities, and to reach out to greater audiences. It will look at the obstacles that African museums face in accessing digital information, and how organisations such as AFRICOM can make positive contributions in overcoming some of these obstacles in the heritage sector.

 

Collaborations between African and U.S. Museums

Christine Mullen Kreamer (National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, USA)

Museums everywhere in the world face increasing challenges in leveraging limited funds and staff resources to carry out the many tasks museums are called upon to perform.  Rather than settling for the status quo, forward-thinking museums develop innovative strategies to expand current research and exhibition programs, to enhance the skills and experience of their staff, and to make the museum a place of relevance for the local, national and international audiences that museums serve.  With limited budgets, forging partnerships among museums provides strength in numbers and offers museums with limited budgets ways to carry out research, preserve historic sites, conserve and expand collections, and create exhibitions and outreach programs that reach new audiences.

This paper will touch on a number of areas of mutually beneficial collaborations (past and potential future projects) between U.S. and African museums.  It will focus on an interest in strengthening artistic production in African crafts by linking it to master artists and to the potential exhibition and sale of high quality works by such artists.  Institutional collaboration might concentrate on the documentation of high quality crafts and the master artists who create them.  Such a project would identify "living treasure" master artists whose knowledge and skills would be recognized, documented and celebrated through joint research and collecting projects that result in the exhibition and possible sale of high quality works by these master artists.  Stimulating the production and sale of high quality African arts and crafts would benefit the artists, encourage the training of younger artists, provide high quality works to high end museum and specialty shops, and emphasize the value of African arts to the research, collection, exhibition and publication work of museums.    

 

 

II-1  Artists in Contemporary Ethiopia and in the Diaspora

Co-chairs: Rebecca Martin Nagy (Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, USA) and Achamyeleh Debela (North Carolina Central University, USA)

 

Ethiopian artists working in their own country and abroad are increasingly gaining recognition as major figures in the international art world, as evidenced by recent one person and group shows of their work and by the inclusion of Ethiopian artists in group shows of pan-African and international scope. Scholarly research on contemporary African art has increased, and there is an encouraging trend among major museums to acquire work by contemporary African artists, including Ethiopians. Some critics and art historians would argue that the Ethiopian heritage of contemporary, academically trained artists is largely irrelevant in considering their work. We believe, however, that the work of these artists should be considered in terms of both continuity with the past and the change that is all but inevitable given the ubiquity of global exchange. In addition to academically trained artists, others continue to work in the time-honored genres of mural painting, icon painting, and metalworking.  Having served apprenticeships under established masters, they sell their work to the church and local patrons who employ it for traditional purposes and to local and foreign patrons who value the work for its craftsmanship and aesthetic appeal. We invite papers on various aspects of contemporary art and artists in Ethiopia and the Diaspora, including traditional and academically trained artists. We welcome papers representing differing points of view about the relevance of looking for the expression of a distinctively Ethiopian identity in the work of contemporary artists.

 

Skunder Boghossian: A Jewel of a Painter of the 21st Century

Achamyeleh Debela (North Carolina Central University, USA)

In the 1960s, when many believed that African artists produced only “tribal” art forms, Skunder’s paintings already hung in the modern art museums of New York and Paris. Long before it was fashionable for contemporary African artists to draw inspiration from “traditional” African art, Skunder embarked on a pioneering journey into his Ethiopian past. This paper examines Skunder’s paintings in private collections in Addis Ababa for fresh insights into the work of a gifted artist who generously shared his creative spirit with his students, friends, colleagues and the world.

 

Tadesse Mesfin: Ethiopian Impressions

Patrick J. Bayens (University of Kentucky, USA)

Contemporary Ethiopian painter Tadesse Mesfin made his mark with realistic art in the European tradition, but made a seismic shift in the late 1990s when he allowed himself to be influenced by Ethiopian Christian art. Eschewing social, cultural, or political themes, he developed as an artist by seeking artistic solutions to his painter craft—composition, line, and pattern—in contrast to some of his better-known compatriots. Though widely recognized and honored in his homeland, he has, because of his artistic course, failed to achieve an international recognition commensurate with his domestic acclaim.

 

Back to the Future (or Painting Both Ways): The Recent Work of a Traditional Artist in the Diaspora

Neal W. Sobania (Hope College, USA)

Traditionally trained as an artist in his father’s workshop, Daniel Berhanemeskel was by the age of fifteen an accomplished icon painter whose work was being both commissioned and sold through shops in his hometown of Aksum, Ethiopia.  However, from the age of nineteen, he has been educated in a Western idiom in the art department of a US college. This paper offers a preliminary consideration of this young painter’s artistic journey from traditional painter to academic painter.

 

 

II-2  Congo? Carabali?—Images of African Identity in the Diaspora (Part 2)

Co-chairs: Judith Bettelheim (San Francisco State University, USA);  Kristine Juncker (Columbia University, USA)

 

For panel abstract see panel I-3

 

Portraits in the Altar: Ancestors in Twentieth-Century Espiritismo

Kristine Juncker (Columbia University, USA)

This paper will present five short case studies of Afro-Cuban religious practitioners who actively rely on portraits in their Espiritismo altars.  An examination of the display, use and interpretation of these portraits demonstrates that many Afro-Cuban religious families actively ‘work’ with portraiture. 

Portraits in spirit altars show respect for distinguished religious background and experience, however they can also help the practitioner achieve professional goals, reinvent history, or even manipulate popular gender roles.  Notably, both the rise of African diasporic pride and Cuban government’s own values of

religious art have dramatically changed the way portraits, and thereby notions of the ancestor, have been adapted into an Afro-Cuban religious altar.

 

Diaspora African Festivals - Imitation or Evolution: The Case of Two Orisa Festivals in Trinidad and Tobago

Eintou Pearl Springer (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago)

The paper will explore the repression and retention of traditional African religion in Trinidad and Tobago. It will detail its survival mechanisms and its rise to prominence in the post 1970 period. The reasons for its resurgence both social and political will be examined. The public face of this resurgence has been the development of festivals, amongst which are the Orisha Family Day, a festival combining both secular and spiritual elements, and the Osun Festival based on a spiritual festival held continuously for centuries in Nigeria, the birthplace of the religion. The implications of these festivals, the interplay between tradition and modernity will be explored. Video footage and numerous newspaper clippings will enhance the presentation.

 

Carnaval à Jacmel: Images from Haiti

Phyllis Galembo (University at Albany, State University of New York, USA)

 

 

II-3  Crossing Boundaries: Routes of Colonialism in African Art
Co-chairs: Andrea Frohne (Dickenson College, USA); and Onyile Bassey Onyile (Georgia Southern University, USA)

This panel seeks to examine the complex connections between art and colonial ideology. How has colonialism influenced, or been imbued, in the arts of many African societies? Issues to consider are the geographic, symbolic, political, aesthetic, religious, iconographic, economic, stylistic, or social routes induced by colonialism in arts of the African world. Additional areas might include Christianity, gender, or "race". Conversely, why has the history of colonialism at times been written out of African art studies?

This panel will include both "traditional" and contemporary artists. Also, what models of visual theory might accommodate the multivalence of Africa’s arts, identities and experiences? We hope to offer innovative strategies for examining the visual culture that has arisen from the political impact of colonialism.

 

Reflections in the Mirror: Exploring Western/Congolese Relations through the Art of Trigo Piula

Sarah Getzelman (University of Denver, USA)

What once was a mirror is replaced by a television screen.  What once held mystical powers is now charged by the electrical cords that run from his body.  The audience is enraptured by this object of worship.  Through their eyes, the viewer of Trigo Piula’s Ta Tele becomes enraptured as well.  Here, the invention of the television rivals the invention of Africa; both Western concepts that have been popularly accepted.  Yet, can one get a true understanding of Piula’s intent through such a basic interpretation?  Is it possible that modern Congolese art represents more than its colonial influence?

A public interest in traditional African art has eclipsed that of contemporary African creations for many years.  It seems as though it is only recently that the work of modern artists in many African cities is recognized.  Even with this recognition, however, stipulations and conditions are applied to each work.  Western critics interpret African works in comparison to the masterpieces of the Western world.  The influence of the West is seen as undisputedly positive, therefore this influence in art must be so as well.  A closer look at Trigo Piula’s paintings would tell a different story.  By transposing cultural elements from each society, Piula makes a powerful statement on Western and Congolese relations.  This statement reminds the viewer that there is more to the Congo- more to Africa- than the limitations set upon it through Western expectations.  Through the works by Congolese artist Trigo Piula, one finds both the unification of, and the jarring visual dissonance between, Western and Congolese cultures.

 

European Missionaries and Zaramo Artists in Tanzania: A Question of Patronage

Fadhili Mshana (Georgia College & State University, USA)

European missionaries’ attitudes and interactions with African cultures have generally been seen in relation to imperialism. Criticism leveled against the missionaries was not only that they did not understand much of African cultures, but they also strove to destroy what they did not grasp. In their involvement with African art traditions, missionaries were also accused of adopting antagonistic approaches. Yet there were some missionaries who recognized the value of African cultures and expended efforts to understand them. Others made significant contributions to the study of African art traditions in the twentieth century.

This paper seeks to explore the contexts and agenda behind the missionaries’ seemingly benevolent postures and actions pertaining to African art, not least as they relate to issues of patronage and the art market in shaping the form, subject-matter, and styles of art. I will focus on the Maneromango school run by German Lutheran missionaries to show the nature of missionary relationship with the Zaramo carvers in style and theme. As well, to ascertain notable influences of the school and developments concerning Zaramo artists. At Maneromango, a large majority of Zaramo carvers from Kisarawe District developed and refined their carving style. Equally important is the far-reaching influence of the school upon Zaramo carvers today. At any rate, notable developments- -both positive and negative- -affected the art created there. I will argue that though the Maneromango school and the missionaries reshaped traditional methods and genres, but it also gave Zaramo art the recognition it deserved, in turn increasing demand.

 

“How Can African Artists be African After Picasso?”: Seeking Interpellations Beyond the Colonial in South African Art

Julie L. McGee (Bowdoin College, USA)

The Eurocentric epistemological system that is the foundation for art historical discourse has not been disrupted in South Africa and often responds poorly to perceived threats from the outside.  Too few black voices participate in constructing South Africa’s art historical narrative and national art collections; those in power rationalize the situation in the name of Western notions of professionalization.  What is indigenous knowledge?  The battle is over whose knowledge: what constitutes African knowledge, who participates in this debate and who decides.  The struggle is also over the colonial roots of art history and its relevance and meaning to the present and future South Africa.

 

 

 

 

Beyond the Colonial Paradigm: Modern Egyptian Aesthetic Experience as a Discourse of Social Context

Patrick Kane (Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA)

A hermeneutics of colonialism must critique Eurocentrism’s historicizing of modern aesthetics as oppositions of tradition and modernity.  Egyptian discourse on the arts however offers a wider horizon for a hermeneutics of experience and an alterity of modernisms that rooted itself in the social context of the everyday. The colonial project historicized Egyptian arts into antiquity, medieval and folkoric crafts, as categories for colonial administration, but negated this aesthetic experience of the colonized. This paper reviews the vibrant alterity of contemporary and modern Egyptian discourse in the wider horizons accorded to pre-colonial and contemporary arts as a narrative of social context.  

 

African Contemporary Art in Western Eyes : Germany’s Case from 1950 to Today

Romuald Tchibozo (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany)

My paper will be about the reception of contemporary African art in both ex West and East Germany through exhibitions, the role of cultural institutions, and the media.

In the former Federal Republic of Germany, in order to garner an autonomous international relationship, the official cultural institutions made an effort to organise African art and culture exhibitions.  Also, there were private underwriters who had worked too, sometimes with official African institutions or directly with artists in order to arrange the exhibitions.

However, in the former Democratic Republic of Germany, the government has worked with difficulty to approach African countries, which at the end of the 1960s, continued the struggle for independence. Because there were no underwriters to cultivate international cultural relationships and exhibitions, the government undertook all initiatives.

Secondly, this study considers what the journalists of both sides have written concerning contemporary African art. The press critics in ex-Federal Republic of Germany were particularly vicious until the end of the 1980s.  In the ex-Democratic Republic of Germany, the press presents this art, particularly from Mozambique and Tanzania, to illustrate the end of colonialism and an imperialist mentality.  It is very interesting to compare different ideologies by the people of almost the same country who have an unrelated idea on the subject of contemporary African art.   

 

 

III-1  Africa and the Indian Ocean World: Arts and Identities

Co-chairs: Henry J. Drewal (University of Wisconsin, USA); Allen Roberts (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

 

Indian Ocean World histories, cultures and arts are the result of complex,

cross-cultural, and multi-directional currents. Africans have been an important presence in the Indian Ocean World in such diverse roles as traders, merchants, sailors, artists and architects, professional soldiers, court musicians, bureaucrats, regents, saints, rulers, etc. for more than 1000 years. This panel seeks to present aspects of this diverse cultural world under the broad theme of arts and identities. We encourage papers that illuminate the artistic interactions and impacts of various African peoples in specific sites and eras.

 

Building Global But Meaning Local: Nineteenth-Century Zanzibar Architecture

Prita Meier (Harvard University, USA)

This paper will examine the politics of architectural style and meaning in nineteenth century Zanzibar. The architectural legacy of the reign of the Busaidi sultan Seyyid Barghash (ruled from 1870-1888) will serve as a spring board to reexamine larger issues regarding the relationship between architecture and the social politics of intercultural negotiations. Issues of both assimilation and resistance as seen through the idiom of architecture will be addressed.  The crosscurrents between Zanzibar, the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, African inland and Europe will be emphasized, reframing the “Age of Empire” as a period producing alternative and often conflicting visions of the meaning of Swahili coast space and identity. 

 

“In the Mirror of the Mother”: Arts of the Mouride Diaspora in Mauritius

Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

For approximately fifteen years, the teachings of a charismatic Senegalese Sufi spiritual teacher named Sheikh Adoulaye Dieye (d.2001) and his successor, Sheikh Ali N’Daw, have been flourishing on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Mauritius has been a crossroads of cultural and religious transaction and borrowing for centuries. This presentation focuses on how this particular practice of Sufism (originating from the Senegalese movement called the Mouride Way, founded by Sheikh Amadou Bamba, 1853-1927), found its way across the continent to this island with no particular ties to Senegal. It addresses the way in which the movement, to which more than half of Senegal’s ten million Muslims belong, has taken on a specifically feminist character in Mauritius. It will argue that this aspect of the movement emanates from the role of the founding saint’s mother in the hagiography of Sheikh Amadou Bamba.

In Senegal, the Mouride Way is an extremely visual movement. On the surface, it appears that the visual dimension of the movement has not carried over to Mauritius, where many of its followers still consider images to be forbidden, as they were taught in the context of more orthodox Muslim practices. Only photographs of Sheikh Dieye, Sheikh Ali, and Sheikh Amadou Bamba are found in the homes of devotees, but little else in the way of the visual apart from Arab calligraphic verses. Yet, particular events demonstrate that the suppression of the visual is not an absolute for these Mourides, who are mostly women of Indian descent, primarily from Muslim backgrounds but in some cases of Hindu origin. And other art forms, such as song, have flourished in this new spiritual landscape. This presentation examines the processual nature of visual and expressive arts associated with the Mouride diaspora in Mauritius, and the fluidity, flexibility, and courage of its devotees in the face of orthodox Muslim doctrines on Mauritius, as well as their remarkable ability to adapt to changing political circumstances and transnational cultural stimuli.

 

From Senegal to India via Mauritius: The Arts of an Emerging Spiritual Diaspora

Allen F. Roberts (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

In January, 2004, two devotional diasporas began to intersect: that of the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement, and that of Baba Gor, a Sufi movement in western India based upon the teachings and continuing blessings of Baba Gor, a medieval settler in Gujarat said to have hailed from Abyssinia or the Sudan. Polly and Al Roberts have studied Mouride visual culture for the last decade, witness their exhibition and book, A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (2003); and other U.S. scholars including Prita Meier and Bill Dewey who will present research results in this same panel, have visited and studied the tomb of Baba Gor. In January, 2004, a Mouride delegation from Réunion and Mauritius, led by Sheikh Aly N’Daw as assisted by a Muslim Mauritian woman, a Hindu Mauritian woman, and a Jewish American woman—all of whom have converted to Mouridism—traveled to India on a complex spiritual journey. Having learned of Baba Gor and his Sidi (Afro-Indian) devotees during a dinner at the Los Angeles home of Polly and Al Roberts in the fall of 2003, Sheikh Aly decided to include a visit to the tomb of Baba Gor to his forthcoming Indian itinerary. The visit would bring together persons devoted to two sub-Saharan African Sufi saints whose lives are separated in time by some five hundred years. The results of this remarkable encounter will be discussed in the present progress report of emerging research.

 

Africans in India: Worship at the “Tombs” of Baba Ghor

William Dewey (University of Tennessee, USA)

Baba Ghor (or Gor) is remembered as an African (Abyssinian) trader who founded the famed agate and carnelian industry of Gujarat perhaps as long ago as the 14th century. He is also the most important African Islamic saint (pir) honored in scores of Indian cities and among the Indian Islamic diaspora in  communities as far-flung as London. His durga (tomb) in Ratanpur, Gujarat and the numerous chillas, or memorial tombs, found elsewhere, are the principal foci of worship of many Sidi (or African descent) Muslims.

Sidis of these communities have gained reputations as musical performers extraordinaire and earn money singing and dancing for private celebrations such as Hindu weddings, at the Ganesh festival of Mumbai and even the Festival of India. This film however focuses on the performances associated with worship and healing performed in contexts of the tomb site at Ratanpur and a memorial tomb in Mumbai. The research is based upon observations, interviews and filming done by a multi-disciplinary group of scholars with the 'Crossing Borders' team who visited these sites in July of 2000. The sites are largely controlled by Sidis (although now being contested by Sunni Bohras) and attract Sidis and others in the area seeking cures for a variety of difficulties, especially unwanted spirit possessions and "black magic and spells."

The expressive and material culture displayed at these devotional sites

represent an intense (and at times blurred) synthesis of African, Hindi and Muslim religious traditions.  As a mystic Sufi saint, Baba Ghor's divine blessing (or baraka) is mediated through the active participation of devotees in the daily  renewal of the tomb's ornamentation and by music and dance.  The celebration of Baba Ghor's spirit and power via percussion and dance performances is one of the key features of this saint's worship.  These performances are called Goma" and most likely are derived from the east African dance and drumming traditions of "Ngoma".

The musical repertoire of Sidi musicians' ranges from still vaguely remembered African traditions to popular Indian Islamic traditions.  For example, while the drums are referred to by Swahili names and large stringed instruments called "nangs" are considered to be objects directly coming from Africa, such accomplished Sidi performers as the recently deceased Kamar, are trained as Indian (and Pakistani) "qwalli" singers.

The shrine complex of Baba Ghor in Ratanpur is the most important site

of pilgrimage for his devotees world-wide and also includes the tombs of Baba Ghor's sister, Mai Mishra, and brother, Baba Habash as well.  The Sidi Sufi cult differs from other Muslim saint cults in that ritual space and activities are divided into male and female domains.  For example, the tomb of Mai Mishra is an important site of worship for both men and women in its own right.  The space accorded to Mai Mishra also demands a female ritual specialist and well- respected mediums of both Baba Ghor and Mai Mishra are often females.

The religion and expressive culture of this African diasporic community illustrates the active fusion of both present and past, and imagined practices.  The exact "African" nature of specific moments and objects is in a constant state of creation and (re)imagining.  For example, several Sidi dance troupes have recently been revitalized by taking their inspiration from West African dance troupes that were touring larger cities in India.

 

Afro-Indian Performance Arts in Karnataka

Henry J. Drewal (University of Wisconsin, USA)

The Indians of African descent (Siddis) in Northern Karnataka are engaged in a movement to assert and define their culture and history at a moment when the Indian government has recognized them as a distinct “scheduled tribe” after many years of legal and social limbo. Part of their effort involves cultural performances -- music, dance, and song – as one way to claim their place and space in contemporary Indian society that is largely ignorant of their presence or long history in South Asia. In addition, some of their religious beliefs and practices may have roots in Africa. This collaborative presentation by two scholars who have worked among the same Siddi communities (Drewal on arts, Obeng on religion) will discuss these cultural elements and assess Siddi strategies for empowerment in India today. 

 

 

 

 

African Indian Political Action Mediated through Religion

Pashington J. Obeng, Wellesley College, USA

The paper focuses on how today's Karnataka African Indians draw on African and Indian religious and cultural resources to  rework and assert their identities while simultaneously, subverting the forces that oppress them.

 

 

III-2  Confluence or Conflict? Two Trends of Contemporary African Art in an International Context

Chair: Sunanda K. Sanyal (The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, USA)

 

In recent years, works of contemporary African artists –primarily painters-- with little or no art school training have drawn a fair number of Western curators, collectors, and scholars. Identified as “self-taught”, “popular” or “urban”, and occasionally organized in groups and workshops, such artists produce both site-specific and portable images, most frequently figurative social narratives with formal and iconographic strategies significantly different from those employed by academically trained artists. The market’s enthusiasm for this kind of art, however, has raised questions. While many of its gallery advocates have insisted that it demonstrates an “original” pictorial approach, an “African” way of seeing, unlike the allegedly derivative tendencies of the contemporary enterprise grounded in institutional art training; critics of this view identify such preference as an essentialist fascination for a form of neo-primitivism, a neo-colonial urge to legitimize a signifier of the Third World too benign to challenge the West’s latent claim to cultural superiority.

The panel attempts to examine the production, reception and marketing of this genre of art in light of the above debate. What is the role of these artists, vis-à-vis that of art school graduates, in contemporary Africa’s response to the global art scene? How differently do the works of the two groups address notions of tradition and modernity? Has scholarly research on the “self-taught” artists (Fabian, Jewsiewicki, Court) problematized their popular reception as authentic storytellers in the Euro-American art market? Art historians, artists, critics, and curators are invited to explore such questions to generate a productive discussion on the subject.

 

Bridging Worlds: Knowledge, Patronage and Creativity in Contemporary African Art

Laurel Birch Aguilar (University of St. Andrews, UK)

Contemporary arts/paintings in one city, Lilongwe, reveals the clear separation of artist communities: the elite artists who are educated and trained in art, and a more recent network of artists working in popular genre, but seeking recognition. The two groups co-exist, identifiable by the community in which they work and the arts they produce.

In this exploratory paper, artwork, subjects and themes, space, patronage and markets identify these two very different artist communities. I interpret the work of each community via issues of knowledge and creativity, focusing particularly on the question of perception of 'African culture' by artists, and their notions of how their patrons view Africa and purchase art. Central to this discussion is a set of reactions to a recent small exhibition of this art in Scotland.

 

Narrating Modernity : Kenyan Artists and the American Embassy Bombing

Sidney L. Kasfir (Emory University, USA)

In Modernity at Large  (1996:3), Arjun Appadurai posits media as one of the major diacritics which works to constitute modern subjectivity. One aspect of this subjectivity that concerns me here is the acceptance of a national identity in the popular imagination when most public and local discourse, including that fostered by the nation-state itself, is instead framed in terms of rival ethnicities or loyalty to opposing political factions. Most discussions of media’s role in the production of these identities focus upon print and electronic transmission since these reach the widest audiences, although both Habermas (1989) and Anderson (1983, 1991) have noted the salience of the visual arts as well.

My story concerns a visual narrative couched inside a 1998 news story, which is itself part of a much larger historical narrative beginning with colonialism and extending up to the present in one East African nation state: just before midday on Friday the 7th of August 1998, a terrorist bomb exploded in downtown Nairobi, killing over 200 people and injuring over 4,000. The explosion ripped apart the American Embassy and totally demolished the Ufundi Cooperative
building next to it as well as breaking the windows of nearly every downtown skyscraper in a radius of one kilometer. A year later a group of artists organized a retrospective exhibition to memorialize the collective experience. Here I consider the ways artists constructed these memories out of the verbal narratives and news media accounts, and in doing so helped to create a modern national identity.

 

The Wet Season: Richard Onyango at the 2003 Venice Biennale

Jessica Levin (Harvard University, USA)

The paper discusses the artist’s work at the Kenya pavilion at this year’s international art exhibition. The three large-scale oil paintings are landscapes picturing scenes from the artist’s youth in Kenya.  In bright color and highly legible, these feature a jeep and bus slogging through mud or careening past cracked roadsides.

Born in Kisii and now working in Malindi on the Kenyan coast, Onyango has been celebrated for his views of rural and domestic spaces.  Many of these, such as his “Day of Permission” (1990), include iconic signs of Western influence.  The selection of paintings for the biennale, however offer a view of the countryside interrupted by whirling tires and automotive engines.  Not selected are his recent works of the Kenyan rural landscape featuring Princess Diana in her pink Chanel suit standing beside a sign protesting land mines.  Also ignored are his visions of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization.  The shifting political landscape extends to his studio in Malindi in proximity to Mombassa, the site of a terrorist car bombing as well as inter-ethnic fighting.

Onyango’s inclusion in the 50th Venice Biennale is of special interest given that the Kenya show marks the first time that an East African country has been represented there. The organizers chose Onyango and Armando Tanzini to represent the nation and its contemporary art production.  The politics of selecting works for the international stage will thus be explored. Before becoming an artist in 1990, Onyango worked as a sign-painter, bus driver, woodcarver, carpenter, clothing designer, farmer, and animal trainer.  The Italian-born Tanzini, who carves in ancient woods, is also deeply involved in the Kenyan tourism industry.  Onyango’s contribution will be explored in light of Tanzini’s work, as well as the group African show at Venice entitled “Fault Lines” curated by Gilane Tawadros.  The majority of installations and photographs in “Fault Lines” carry an overtly political message and participate in a markedly urban, cosmopolitan dialogue.

 

Moroccan Rejections and Recuperations of Naïveté in an International Context: A Reading of Abdeslam Boutaleb’s “La Peinture naïve au Maroc”

Katarzyna Pieprzak (Williams College, USA)

In 1985, the Moroccan mathematician Abdeslam Boutaleb published a glossy coffee-table book of Moroccan art entitled La Peinture naïve au Maroc with the Parisian press Les editions du Jaguar.  The book jacket proclaimed that the Professor of Math discovered “naïve art” by complete chance in 1979, and ever since that coup de foudre, he has worked to establish a large collection of canvas painting from Morocco’s unschooled, or autodidactic, painters in the hopes of unveiling the value of their work to a larger world audience.

In this paper, I will examine and critique the rhetoric of rejection and recuperation present in Boutaleb’s book.  A commentary on Moroccan art in an international context, Boutaleb provides a rich example of the negotiations of modernity present in the discourse of naïve art as a marginalized or minor art form. In part a reaction to the protests of 1960s Moroccan academic painters who had vehemently rejected the work of unschooled artists in their critique of neo-colonial relationships in art, in part a personal reverie on his homeland and the possibility of an authentically Moroccan vision (“a lost paradise”), the book compiles a substantial collection of artwork interspersed with short biographies of the artists, analytical treatments of the art as well as European literary musings on art and naïveté by the likes of Baudelaire, Paul Eluard, and André Malraux. It is precisely the reactionary politics present in the textual framing and marketing of the artwork that makes the book such a fascinating participant in the ongoing arguments about the contribution of self-taught artists to contemporary art in Africa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

III-3  The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same?  Assessing Change in Postcolonial South African Visual Cultures

Chair: Liese van der Watt (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

 

This panel explores changes in African visual practices that have been brought about not by physical movement, but rather by ideological movement.   As such, the panel is interested in papers that explore the impact that political liberation has had on the art of Africa and its diaspora. Though not necessarily settled on a South African context, papers may well focus on postapartheid South Africa as one instance where a radical change in government has affected the visual arts in both constructive and detrimental ways.  While democracy has brought international exposure and mobility for many artists, it has also seemingly erased the need for “resistance” or “struggle” art and photography.  In the face of this, what new themes are being articulated? What new struggles waged?  How has democracy affected production and access to resources, if at all?  These and other questions will stand central to this session.

 

Unity Then and Now: Constructing a New South African Identity in Architectural Ornament : The Lessons of the 1930s

Federico Freschi (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)

This paper aims to show how the façades of, and decorative programmes in, selected South African public and commercial buildings erected or decorated since 1994 may be understood as important indexes of the various ideological, social, and historical concerns underpinning the construction of notions of the ‘new’, democratic South Africa, and its attempts to acknowledge and tolerate cultural difference without representing it as Other.  In these terms I suggest that there are certain parallels between much of the rhetoric of nation building in the ‘new’ South Africa – and its representation in the visual arts –and the rhetoric, visual and otherwise, of the ‘fusion’ politics of the 1930s.  As such, many otherwise problematic decorative schemes dating from this period (for example the notorious ‘Zulu Room’ in South Africa House in London), rather than being an embarrassing reminder of an odious past, in fact provide an important lesson: constructions of identity are never neutral, and absolutist constructs of power – and their representation in the visual arts – are never permanent.

 

National Monuments and the Re-Imagining of the Past in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Paula Girshick (Indiana University, USA)

This talk will focus on visual practices of memorialization in post-apartheid South Africa.  The South African landscape is dotted with Afrikaner monuments, constant reminders of a brutal past. The new ANC-based government wants to counterbalance this with a new visual landscape, creating monuments which will recognize and celebrate the histories of previously marginalized groups while at the same time promoting reconciliation and nation-building. When representing this new South Africa, artists and architects must now seek different visual practices of memorialization, partially because of the lack of an indigenous large-scale memorial tradition and partially as a result of the widespread resistance to the kind of monumental representative sculpture that characterized the apartheid regime.  On the national level, monuments have gone in two directions: either minimalism (as Michael Kimmelman puts it, "what used to be men on horses with thrusting swords has morphed....into plain walls and boxes") or what David Bunn has called "neo-primitivist nostalgia" (a propensity for roundness). In this talk I will focus on neo-primitivist nostalgia in two new national monuments, one in Pretoria and the other in  rural KwaZulu Natal. By comparing how these monuments were created, I will show that neo-primitivist nostalgia could emerge in both cases even when radically  different aesthetic and ideological impulses were at stake.

 

The Dak'Art Biennale and the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres: Pan-African Exhibitions and Geopolitics in the Global Arena

Joanna Grabski (Denison University, USA)

This paper examines the Dak'Art Biennale in relation to the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts NPgres. Sponsored by the Senegalese government, both events constitute an "expression of political will" and an important discursive site for expounding the contributions of African artists in the global area. Several questions underpin my paper. How does Dak'Art from a discursive site for the construction of a Pan-African artistic platform? How does this particular Biennale interface with the global art world and its institutions? How do artists stake out geopolitical questions in their visual propositions and how is this relevant to the contemporary political climate?

 

Shifting Notions of Truth and Reality in South African Post-Apartheid Photography

Svea Josephy (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

South African photography in the 20th century was dominated by the social documentary genre. In this paper I aim to foreground a fundamental shift, which occurred between apartheid and post-apartheid photographic practice in South Africa. In the 1990s South African photography moved away from a mode of representation that was primarily about recording ‘reality’ (as typified by documentary) towards one which interrogated ‘reality’ and perceived the pursuit of reality to be illusory (as typified by contemporary visual art). I will argue that South African photography has drifted from a ‘truthful’ paradigm (documentary photography), towards a more fluid and creative form.

 

Performing Identities in Contemporary South Africa

Liese van der Watt (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

If, indeed,  “Identity’s politics is naming” as art historian Jane Blocker has put it - pointing to the exclusions that accompany all inclusions and to the differences that are often violently expelled in the process of forging sameness - then identity’s politics are also, of course, apartheid’s politics. The paper will assess the continued need for identity politics in postapartheid South Africa, with specific reference to its articulation in visual culture.   Looking at the strategies used by a number of young South African artists, the paper will explore how notions of identity are being redefined, reclaimed or dismissed in order to ‘think’ difference differently and to tolerate diversity.

 

 

III-4  Yoruba Popular Arts Worldwide!
Co-Chairs: David T. Doris (University of Michigan, USA); Elisha P. Renne  (University of Michigan, USA)

 

In paintings, beadwork, textiles, dress and videos, and more recently in elaborately decorated marriage letters, Yoruba popular cultures have come to be potent signifiers not only of Yoruba identities, but of the globalizing reach of an African culture. This panel will examine Yoruba popular cultures, focusing on the visual arts in Nigeria and their reverberations throughout the African Diaspora. It also will address their responsive, incorporative relation to cultural materials from outside the psycho-geographical space of Yorubaland. Such selective incorporation, wedded to a distinctive cultural tenacity, it is argued, is one of the enduring hallmarks of Yoruba artistic endeavor.

 

Eshu’s Magic Flute

Donald Cosentino (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

A comparison of the uses of Yorubaland in Caribbean art and mythology to parallel appropriations of Egypt in the art and mythology of classical Rome (eg. Murals in The House of Mysteries in Pompeii)  and the neo-Classical and Romantic Europe of Mozart (The Magic Flute) and Verdi (Aida).  In all these cases, priests and artists constructed a utopia divorced from, and in many ways hostile to, historic realities.  Specific Caribbean evidence for these parallel transformations will be noted in the “Libro de Pinturas” of Jose Antonio Aponte, the patakis of Lucumi mythology,, contemporary Cuban cinema (Gloria Rolanda, “Guantanamera”) and wall art in Havana and Piñar del Rio.  

 

 AfroDisney: Fortuitous Convergences and the Redemption of Textile Casualties in Southern Nigeria.

David Doris (University of Michigan, USA)

A discussion of the Nigerian journey of discarded textiles that feature factory (mis-) printed images of cartoon characters and other icons of the U.S. culture industry. Imported into southern Nigeria and sold especially as bed-sheets and pillowcases, the cloths are transformed—first from rejects into wholesale commodities in the southeastern city of Aba, and then as they are visually interpreted by Yoruba retailers and consumers. Not only are the cloths valued as cheap and durable, but the layered, broken, figurated patterns that decorate them are framed as local, “traditional” Yoruba textile forms, with a difference: “they are not from Nigeria.” Questions arise.

 

 

 

Texts/Textiles and the Exchange of Yoruba Engagement Letters

Elisha P. Renne (University of Michigan, USA)

The creation of elaborately decorated Yoruba engagement letters represents a practice which has developed within the last fifteen to twenty years in southwestern Nigeria.  While typewritten engagement letters have been exchanged since the early 20th century, recent versions include computer-generated texts with fancy textile coverings. By utilizing letters that incorporate both texts and textiles, their bearers maintain the ideal that Yoruba marriage represents a contract between two families, while simultaneously highlighting the distinction of  the bride and groom, as educated, fashionable individuals.   Decorated Yoruba engagement letters illustrate the practice of selective combination of things foreign (e.g., machine generated texts) with locally produced textiles as vehicles for asserting both a “traditional” unity and “modern” distinctively Yoruba identity.

 

Transatlantic Yoruba:  Let’s Take a Ride on the Âshe/Acè/Achè/Axé Bus

Dana Rush (University of Illinois, USA)

This paper will trace the trajectory of the fundamental Yoruba concept of àshe (life-force, divine authority, the power to make things happen) to Fon acè, to Afro-Cuban aché, and, finally, to Afro-Brazilian axé. Although the essential meaning of àshe does not change significantly in neighboring and transatlantic venues, the way it is expressed in diasporic popular culture differs, indeed. From Fon colloquialisms, to marketing strategies to sell CDs, to ever-present exposure on mass transit, among other examples, àshe/acè/achè/axé remains an active ‘life force,’ reifying the never-ending globalizing capacity of such an inherently potent concept.

 

Ife’s Life Size Copper Portrait Heads: Popular versus Royal

Suzanne Preston Blier (Harvard University, USA)

 

 

IV-1  Documenting Change, Returning to the Field (Part 1)

Chair:  Christine Mullen Kreamer, (National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, USA)

 

This panel explores the process of change observed when conducting art historical research in Africa.  The premise is that return trips to the field provide the opportunity to conduct research that compares earlier data with recent findings and to consider the motivations, impact and personalities connected with changes that occur over time.  What are the research questions and methodologies guiding return research and the documentation of change?  What significance may be attributed to changes over time in aesthetic concepts and in the forms, techniques and meanings of specific art forms or categories of art?  How have the arts been impacted by access to new materials or sources of inspiration?  Who are the key individuals involved in the making, using or marketing of arts over time?  Are there areas of artistic production that evince relatively little change over time?   Papers exploring these and other issues relating to change over time in African visual arts are most welcome.

 

The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same… Or Do They?  Research in Nigeria 1973 and 2003

Jean M. Borgatti (Clark University, USA)

 

In September 2002, I returned to Nigeria as a Fulbright scholar after a 23-year period during which I had been away, though in psychological touch with my experience, frozen though it was in the 1970s, through regular teaching and work on the massive amount of field data collected during that period. My intent was to teach in Nigeria and to continue a research project on social change and aesthetic preference among the Okpella of Edo North.

The Okpella are one of many small but distinct groups of people who live north of Benin City in Etsako (East) Local Government Area in southern Nigeria.                 They speak an Edo-related language like the people of Benin, having migrated from Benin in the early 18th century.  Their visual culture, as we know it from the 20th century, includes three masquerade traditions -- a social masquerade introduced circa 1930 from east of the Niger river, an eclectic group of masquerades of diverse origin woven into an annual festival of all souls that took its present form some time after the turn of the century, and an independent and allegedly ancient masquerade of woven raffia.  Aesthetic preference patterns derived from survey research are widely shared and deeply rooted, demonstrating little significant variation across age, gender, and education.

            During a sustained period of 15 months, I have added new qualitative data to contrast with research carried out from 1971-1974 on the history of Okpella masquerades and the definition of aesthetic concepts.  At the same time, I have carried out additional quantitative research to contrast with a survey on aesthetic preference carried out in 1979.  Changes in Okpella’s ancestral festival complex since 1979 have been documented through observation as well as discussion with community leaders and an inventory of the masquerades held by local families for comparison with information collected earlier.   Additional quantitative data on preference was collected through a panel study linked to the survey research undertaken in 1979.  For the panel study, approximately 25% of the 400 individuals interviewed in 1979 have been re-interviewed, and some 20 respondents aged 18 and under have been added to the sample to provide a current youthful perspective. 

            The proposed paper is a preliminary discussion of my findings as well as my impressions about a return to the field, particularly the differences between the research possibilities then and now, a combination of factors linked to economic conditions, Nigeria’s recent history, generational changes and social interests of the community as well as my own focused on one Okpella community in particular, Ogiriga, where Okpella’s masquerade festival honoring the ancestors and purifying the community took its present form in the early 1900s. Ogiriga is the home of Lawrence Ajanaku (a master carver who has become better known for his cloth appliqué work) and James John (the carver to whom most of the masks made during the 80s and 90s have been attributed).  Ogiriga is also the one community from which data has been analyzed and published as a discrete set  (Borgatti: "Ogiriga-Okpella masks: In Search of the parameters of beautiful and grotesque." Visual Communications, 8:3, Summer 82, 28-40 and "Anogiri or Olimi: Preference Patterns for Mask Types in Ogiriga-Okpella, Nigeria." Bashiru [Madison] 11 [1]:34-46. 1980.) Thus, it lends itself to a pilot analysis that can be accomplished by the Triennial date. 

 

Changing Mores in Asante Funeral Displays: "Modernity" as a Resource for Both Competitive Display and Sumptuary Restraint

Suzanne Gott (Kansas City Art Institute, USA)

This paper addresses changes taking place in contemporary Asante funerals, arguably the most important social events in present-day Asante.  During the presentation, I will explore how the rhetoric of "modernity" is employed by those seeking to restrain Asante funerary practices as well as by those seeking new ways to enhance the prestige and competitive impact of an Asante funeral.

The expenditure and heightened display associated with Asante funeral rites have long been sources of contestation and controversy.  Until the late nineteenth century, the opulent display of a prestigious Asante funeral was a privilege reserved for royals and the nobility.  However in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, there was an erosion of royal power as a result of internal instability and colonial rule that made it possible for Asante's emergent entrepreneurial elite to engage in costly, status-seeking funeral displays.

Since that time, there has been an ongoing sense of contestation between members of the nobility and the moneyed elite that has been played out via the long-established Asante practice of poatwa, or competitive display.  Today, all the regalia and presentation items required for staging a funeral of royal proportions may now be rented from shops specializing in the "hiring" of funerary prestige items and the supplying of dancing attendants and kete drumming troupes traditionally associated with the Asantehene's court.

In recent years, royals' opposition to opulent funerary displays by non-royals has been expressed in terms of "modernity", particularly the enlightened restraint associated with Christianity and formal education.  In the past decade, certain chiefs' support for increased restrictions on funeral expenditures and displays by non-royals has been regarded as evidence of the more progressive, "modern" stance of these traditional rulers.

Yet at the same time, the accoutrements and rhetoric of "modernity" have been enlisted as a means of enhancing the expense and prestige of Asante funerals.  In the 1990s, more prestigious funerals starting providing guests with food in the form of restaurant take-away meals in Styrofoam containers, complete with plastic forks and spoons.  Customary presentations of alcoholic drinks now often feature over-sized bottles of champagne, novelty-shaped whiskey bottles, and golden cocktail sets complete with an ice-bucket. Wooden crates of bottled soft drinks have now been replaced with beribboned basins of canned Coke and Fanta.

The drumming and singing groups customarily associated with Asante funerals are now augmented by local bands playing current hit music.  During funeral presentations, a band member may use their sound system to echo the announcer's words, literally and symbolically amplifying the impact of funeral speeches.  The professional funeral announcer, who uses Twi oratory to enhance the value of a funerary presentation, may punctuate her performance with such metonyms of modernity as a phrase in English, or the proud assertion that this particular funeral is "one-touch," an allusion to Ghana's most exclusive and expensive cell-phone service.

 

Masques à la mode: Researching Dogon Masks at the Turn of the Millennium

Polly Richards (School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK)

My research explores the formal developments of the masks and masquerades of the Dogon people, Mali, as a direct response to social and other changes in the latter half of the 20th century. The existing literature, covering the period from 1938 to 1996, has failed to provide any detailed account of a masking complex that has, in reality, adapted to several external factors: the annual exodus (and return) of young men to cities seeking work, the influx of tourism and imported goods, increasing desertification, and most importantly the penetration of Christianity and Islam and the political changes contingent upon the colonial and post-colonial government. In particular, Griaule's major work, Masques Dogons (1938b) no longer provides an accurate account of the current state of the masquerade tradition.

Whatever the changes, masquerade practices continue to thrive. Newly invented masks are performed for an entirely local audience, in contrast to the self-consciously "traditional" performances for tourists; and on closer examination, even more subtle developments