13th International Triennial Symposium on African Art
African Art:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 are taking place regarding the formal evolution
of the masks themselves. The purpose of my research has been to document such
innovatory forms and processes in specific detail and to investigate how such
changes have been perceived locally, focusing attention on the discourses of
mask makers, performers and audiences. These include an examination of the
contrast between performance for local purposes and for tourists and visiting
dignitaries. The ontological status of masks and their relationships to other
aspects of Dogon ritual practice has been clarified. Moreover, several hitherto undocumented masks have been
detailed, in addition to the facts and processes of change and innovation in
what has so far been presented as a "timeless" and essentially
"traditional" African society.
IV-2 Symbolism Within Historical Performance
and Communication of Caribbean Africans
Chair: Gene Emanuel
(University of the Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands)
This panel focuses on public
events and performances that involve verbal and non-verbal communication
including drummed and musical messages.
As vehicles of communal expression, these activities involve diverse
symbols, which reveal the extent of the underlying “Africaness” or
“Caribbeaness” of participants at a given point in history. Rather than relinquish their
African roots, the newly enslaved Akan warriors and princes that masterminded
the St. John African Slave Revolution of 1733-1734, utilized customary
indigenous communication systems, including signal drums, to martial their
forces for the successful overthrow of the Danish plantocracy. Calypso is popular throughout the
Caribbean and has gained international recognition as a highly developed oral
literary form which uses satire and double-entendre to dispense social commentary,
document history, lampoon authority, and disseminate opinions on topical
issues. Although Calypso songs
have been studied and critiqued in literary research, the opinions and
experiences of the Calypsonians themselves are usually overlooked. However, the insights of ten
Calypsonians relative to their art have been documented by academician and
practitioner Mighty Chalkdust.
When Charles Lindberg flew his Spirit of St. Louis to St. Thomas in
1929, the U.S. Virgin Islands were thrust briefly into the national
spotlight. His arrival was an occasion
for pomp and pageantry—St. Thomas style—and photographs document
the events that took place. The
official greeting, the gift bestowal, the procession following the community
band, the inter-generational excitement and the seating hierarchies all serve
to reveal the nature of St. Thomas society of that era. The critical role of oral traditions in
the Caribbean was highlighted in a staged production by Dance Alloy in
Pittsburgh through collaboration between Calypsonian, Black Stalin, and
choreographer Mark Taylor. Titled,
“Roots / Crossroutes: Stories from the Caribbean,” it found its
genesis in the complex issue of immigration between the islands. The show provides a dramatic rendition
of immigration narratives as portrayed in dance, song, and story-telling. The lyrics of the music and the
motivation of the choreography were drawn from oral histories gathered in St.
Thomas, USVI. Weddings and
funerals are major lifecycle rituals in the Virgin Islands and are important
public events which have certain features in common. Both involve largess, church ceremonies, processions,
oratory, music, and family sponsored receptions. But the ways these features play-out within the respective
events and the contrasting way various motifs and symbols are utilized, to
reveal the underlying purposes and sentiments.
From the Horse’s
Mouth: Calypsonians' Insights on the Development of Calypso
Hollis "Mighty
Chalkdust" Liverpool (University of the Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin
Islands)
Charles Lindberg's First
Visit to an African Community in 1929
Edgar O. Lake (USVI
Department of Education, U.S. Virgin Islands)
Festival Arts in the
Workplace
Roosevelt Finlayson (Bahama
Arts Institute)
Virgin Islands Funerals
and Weddings: A Comparison of Motifs and Symbols
Agnes Nicholas (University
of the Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands)
The Bonfire Wars: Akan
Drums and Ritual in the St. John African Slave Revolution (1733–1734)
Gene Emanuel (University of
the Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands)
IV-3 The Traditional/Contemporary Conundrum
(Part 1)
Chair: Barbara E. Frank
(Stony Brook University, USA)
This panel hopes to offer
new insights on an old problem … what is the
relationship between
contemporary art and the so-called traditional arts of Africa. I am just as interested
in papers that take a critical view of how contemporary artists use, abuse, or
appropriate traditional forms as in ones that explore how traditional arts are
rescued, transformed, and enriched by contemporary art practices.
Barbara E. Frank (Stony
Brook University, USA)
This
paper explores the crossing of gender domains by contemporary African artists
in the transformation of traditional artistic forms into individual,
nationalist, and continental domains, such as the appropriation of uli by
Nsukka artists, of Bamana mudcloth by a variety of contemporary artists, and
Berber women's tatoo as markers of nationalist Moroccan heritage. This paper questions the transformation
of these arts from the domain of elder women into ones of predominantly young
male artists. Should we be celebrating the preservation of these traditional
aesthetic forms as embodied in new contexts, or bemoaning the loss of women's
voices in their absorption into the global arena.
Outside the Box: Rethinking Categories of African Art through Context and Practice
Kinsey Katchka (The Detroit
Institute of Arts, USA)
Scholars,
collectors, museums and audiences have tended to pigeonhole African art objects
into various categories, namely traditional and contemporary. Here, I revisit
this tendency, posit historical and ideological reasons for it, and attempt to
talk about African visual culture in a less reified manner. To do so, I discuss
how the increasing literature on popular art figures into the system, incorporating
elements of traditional and contemporary and further calling into question
those categories. Based on fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal and subsequent
curatorial work, I discuss reasons for questioning conventional categorization,
and examples of how these longstanding conceptual categories prove untenable in
contemporary practice.
The Creative Reformation
of Existing African Traditions: The Iconography of the Abayomi Barber Art
School
Odiboh Freeborn (University
of Benin, Nigeria)
The
paper examines the iconography of the Abayomi Barber Art School, and attempts
to define them within Yoruba traditional/cultural artistic idioms. There is a
brief discussion of the School to situate it within modern Nigerian /African
art. Apart from that, Yoruba art
as well as some of the cultural aspects are highlighted to explain their
reformations in the contemporary art of the Abayomi School. Apparently, the
style of the school for establishing the African identity is unique in the
artistic panorama of contemporary Nigeria. Pertinently, the views of the
artists as well as selected works of the school are examined to emphasize the
reformative artistic attitude.
“Allah and the Wall
of Confrontation”: Mythopoesis in Modern and Contemporary African Art
Sylvester Ogbechie (University
of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
What is the role of indigenous aesthetics (the use of formal structures,
symbols and imagery derived from "traditional" African arts) on the constitution
of artistic identity in modern and contemporary African art? The constitution
of artistic identity in modern and contemporary African art, and, to some
extent, the writing of art history itself can be defined as a form of
mythopoesis, an active process of mythmaking through visual and verbal
narratives. Modern African
artists, implicated in the discourse of modernism utilize a wealth of
indigenous mythology (encapsulated in religious and aesthetic traditions of
different African cultures) as a framework for their contemporary
practice. For these African
artists, traditional forms of African aesthetic practices operate within a
structure of indigenous validation opposed to the totalitarian ideal of uniform
Eurocentric modernity imposed on African cultures as a result of colonization. Thus “traditional" African
aesthetics provide modern African artists with a basis for interrogating the
normative assumptions of the colonial and postcolonial orders especially
through their adoption of indigenous arts and symbols as a framework for
contemporary artistic practice. My
paper evaluates this process of appropriation by questioning the implications
of recourse to indigenous aesthetics in the practice of several significant
modern and contemporary African artists.
IV-4 ROUNDTABLE: Through the Lens and Onto
the Screen: Professors and Curators Describe Their Film Making Processes
Chair: Susan Vogel (Prince
Street Pictures, New York, USA)
Many African art historians
and anthropologists have found themselves
making films – some
drawn to record the movement of ritual or dance in
the field, others compelled
by the needs of an exhibition or institution. This Round Table is addressed to
them and their working methods. It is not primarily concerned with films made
by documentarians who work in Ghana today and in Chile next month.
Professors
and curators will discuss their singular experiences and
describe their personal
process from beginning to end for making a successful film in Africa.
Participants will show a 2 minute sample of their film, and describe briefly 1)
the research, planning, budgeting, and funding; 2) crew, equipment and methods
of location filming; 3) editing, sound mix, and titling; 4) distribution. They
will conclude with a brief and candid assessment of their own satisfaction with
the results. The discussion will be practical, but not technical, will focus on
what has been learned from good and bad experiences, and will reveal a
surprising variety of hybrid processes, styles, and possible results.
African art historians and
anthropologists who have already completed and distributed films and will
discuss a variety of specific experiences:
Projections from the
Archives onto the Museum Wall: Rediscovering Chi Wara Performance Footage
Alisa LaGamma (Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, USA)
Control, Concessions, and
Compromises: Mediating Messages with the BBC
Enid Schildkrout (American Museum of Natural History, New
York, USA)
Reflections on Fieldwork
with a Film Crew: In and Out of Africa
Christopher B. Steiner
(Connecticut College, USA)
Practicing Film and
Cultural Ventriloquism in Mali
Susan Vogel (Prince Street
Pictures, New York, USA)
V-1 Documenting Change, Returning to the
Field (Part 2)
Chair: Christine Mullen Kreamer, (National
Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, USA)
For panel abstract see panel
IV-1
Revisiting the Oye-Ekiti
Workshop: Africanizing Christian Art and Neo-Traditionalizing Yoruba Art
Nicholas J. Bridger
(Archbishop Mitty High School, San Jose, CA, USA)
In
1946 Irish Catholic missionaries planned a radical experiment in colonial
Nigeria: organizing an arts workshop in rural Yorubaland to promote traditional
Yoruba artistic practices of woodcarving, textile weaving and beadwork in the
creation of Christian-Yoruba hybrid art form while still serving existing art patrons.
Much of what's known about this Oye-Ekiti Workshop (1947-1954) during its brief
life was based on the writings of Fr. Kevin Carroll, S.M.A., one of the
workshop's founders and managers, especially his 1967 book, Yoruba Religious
Carving. In revisiting this workshop for my Master's thesis (2002), I
was able to access the workshop's written records in the newly-opened archive
of Carroll's missionary order in Ireland to balance and deepen the account of
its conceptual origins in the 1930's, varied business activities and the
backlash which caused its closing, from the perspective of its European
patrons.
Fifty
years ago, the workshop and its artists created the double strands of Yoruba
neo-traditional woodcarving and its sibling, a Yoruba-Christian hybrid art,
both of which have continued to the present. This summer I went to Nigeria
(Ibadan, Ife, Oyo, etc.) to locate some of the workshop's elusive pieces and
interview some of the contemporary artists and patrons in these areas. My paper
tracks these intertwined traditions from their origins and documents some of
the changes since Carroll's book. Further, the growing significance of the
Oye-Ekiti experiment must today be seen not simply in secular art historical
terms, but in global political and religious contexts as well. Based on recent
research in missionary archives and in Ibadan and Ife, Nigeria, this paper
revisits the workshop and tracks its two entwined art traditions up to the
present and places the Oye-Ekiti experiment, not simply in art historical
terms, but in global religious and political context, as well.
Four Decades in Urhobo:
From the “Golden Years” to Chaos, and Now, a Cultural Revival
Perkins Foss (Museum for
African Art, New York, USA)
Between1966
to 2002, I visited Urhobo country—some 90 miles south of Benin City, on
the fringe of the western Niger River delta—for a total of about 48
months. My longer stays were 22 and 15 months. Since 1997, I have been back at
least once a year, sometimes twice.
For
the outsider-scholar, the 60s and 70s were rewarding years, even though many
Urhobo shrines and their associated cults were in decline. I visited about 50 communities, and
about 10 at some length. While cult members were often extremely reluctant to
share their shrines and associated rituals with outsiders, I documented dozens
of performances and rituals associated with Urhobo art, and was able to visit
and photograph shrine sculpture in many locales.
By
the 1990s, Urhobo culture had drastically atrophied, largely for two reasons:
the huge growth of the petroleum business, and the destructive, brutal
“kleptocracy” of Sonny Abacha. To borrow a phrase, things really
did fall apart.
Fieldwork
has been different in recent years. Urban areas of Sapele, Ughelli and
especially Warri have grown exponentially, with hoards desperately searching
for some small share of the oil wealth. Travel is expensive, difficult and
dangerous; people often suspect outsiders, Nigerian or otherwise. A persistent
problem is the disenfranchised youth, who have no education and no jobs. They
have little interest in their own culture. My most fruitful avenues of enquiry
have been with academics and artists who are residing elsewhere in Nigeria and
around the world.
There
are some areas of aesthetic creativity that seem to be thriving, especially
those involving forms of spiritual expression that link elements of
missionary-based Christianity, activities of the adherents of edjo
(spirit-forces) and orhan (medicinal shrines). The most popular group is
Igbe, a group that was founded in the 1930s but did not experience
substantial growth until the 1970s. While seen as controversial by both the edjo-followers
and the Christians, they are growing fast; their music, dance and drama draw on
old and new forms and offer potential areas for rich research.
There are also positive signs of cultural revival elsewhere in Urhoboland. Using the one word-processor in their village, local historians are writing up accounts of the past. The Urhobo Historical Society, a thriving organization that was started in the US and Canada by Urhobo academics, has ironically spread both to the UK and Europe. Next year they plan to have their annual meeting in Urhoboland itself. The burgeoning Niger Delta Culture Centre in Agbarha-Otor has hosted for five years the Harmattan Workshops where visual artists, dancers and singers of all types gather for ten days of production, interaction and relaxation, while they develop and disseminate new art for Urhobo and beyond.
Two Views of Sidi Ballo:
1978 and 1998
Patrick McNaughton
(Indiana University, Bloomington, USA)
Sidi
Ballo was a first-rate bird masquerader for nearly 40 years. He began performing in the Ton youth
association and went on to establish a successful itinerant career. I first saw him perform in 1978, and
have never been so impressed by art, before or since. I saw him perform again in 1998, along with his brother
Solo. There were big changes in
both Sidi’s masquerade and his performance. At 58, he was responding to his own aging process, in a very
intelligent and practical way that effectively deployed his sense of aesthetics
and capitalized on his strengths as a performer. His ideas about the value of performing had remained
consistent. And, importantly, his
audiences still valued him intensely, as they had over many years.
I
want to discuss the changes Sidi made, describing what he gave up, why, and
what he replaced it with. I will
also discuss what Sidi considers important in bird masquerading, and in his
performances particularly. Finally,
I will describe the interest that audiences have maintained in bird
masquerading, within and beyond Bamako.
My interest throughout the paper will be in expressing the importance of
individuals, both in the production of art and in process of change. People are not interchangeable. What Sidi brought to the tradition of
bird masquerading is uniquely his own, and if we want to understand the kind of
thoughts and feelings for artworks that local people have, we should begin by
looking at the individuals involved.
V-2 From East to West and Back Again: Dance
of Africa and the Diaspora in the Twenty-first Century
Chair: Reginald Yates (Dance Aid Africa, Ghana)
Although common to all
societies, dance has been Africa’s superlative art form and is characterized
by a rhythmic complexity that is unparalleled elsewhere. Through the process of slavery, African
dance sensibilities have been dispersed throughout the Diaspora by African
descendents. But wherever they
landed their music and dance took on the flavor of the local community, and the
differences in rhythmic orientation can be demonstrated. The degree to which African dance
purposes have been retained in the New World varies from location to location. In Trinidad and Tobago, various
transplanted African groups created Nation Dances as a means of preserving
their African roots. The Nation
Dances were performed as an integral component of the Saraka feast, a West
African ritual of thanksgiving involving dance and accompanying drums rhythms
and chants. The European quadrille
was adopted by mulattos and freed slaves in the French Caribbean islands in the
late eighteenth-century as an expression of high society, but nevertheless they
made it their own by accenting the rhythmic and dynamic dance movements, and
utilizing brightly-colored madras costumes. African dance is intrinsically health giving, and dance
movement therapy is increasingly being adopted by therapists and
health-professionals as a para-medical intervention to treat mentally and
physically challenged clients as well as those who are simply experiencing
occupational stress. Despite the
superior qualities of African dance, many traditional dances are declining due
to the impact of modernization and changing values. The need to conserve Africa’s dance legacy is
paramount and notation techniques have been developed that make this possible
and in so doing render dance on an African model accessible to new generations
in the twenty-first century.
Kariamu Welsh Asante (Temple
University, USA)
Dominique Cyrille (Center
for Black Music Research, Columbia College, USA)
Cross-Cultural Dance
Movement Therapy as a Healing Para-Medical Intervention in the Caribbean from
the Route of Africa to Trinidad and Tobago's Carnival
Terrence Wendell Brathwaite
(Birmingham Centre for Arts Therapy, UK)
Hazel Franco (University of
the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago)
Creating New Roots for
African Music/Dance through Notation
Doris Green (Pan African
Arts Performing Arts Preservation Association, Uniondale, NY, USA)
V-3 Iconographies of Poverty in
Contemporary South African Art
Co-chairs: Sandra Klopper
(University of Stellenbosch, South Africa); Kim Miller (Transylvania
University, USA)
In recent years, scholars
have marveled at the inventive capacities of African artists who, due to their
impoverished circumstances, are forced to rely on the use of recycled materials
for artistic expression as well as for economic survival. More often than not, these studies tend
to exclude examples from South Africa, presumably because it enjoys comparatively
high levels of consumption and a widespread reliance on cheap, locally
manufactured goods.
Unlike
these conventional studies on recycled art in Africa, this panel explores the
element of poverty in South African art in relation to both its production and
its consumption. Thus while
certain art forms and practices are determined by the poverty of their makers,
especially in rural areas, other forms use poverty as a subject in order to
appeal to extended markets. In
some cases, artists concurrently experience and express the condition of
poverty. This panel offers a
series of case studies on the iconographies of poverty in South African Art from a variety of
practical and theoretical perspectives.
Plastic Beads and
Recycled Trinkets: Poverty and the
Question of Aesthetic Choice in the Production of Ritual Garments in
Contemporary South Africa
Sandra Klopper (University
of Stellenbosch, South Africa)
The primary aim of this
paper is to consider the relationship between aesthetic choice and economic
necessity in the use of plastic beads and recycled trinkets by the producers
(and consumers) of various garments worn by ritual specialists and young
initiates in contemporary rural South Africa. Taking into account the different
ways in which researchers have relied on the notion of bricolage to explain the aesthetic concerns of both African
communities and working class and other youth groups in Britain and elsewhere,
I explore the complex implications of the growing tendency among South
Africa’s rural communities of making garments in which cheap materials
are combined in seemingly new and increasingly unexpected ways.
Colour in the
Representation of South African Townships by Zwelethu Mthethwa and Chris
Ledochowski and the Question of “Shack Chic”
Michael Godby (University of
Cape Town, South Africa)
During
apartheid, documentary photographers tended to represent South Africa’s
townships as sites of repression or struggle. The urgency of the situation
dictated that the aesthetic should be both instantaneous and dramatic. For
these reasons, most photographers used high speed, high contrast black and
white film.
The
introduction of democracy in 1994 has allowed photographers such as Zwelethu
Mthethwa and Chris Ledochowski to refuse the objectifying tendencies of
political photography and celebrate the individual humanity of their subjects,
primarily through the medium of brilliant colour. This paper explores these
projects in light of the recent publication of ‘Shack Chic’ that
extols township culture.
Rereading and
Contextualizing the Vocabularies of Poverty and Despair in Contemporary Art
from KwaZulu-Natal
Juliette Leeb-du Toit
(University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa)
Contexts
of poverty that reflect the daily lives of many urbanized Zulu, have been
subject to picturesque translations expected by white audiences. More recently,
however, poverty has appeared in a more uncensored reflection by artists exposing the realities of hardship and
destitution in both rural and urban spheres. This paper will examine ways in
which destitution and neediness reflect on a series of deficiencies that are
not only material, but that rather reflect and function as indictments of
personal, communal, state and political agencies. Artists reflect on social
abjection, communal deprivation, emotional neediness, cultural uncertainty and
the absence and lack of moral values and needs. Centered in an examination of
the work of Trevor Makhoba and some of his peers, this paper will examine such
content in relation to issues central to literature, music and social transformation
in the region.
Images of Poverty in the
Art of Thami Mnyele
Diana Wylie (Boston
University, USA)
This
paper will examine how a graphic artist who became a cadre in Umkhonto we Sizwe
addressed the issue of poverty in his work. Thami Mnyele studied at Rorke's Drift (1973), worked as a
layout artist for SACHED (1970-8), and participated in various art ensembles,
notably a Black Consciousness troupe called Mihloti (1972-7) and one named Medu
which he joined while in exile in Botswana (1979-1985). In these efforts Mnyele reflected
various aspects of the problem of poverty: 1.in his technique: untrained in
color, he used mainly conte and turpentine and sometimes shoe polish and blood,
and he drew from photographs; 2.
in his subject matter: his work displays not only material poverty but also
poverty of spirit, that is, the states of emotional extremity to which late
apartheid South Africa had given rise; 3. in his iconography: he used images of
barbed wire, bones and crumbling landscapes, and women were frequently the
bearers of his messages about suffering and salvation. A study of the changes in his work from 1969, when he began to draw, until
his death in 1985 will reveal him shifting from an examination of the emotional
consequences of poverty to a didactic approach, showing continued poverty as
the likely consequence of disunity.
The paper will examine this transformation by placing Mnyele's work in
historical context.
The Importance of
Economic Empowerment: Reflections on Income Generation, Visual Representation,
and Gender Dynamics at a Women’s Artmaking Cooperative in Crossroads,
South Africa
Kim Miller (Transylvania
University, USA)
This
paper will examine the feminization of poverty as both cause and subject matter
in women’s printed textiles produced by artists at the Philani Workshop
in Crossroads, Cape Town. The
Philani Workshop was initially formed in 1997 as part of an ambitious, nation
wide anti-poverty initiative, with the long term goal of battling child
malnutrition and poverty by training unemployed mothers to be artists. The
artists subsequently found empowerment through the creation of powerful
autobiographical narratives, as well as through the income that they
earned. This paper will
consider the ways in which Philani artists consistently celebrate their own
attempts to overcome their impoverished circumstances, despite the harsh
realities of their meager earnings, and the crippling poverty in which they
continue to live. In addition, I
will aim to frame Philani artists as political actors who strive to make
visible the conditions of their lives by focusing their artistic efforts on the
exploitation and survival of Black South African women despite apartheid
policies that discriminated against them, and a current environment which in
many ways continues to be hostile towards the emancipation of women.
V-4 The Traditional/Contemporary Conundrum
(Part 2)
Chair: Barbara Frank (Stony
Brook University, USA)
For panel abstract see panel
VI-3
New Applications of Old
Traditions: The "Visual Poetry" of Rachid Koraïchi
Lara Baker Sedlaczek
(University of Kentucky, USA)
This
presentation examines Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi’s use of
traditional Arabic calligraphy in his contemporary artworks. He learned this
art of writing as a child in a Sufi family, but his use of its forms today is
anything but traditional. Individual works and collaborative efforts with poets
like Mahmoud Darwish and Mohammed Dib reveal his unique employment of words and
symbols. Through a combination of the traditional and the contemporary, his art
bridges the gaps between people, countries, cultures, and religions. The result
is a new visual language that transcends geographical and cultural borders to
communicate in a universal manner.
Kristina Van Dyke (Harvard
University, USA)
My paper critically examines the recent historiography of African photography, arguing that Western scholars have taken a media-centric and ocularcentric approach to the work of Malick Sidibe, Seydou Keita and others, overlooking an important framework used to interpret photography; oral history and performance traditions. The resulting scholarship presents photography as a medium that required the importation not only of materials, but intellectual constructs as well, setting up a false binary between “traditional” and “contemporary” or “African” and “Western” art forms. I explore how photographers and users talk about and exploit photography in language that parallels praise singing and show how photography has been used by its audience as a way of contesting or expanding the social functions of praise singing in contemporary Malian culture.
Aimée Bessire (Maine
College of Art, USA)
Artists
as varied as Samuel Fosso, Zwelethu Mthethwa, William Pope.L, and Ike Ude are
challenging their viewers to reconsider the space of the male body. Through
their work, these artists reclaim, reconfigure, and highlight the position of
the black male as they confront stereotypes. The work of these artists is as
diverse as the multiple definitions of maleness that they challenge; yet,
whether they seek to highlight racial or cultural identity, gender issues, or
the subtle play of power relations, the artists all challenge the
categorization of the black male. This paper investigates redefinitions of the
male body through performance art and photography.
Where There Is No Barbie:
Muslim Girls and Clay Dolls in Niger
Alice Burmeister (Winthrop
University, USA)
This paper will explore the way in which Muslim girls
play with handmade clay dolls in Niger,
West Africa. The dolls themselves,
made in fired clay by adult women, are played with by young girls in manner
similar to the way American girls play with Barbie dolls. They dress the clay figures in handmade
clothing and create elaborate homes for them, setting the stage for a broad
range of social and cultural activities.
While many similarities exist between Nigerien girls’ play and
that of their Western counterparts, important differences exist as well. This is primarily due to the strongly
Muslim context of contemporary Nigerien society. For example, many girls in Niger have begun to dress their
dolls in a particular type of body-length veil that has recently become
fashionable among young fundamentalist female Muslims. In collaboration with one another, the
girls also engage their dolls in mock versions of the complex social and
financial negotiations required for Muslim arranged marriages and
baptisms. In addition, they fill
their dolls’ domestic spaces with miniature collections of bottle caps,
stones and other small objects intended to replicate the extensive displays of
house wares associated with Muslim female identity in Niger today.
On the surface, such activities attest to the strong current of Muslim influence in contemporary life in many parts of West Africa, and reveal the ways in which young girls are socialized to become good Muslims and good mothers. At the same time, when one looks deeper there are particular practices which point to a certain subversive tendency in the dolls’ behaviors. For example, at variance with the practice of polygamy found throughout most of Niger, many girls do not permit their dolls to have co-wives. Furthermore, although dolls representing children are plentiful, the male spouse doll seems to be absent in many cases. It is the adult mother doll that plays the dominant role, making all of the decisions and actively serving as household head. Such practices suggest that girls are using the dolls to act out scenarios that subvert traditional Muslim hierarchies.
Using current scholarship on doll play in both
Western and non-Western worlds, as well as the Hausa notion of iyawa, defined as the capacity for action, I will argue
that girls engage these dolls in play as a means for navigating the complicated
realm of social and religious tradition found in Niger today. The beauty of this type of fluid play
is that it allows girls to construct identities that pay homage to some of the
outer, more visible practices of Islam, while at the same time providing a safe
space for subversion of certain Islamic practices as symbolic manifestations of
inner empowerment that may one day materialize in adult life. As vehicles for the construction of a
complex identity, clay dolls in Niger help transport young girls to new realms
of religious and social mobility, preparing them for an ever-evolving West
African Muslim world.
VI-1 Atlantic Rim Performance Arts
Chair: Robert Nicholls
(University of the Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands)
Those European, West
African, American and Caribbean countries that were involved in the triangular
trade of the middle-passage have had an ineradicable influence on each others
art and expressive culture. This
is particularly evident in the creolized aesthetic that emerged in the
Caribbean and Diaspora from Amerindian, European and West African influences. Communities of African descendents in
Puerto Rico such as the Piñones sector maintain an African sensitivity
to the earth, trees, and the natural landscape. “Resistance as an art” emerges from the
fragmented archival and oral narratives, which document epic defenses of the
land against threatening invaders that span almost five centuries. Both African and Caribbean themes appear in the paintings of Canute
Caliste, an artist from the island of Carriacou who is gaining international
attention. Bull-horned masquerades
appeared historically in the Upper Guinea region of West Africa, the West
Country region of England, and in many West Indian islands.
African Themes in the
Paintings of Canute Caliste (Carriacouan Artist)
Don Hill (State University
of New York, USA)
Roots, Routes, and
Legitimacy: Ecological Resistance - Narratives of Place Piñones, Puerto
Rico
Wanda Mills-Bocachica
(University of the Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands)
Robert Nicholls (University
of the Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands)
John Collins (University of
Ghana, Ghana)
Americas
Juma Santos (University of
Ghana, Ghana)
VI-2 National Politics and Rural Arts in
Contemporary Africa
Co-chairs: Ute
Röschenthaler (University of Frankfurt, Germany); Eli Bentor, (Appalachian
State University, USA)
In the last decades, many
African countries have experienced profound political changes from structural
adjustment programs, a transition to multiparty democracy or an end of a
military regime, to a descent into the chaos of a civil war. The shift toward studying modern art in
Africa marked a move from the traditional rural setting to urban contexts of
art making. In urban settings, it seems natural to study the political aspects
of art. Yet, we still often think of rural arts as part of a
‘traditional’ world unaffected by national and international
events. Recent political processes
across the continent have profound impacts on cultural production even in the
most remote rural areas. This
panel will look at the grass root artistic reactions to national and global
transformation. We invite paper
proposals examining festivals, dances, shrines and other forms of
‘traditional
arts’ in their current transformations.
Driving Out Evil Spirits: The 2001 Yakurr Riots and their Impact on
the Celebration of Saa
Gitti Salami (University of Iowa, USA)
Saa, a Lokaa term that signifies
the act of emphatically rejecting something undesirable, is the name given to
the concluding ceremony of the annual ritual cycle of Yakurr culture of
southeastern Nigeria. During Saa, priest-chiefs of the township of Ugep,
assisted by a substantial portion of the younger population, clear their town
of evil spirits in accordance with indigenous religious beliefs. On 30 November
2001, Yakurr people’s much beloved King, the Obol Lopon of Ugep Ubi Ujong
Inah, mustered up a bright smile during Saa performances and, despite his
advanced age, vigorously stabbed his sword into the thin air when suddenly a
menacing group of young men clad in black, their identity masked by stocking
caps, materialized, encircled the monarch, and threatened his life with
machetes. Rumor throughout the following weeks alleged the gang had acted on
behalf of the chairman of the local government, Godwin Ettah, who had been
suspended from his post by the governor of Cross River State, Donald Duke, four
months earlier as a result of hearings conducted in Calabar, during which the
Obol Lopon had testified and requested the elected official’s temporary
removal from office. The investigations in the capital of the state aimed to
shed light on the causes of a popular uprising against the Yakurr local
government, a violent incident which had taken place on 2 July 2001 and drawn
national attention.
The disruption of the ritual protocol during Saa and consequent adjustments made to the ritual protocol of the ceremony provide the focal point for the discussion. They are explained as a consequence of increased politicization of the stool of the Obol Lopon of Ugep due to conferment of paramount rulership on the incumbent of the office on 26 November 1999, and are further related to a history of earlier alterations to the office which were made during pre-colonial and colonial times. The paper illuminates the intertwined nature that exists between Yakurr indigenous traditions, of which the priest-chiefs and their King are the primary custodians and icons, and the contemporaneous political context, arguing that national politics, filtered through local political events, do not merely impact Yakurr indigenous culture, but rather are a constitutive part of its dynamic nature.
The author utilizes visual analysis of ritual
paraphernalia and performances and archival records to substantiate the
argument.
“The Gendarme Is
What People Want”: New Figures of Power in a Cameroonian Pottery
Tradition
Silvia Forni (Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy)
Grassfields
art has always been intrinsically political in nature. Prestige items took the
form of wooden figures, stools, brass objects, pipes, dishes and pots.
Restricted access to materials and symbols marked the social stratification
which characterized the Grassfields kingdoms and celebrated the often
supernatural power of the king and his notables. While colonialism and the successive formation of the
Republic of Cameroon have strongly affected the nature of the powers of
Grassfields kings, the survival of many artistic traditions shows that emblems
of power are still sought after both at rural and urban levels. Along with the
traditional forms new items and styles, that combine traditional symbols with a
brighter, “shinier” look, have been created by rural artists to satisfy
the tastes of modern elites.
In
this paper I explore the changes and transformations that have occurred in the
pottery production of the village of Nsei, a well known pottery center since
precolonial times. In particular, I wish to address the production of painted
figures which has developed in the last decades. Born with clear intent of
social and political commentary in the late 1970s, this production has
progressively evolved into rather stereotypical forms, mass-produced for rural
and urban markets. In their
conventionality, many items of this production feature traditional emblems of
power such as lions and leopards and new icons of prestige and control, such as
military officers and gendarmes. These figures are among the most common and
best selling items of the Nsei production, and are sold throughout southern
Cameroon and in neighboring countries. Through the creation of these brightly
colored clay figures, the potters of Nsei model in their own terms ideas of
power and modernity, and interpret the new needs and ideals of contemporary
Cameroonian society.
Creating Local Culture: Performance, Boundaries, and Politics in the
Cross River Region
Ute Röschenthaler
(University of Frankfurt, Germany)
Boundaries have
proven to be powerful means for legitimising access to resources, for the
justification of inclusion or exclusion, and of representing sovereignty among
others. Maps of the Cross River region of Cameroon and Nigeria reflect this
effect by displaying a conspicuous blank on either side of the boundary. This
blank appears to reproduce itself in the cultural consciousness of the people
despite marriages, trade, cultural exchange and identity shifting that
regularly take place in the Cross River region.
Three examples from field research carried out between 1998 and 2001 in the Cross River area will serve to explicate the inventive strategies of people to arrange with these developments for various ends. The examples will elaborate on the appropriation of acquired performances as "traditional", on how international and intra-state boundaries determine the participation in a cultural association (inclusion or exclusion), and how boundaries are retrospectively used to justify the dissemination of associations (in Cameroon).
The first example
will draw on observations made during election processes of dance groups for
the National Festival of Arts and Culture of Cameroon. For the competition on
the Divisional level, the various village councils of Manyu Division are asked
to send the best of their traditional dance groups to the capital. It is
noteworthy to have a closer look at Cross River notions of "traditional
dances" which on the one hand may include everything that is not
"white man style". On the other it also may embrace a recently
acquired performance from a Nigerian or other locality to represent a
“typically” Manyu “traditional dance".
With the second example I will show that the foundation of the pan-Obasinjom association in 2000 created a new type of society that was supposed to unite all the individual Obasinjom societies in the various villages. Its declared aim was to strengthen the powers of Obasinjom and help to keep alive the secret and medical knowledge of this cult agency which detected witchcraft, theft and other unlawful acts in the village. Membership in the association, however, did not include all the Obasinjom that existed in the region, but only those in the Manyu Division. It excluded a few more Obasinjom in the adjacent Divisions and particularly those just across the border in Nigeria. This is the more noteworthy since the Obasinjom appears to have been invented in a village right near the border from which is was disseminated to villages in Nigeria and Cameroon.
The third example will follow
up some arguments raised about the dissemination of the Ekpe society to justify
the extension of its frontier. There are plans to also found a pan-Ekpe society
to strengthen its sphere of influence in order to eventually increase the
political standing of the Manyu Division. In addition to other identity markers
such as language, ethnicity, socio-political organization or environmental
features, the various boundaries take a strong part in deciding where to draw
the lines and create cultural identities.
VI-3 Relevant Modernities
Co-Chairs: Erin Haney and
Malika Kraamer (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK)
Africanists' description of
local modernities needs further conceptual expansion. Scholars have characterized modernity as an invention of the
west, heavy on the hegemony; others have considered African modernities as
inherently resistant to the west.
The transfer of artistic practices is considerably more complex:
"traditions" themselves bear witness to their eclectic sources,
coming from both nearby and faraway.
The importance of the import
is relevant only in that artistic practices and influences shift, evolve, and
disappear such as artists, audiences and patrons see fit. It's not surprising that engagement
within the context of local cultures is as much a part of the story as anything
else.
Esto perpetua (May It Live Forever)—Short Life and Long Art in
Earliest Gold Coast Photography
Erin Haney (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, UK)
This paper will examine the milieu that fostered
the Gold Coast’s earliest photographers and comprised their oeuvre in the
last half of the 19th century.
This imagery registers a wealth of influences, as it was formulated by
local patronage and framed via travelling photographers sourcing a range of
Atlantic visual influences. Unlike
many parts of west Africa, coastal Ghana’s history of photographic
traditions materialized before the consolidation of colonial power. The evolution of localized photographic
genres, as well as people’s heightened awareness of the routes by which
images were liable to travel, bear witness to the embedded nature of local
representation.
“Make Me a Modern Textile”: Recent
Developments in Ewe Textiles
Malika Kraamer (School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London, UK)
This
paper addresses the transfer of artistic practices and local perceptions of
their importance in so-called Ewe textile traditions. The adaptation of foreign
elements lies at its core, the acknowledgement of these imports is, however,
only sometimes considered relevant. With
the case of Nigerian weave,
these shifting artists and audiences´ creation of new textiles have
comprised a specific modernity at the turn of this century. Yet the processes of
´localisation´ was already in place, seen in the way cloths
acquired new names. It is these
very processes that have already been observed in older innovations of Ewe
textile traditions.
Modernity
Then Is Not the Same as Modernity Now; and Modernity There Is Not the Same as
Modernity Here . . .
John
Picton (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK)
Modernity then is not the same as modernity now; and
modernity there is not the same as modernity here... The question of how we divide up our subject into
manageable pieces continues to concern us. We recognise that ethnic categories
are contingent, anything but "timeless', but part of the story we tell;
but what about that other taken-for-granted categorization, the
"traditional" versus the "contemporary"? Tradition (from the
Latin 'tradere' to hand over) defines one set of possibilities of change; and
most traditions bear some trace of eclectic engagement between the local and
the further away. In that case, 'modern' cannot be about some single set of
conditions and practices mediated via "the West", but simply about
the conditions of just now.
Qes Adamu Tesfaw and the
Limits of “Modernity”: A Consideration of the Life and Work of a
Contemporary Ethiopian Artist
Raymond A. Silverman (University of Michigan, USA)
Qes
Adamu Tesfaw was trained as a painter while studying to become a priest in the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church. For the last forty years he has lived in the capital
of Ethiopia. His paintings are unique and could easily be classified as a
hybrid of the traditional and the modern — an expression of
“modernity” as it has been characterized in so many recent studies
of urban-based African artists. This paper, informed by biography, an
examination of paintings, and conversations with the Qes Adamu, argues that
they are not, and suggests that “modernity,” as a theoretical
construct, may be generating skewed perceptions of individual artists and the
local cultures in which they live.
Tracing Modernities:
Chant Avedissian’s Narratives of Egyptian Public Space
Elizabeth Harney (University
of Toronto, Canada)
This
paper will examine the links between nationalism, modernity, and popular
imagery in the public sphere in contemporary Egypt, looking at the artistic
oeuvre of multi-media artist, Chant Avedissian. Avedissian’s large scale,
colorful and playful stenciled paintings, his textile designs and his
photography are inspired by the vibrant visual lexicon of pop culture emerging
in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s and the strong connections between the rise of
Arab nationalism and ideas of modernity.
A growing number of scholar’s now address the subject of “alternative” or parallel modernities. It is now clear that any study of these cultural matrices must take into account the complex manner in which they engaged with existing traditions and modes of modernity, European or imported ideas, images and objects, and shifting local and global socio-economic and political conditions. An artist of Armenian descent who often positioned himself as a critical “outsider” to the Egyptian visual arts community, Avedissian has been, nonetheless, a keen observer of the unique “culture of the new” that accompanied Gamel Abdel Nasser’s rise to power in an independent, modern Egypt. His interest in pop culture from the utopian era of the 1950s and 1960s--its associations with both American consumerism, Bollywood iconicity, and the exchange of technologies and goods due to cold war politics—introduces the viewer in the visual economy of an era. Moreover, Avedissian’s close relationship with famous populist architect, Hassan Fathy, has resulted in a careful and sensitive investigation of the lessons one can learn when bringing indigenous knowledge and traditions to bear on the modern.
VI-4 Young Scholars Forum: Contemporary Art
from Africa and the Diaspora
Chair: Danielle Marie Snoddy
(University of Iowa, USA)
This panel is a platform for graduate students to present
work based on their fieldwork experiences with living
artists. Papers should focus on contemporary artistic production in Africa and
the diaspora. The idea of contemporary arts is not limited to urban,
studio practices but includes all artistic production of the contemporary era. Papers that
deal with issues of gender, (post) colonialism, identity, memory, change,
appropriation, and bodies are especially welcome. Graduate students should be enrolled at
a university at the time of the presentation.
Growing Pains: The Legacy
of History, Identity, and Displacement in
Contemporary Britain
Monique Fowler-Paul (London,
UK)
For artists of African, Afro-Caribbean, and
Afro-Asian descent in Britain, identity and diaspora are inescapable
issues. In the recent past,
theories used to describe and interpret their work have centered on a certain
triad of interrelated concepts, namely history, identity, and
displacement. At the dawn of the
twenty-first century, these artists have experienced much more varied ways of
defining and understanding their personal and professional trajectories. While themes of history, identity, and
displacement continue to recur in their creative practice, they do not feel
restricted to these in order to express their experiences and circumstances in
the world.
Capeverdeaness: Embracing
a Diverse Cultural Identity through Artistic Expressions
Elisha Fernandes Simpson
(Cambridge, MA, USA)
Cape
Verdean culture derives from a unique mix of multifarious ethnic
influences. The product of
miscegenation among Africans, Asians, and Europeans; Cape Verdean culture is an
illustrative example of mestizaje.
One method for measuring the degree of mestizaje in a particular culture is to study its traditional
and contemporary art forms. This paper examines the art forms of various Cape
Verdeans, defines the distinct characteristic of Capeverdeaness, and presents examples of Cape Verde’s diverse
cultural origins.
Aesthetic Experience and
Expression: Cultural Memory and Gender Imbalance in Neo-Colonial Chaos
Emma Ross (Yale University,
USA)
A comparison of three generations of scholarship on Dan art and culture reveals a fluid and rapidly changing understanding of women’s roles in initiation societies and masquerades. Not surprisingly one observes a shift away from intricately woven gender balances towards an increase in competition and open animosity between the sexes. This paper will seek to put this evolution in historical context, focusing the analysis on how current cultural memory reflects the scholarly understandings of the thirties while ritual practice exposes extensive antagonism and division between the men and women’s secret societies and leadership. The recent political turmoil and resultant economic crisis in the Cote d’Ivoire has only escalated these tensions, further exacerbating infringements on Dan women’s cultural agency and power.
Identity Politics,
Multicultural Normalization, and “New Ethnicities”: The Recent
Works of Zineb Sedira
Danielle Marie Snoddy
(University of Iowa, USA)
Identity politics have been a major shaper of British art trends from the early nineties up until the present day, especially if an artist claims a diasporic ancestry. Often there is an assumption on the part of the public, cultural critics, or art historians that these artists’ works must engage with notions of “difference.” These artists are often invited to participate in group shows that draw upon the commercialization of multiculturalism, effectively ghettoizing some artists through identity politics. Drawing upon Stuart Hall’s notion of “New Ethnicities” and Kobena Mercer’s theorization of a market-based multicultural normalization, this paper examines London-based artist Zineb Sedira’s recent work as attempt to resist categorization by the art world and maintain her artistic integrity by creating her own ‘new ethnicity’ that reflects her lived experience of the world. In Sedira’s early work, she addressed issues of identity by including apparent Islamic referents, such as hijab or Islamic tile patterns. Since 2001, however, her work has continued to address identity politics though in a different manner. Rather than claim one identity—British-Algerian—she has begun to explore her French Catholic upbringing and her parents’ memories of the Algerian War. Her subject matter has become intensely personal and she has taken up digital media in order to explore the intersecting constellations of her identities. Instead of highlighting difference by using Islamic referents, Sedira’s work now offers up her own personal experiences as a woman living in diaspora in which the viewer is invited to share.
VII-1 African Architecture: Cultural Translation
and Artistic Invention
Chair: Randall Bird (Harvard
University, USA)
The appropriation and
incorporation of Western architectural ideas, forms and techniques in
non-Western contexts involves an ongoing and continually changing process of
cultural translation and artistic invention. A critical assessment of how
African peoples make newly introduced architecture “their own”
requires a close examination of the historical and political contexts in which
their architecture acquires meaning. It is hoped that this comprehensive
approach will provide insight into larger questions concerning the ways in
which architecture, as it is refashioned, becomes a powerful agent with the
ability to refashion its patrons, users and onlookers. This panel will open up and
give special force to questions concerning the experience of modernity beyond
Europe and North America, the role of cosmopolitanism in non-Western contexts
and the interface between colonialism and the arts, as these important issues
continue to be debated across academic disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences. Papers that complicate and enrich our understanding of these issues
in historical and contemporary African contexts are most welcome.
House and Household on
Gorée Island, 1785–1837
Mark Hinchman (University of
Nebraska, Lincoln, USA)
Lying
off the west African coast, Gorée was a vibrant trading center in the
early modern period with a diverse population. Looking at houses and
furnishings, this project argues that objects also constitute representational
and ideological structures, and are part of the identity-making process. The
process of architectural translation – using local materials, relying
upon African craftsmen – is one mechanism whereby styles change. Regarding the finished product, this is also a project of reception that involves
patrons, users, visitors, and onlookers. For those underserved by archives and
history, we do not have immediate access to their thoughts. But the material
world does suggest that Goréens were part of a world community.
The Palace at Soanierana
in the Central Highlands of Madagascar, 1820–1830
Randall Bird (Harvard
University, USA)
In
the early 1820’s, King Radama I of Madagascar requested Louis Le Gros, a
French carpenter who had been living in Mauritius, to build a palace-retreat
located on a small hill called Soanierana. The palace-retreat is among the
earliest cases of European architectural techniques, forms and ideas being
incorporated into royal Merina architecture. Modifications in the appearance of
Merina architecture have generally been attributed to a unilateral process of
European innovations with little reference to questions centered on the
dynamics of cultural exchange and what architecture can reveal about the nature
of such encounters. As Western architecture and technology were introduced and
incorporated into Merina palaces, Merina building traditions were not brought
to extinction but, instead, they survived with new or altered meanings.
The Spread of the Sooro:
Symbols of Rulership in the Sokoto Empire
Mark D. DeLancey (James
Madison University, USA)
This
paper traces the use of the sooro,
a pillared entry-hall, in the palaces of the Fulbe rulers of northern
Cameroon. Sooros serve as the entrance to every Fulbe palace now
existing in northern Cameroon. The
history of this structure makes clear, however, that it did not feature in any
of these palaces until the early twentieth century after the German subjugation
of the region in 1900-1901. The sooro is a primary signifier of rulership, and became a
feature of these palaces as a result of their political separation from the
Sokoto Empire by the German conquest.
Think Cities, Otherwise
Dominique Malaquais (Sarah
Lawrence College, USA)
At
the dawn of the 21st century, definitions of what constitutes an
Africa city are in crisis. This is
so first and foremost because such definitions have historically been based on
European and American models, many developed in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries.
This paper seeks to propose alternative approaches. Part of a much wider project on
conceptions of the city worldwide, it argues for the need to put African cities
center stage, looking to them as possible models for a re-thinking of European
and North American urban environments.
The paper’s primary focus is Douala, the economic capital of
Cameroon. Douala, here, is not considered as cities often are – as an
entity bound in space, characterized by a citizenry, communal norms and a
communal “imaginary” (Mumford on cities generally, Sérpahin
on Douala specifically). Instead,
it is approached from the standpoint of movement, of links between it and other
cities (notably Johannesburg and New York), of the impact these links have on
conceptions, dreams and articulations of the city. Central to the ideas proposed is the argument that,
alongside the term “city,” others, deemed essential to an
understanding of urban spaces, are in need of re-definition as well. First and foremost among these are the
terms “architecture” and “infrastructure.”
VII-2 Double Trouble? Representations of Twins and Doubles in
African and African American Arts
Chair: Philip M. Peek (Drew
University, USA)
Twin births are marked as
serious matters, for better or worse, throughout Africa. Often these twin individuals are
represented by carvings, but there are other images of doubling as well, such
as spirit doubles and animal familiars.
As the Senufo assert:
"Twins have perfect knowledge of each other." That perfect communion is sought by
diviners, by healers, by any individual seeking rapport with spiritual entities
in the other world. These
endeavors are aided and activated by visual and verbal arts. We hope to investigate these artistic
expressions of twins and
doubling in African And African American
cultures in order to reveal
the deeper philosophical and epistemological
meanings they embody.
Philip M. Peek (Drew
University, USA)
Twin births are marked as serious matters, for better or worse, throughout Africa. Often these twin individuals are represented by carvings, but there are other images of doubling as well such as spirit doubles and animal familiars. While it is not clear whether multiple births brought about thinking about doubles or the phenomena of multiple spiritual entitites was linked to the existence of twins, there are striking artistic representations of both issues. As the Senufo assert: “Twins have perfect knowledge of each other.” That perfect communion is sought by diviners in their oracular communications, by healers as they cure their clients, by any individual seeking rapport with spiritual entitites in the other worlds. These endeavors are aided and activated by visual and verbal arts. As of now, a majority of the evidence on this topic comes from West Africa, especially for the Yoruba, Senufo, Dogon, and Bamana peoples, but it may well be that similar artistic representations addressing common communication concerns are present among Central African peoples and among African Americans.
Pascal James Imperato (SUNY
Downstate Medical Center, USA)
The
traditional Bamana and Maninka believe that twins are a replica of Faro, an androgynous supernatural being who himself gave
birth to the first pair of twins. Faro was born of God’s vaporous breath, from a
bubble of his saliva while God was pronouncing the words of creation. Faro is the visible countenance of God, a countenance
that is white. Faro is present wherever there is water. He is on the crest of a swollen stream
after a heavy rain, within the swirling waters of the river, and in the vapor
that arises above ponds early in the morning. He is the water God in the world of Bamanaya (the Bamana way of life). Faro provides
equilibrium to creation, and is viewed by Moslem Bamana and Maninka as a water
genie.
As
implied offspring of Faro, twins
are regarded as extraordinary beings endowed with special powers. Known as flani (two little ones), they are the object of a cult
known as sinzin (support). Whenever a twin dies, which is often in
the low resource world of the Bamana and Maninka, a statue or a stick is
sculpted, known as a flanitokélé (twin that remains or other
twin). This communication
describes Bamana and Maninka beliefs and practices concerning twins and the
role of flanitokélé in traditional Bamana and Maninka life.
I May Not Be Myself:
Doubled Brass Amulet Imagery in Southwestern Burkina Faso
Susan Cooksey (Harn Museum, University of Florida, USA)
Double images of humans, animals, inanimate objects and abstract forms in cast brass abound in the southwest region of Burkina Faso and beyond. In the area around Toussiana, brasscasters produce a plethora of double-imaged amulets prescribed by diviners to cure various ailments of their clients. Diviners say that each type corresponds to a particular spirit being. Some are associated with an element the spirit inhabits—pond or forest. Still other doubled images are emblematic of twins, powerful but volatile beings. Doubling the image enhances its power twofold, diviners say, and speeds access to the spirit.
Other interpretations, based on local beliefs about the nature of spirit beings, can also be elaborated. For example, each individual has a spirit double, that may appear randomly. At these times, notions of identity are challenged, and the tension between the realities constructed through different processes of perception, intuition, and rationality are heightened. At the same time, the senses become the means for negotiating between these realities. Doubled images in brass may have a similar function of signaling and directing through a distinct visual channel, this heightened aesthetic awareness as a means of solving a spiritually induced problem. The amulet thus becomes emblematic of the spirit’s message that cannot be understood without further confrontation and contemplation of particular elements and attributes of various creatures and beings. Western concepts of this other, an alter ego, persona, animus/anima or others perhaps parallel this spirit double, yet another image of self. Both client and diviner have a role in positioning this self externally, objectifying it via different strategies.
The question of why some amulets are worn whereas others are secreted in chambers or sacred ground, also has bearing on ideas about how physical proximity affects client aesthetic response and action. Why does wearing an amulet constitute a sacrifice and further understanding of a particular illness or problem? Who is(are) the viewer (s) or participant(s) in this sacrifice? To what extent is this aesthetic action a social one?
One
could also ask why some double images are stacked, others are adjacent and
still others are so highly abstracted. This paper will explore various
configurations of the amulets and offer some insight into their significance.
In
this paper I will examine a number of full-sized and miniature amulets, some
rarely documented in the literature. I will also offer local interpretations
from diviners and brasscasters with my own and other scholars’
observations of their current and previous use and meanings in the context of
local divination systems. Furthermore, I will discuss historical events in the
20th century that have affected the production of amulets, and the
use and interpretation of amulets among local peoples.
Babatunde Lawal (Virginia
Commonwealth University, USA)
Since the Yoruba of
Southwestern Nigeria and the Republic of Benin have one of the highest twin
births in the world, it is not surprising that the idea of "twoness"
looms large in their cosmology and art. The popular Yoruba word
"ejire," meaning "the friendly two," underscores the
oneness in the twoness of twin birth. So far, much of the scholarship on the
phenomenon has focused on "Ere Ibeji," the Yoruba twin statuettes,
virtually ignoring its manifestations in other areas. This paper explores the deeper philosophical and epistemological
meanings of
twoness in Yoruba culture, emphasizing its
materialization in the visual
and performing arts. In addition, it highlights what the
Yoruba regard
as its positive and negative aspects.
2=3: The Art and Ritual
of Twins and the Trickster in Haitian Vodou
Marilyn Houlberg (Art
Institute of Chicago, USA)
Twin and trickster beliefs
have transformed as they came together in the cultural gumbo in what is known
as Vodou in Haiti. Among the
Yoruba of Nigeria and the Fon of The Republic of Benin not only are twins singled
out for special veneration but also the child born after the twins, Idowu, who
is referred to as a trickster.
This concept carries over into Haitian Vodu where the twins (marassa)
are said to be followed by dossu (m) and dossa (f) again considered to be a
troublesome and very powerful child.
Out of this complex set of ideas comes a range of visual imagery that
relates to twinness and the tricksters in Vodou arts. They may celebrate together but various traits remain
separate. Their ritual utensils, altars, songs, foods, dances, drumming
patterns, and ritual flags can reflect which nation of twins they belong to
(Kongo, Igbo, Fon, and so on).
This paper concludes with examples of the latest developments in Vodou
arts that involves a discussion of globalization, cyber-space and the effects
of tourism, or the lack of it, in Haiti today.
VII-3 Expanding Diaspora: New Directions in
the Study of African Art in International Contexts
Co-chairs: John Peffer
(Northwestern University, USA); Laurie Ann Farrell (Museum for African Art, New
York, USA)
This
panel is a platform for new ideas on what constitutes the African
legacy
of diaspora. We invite papers which present novel approaches to the
study
of African art as something that is internationally distributed, from the
postcolonial world and from other historical periods. For example, how do current discussions of global identities in
contemporary art impact definitions of older forms of continental African
art? How can new scholarship on
“global” art avoid homogenizing individual artistic practices? And how can “traditional” African
art objects themselves, as collected and reproduced items, be seen to operate
as a sort of diaspora of images?
Africa's Diaspora of
Images
John M. Peffer (Northwestern
University, USA)
This paper explores African art as something
'distributed', or
'sown through' other cultures, and as such I propose it may be expected
to stand-in, in meaningful ways, for speaking human subjects.
"Traditional" African art objects, given their later status as
collected
and mechanically reproduced items outside of Africa (and inside as
well), may be seen to operate as a sort of diaspora of images analogous
to, and parallel with, a human diaspora. How can such a perspective
inform a novel inquiry into the altered 'fetish power' of the African
art commodity, now living outside of 'original' sacred or familial
contexts? How can the processes of decontextualizaton, devoicing, and nostalgia which can be seen operating
in the realm of diaspora, also be
applied to art objects across time
and space? In order to examine this
problem of images and mechanical reproduction and diaspora, my paper
will consider both the placement
of African ritual sculpture in museums
and coffee-table books, and the current vogue for African portrait
photography.
The Upa Women Artists'
Collective: Artistic Identity between Two Discourses
Sarah Adams (University of Iowa, USA)
In this paper I encourage us to look at work produced
in Africa,
but marketed for a global audience, as diasporic works. I look at how
the rhetoric that frames the work, and transformations in the work
itself, anticipate a global audience. The paper also directly addresses
the question of how current discussions of global identities in
contemporary art impact definitions of older forms of continental
African art through a specific case study: the analysis of the
historiography of discourse on artistic identity in the field. Through
the analysis of an uli art based cooperative founded in 1991 in Nsugbe,
Nigeria, this paper weaves theoretical insights gained through globally
oriented-studies of artistic identity in contemporary African studio art
back into earlier works on artistic identity in the field.
Artist's Talk
Allan De Souza (Los Angeles,
USA)
What Does a Diasporic
Body Look Like?
Steven Nelson (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
In
looking at the work of contemporary African American artists,
writers have rightly explored the ways in which notions of Diaspora have
informed their visual choices, serving as a template embodying notions
of "home" and
reconciliation between an "African" past and present realities.
Moreover, such African American-centered visions of diaspora and its
articulation, despite the
important work of Stuart Hall and others, are increasingly coming into vogue in
investigations of non African American artists.
This paper examines the ways in which diaspora has gained currency in
discussions of contemporary art practice, addressing its continued
misinterpretation as applied to
artists who are not African American. This paper insists for a more nuanced
understanding of diaspora and its complex nature as
a means of comprehending (or
even questioning) its value as a paradigm for
thinking though contemporary African art.
VII-4 ROUNDTABLE: Collecting African Art in the 21st
Century: Current Practices, New
Perspectives, and Challenges
Chair: Christraud M. Geary
(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA)
In recent years, collecting
African art, be it in institutional or private settings, has changed
fundamentally. Works, such as
figurative sculptures and masks predominantly from West and Central Africa,
were the mainstay of collecting African art throughout much of the 20th
century. Now they have become increasingly rare and prohibitively expensive.
Fakes abound, cashing in on this lucrative market. The stricter implementation
of antiquities legislation in African countries and in the U.S., and the
importance of provenance have also changed the face of collecting. Thus,
institutional and private collectors turned to other types of objects, among
them metal work, currency, pottery, and textiles. This changing emphasis echoes and follows, of course, shifts
in scholarly interest away from examining the classic canon of African art, as
constituted by art historians and collectors in the first half of the 20th
century. Among the more recent entries in the ever-broadening field of what
constitutes collectibles are works from formerly underrepresented regions, such
as objects from Eastern and Southern Africa, works by contemporary African
artists who participate in the global art scene, by African photographers, and
local artists in urban African settings. Participants in this round table are
encouraged to explore collecting from different perspectives, addressing such
issues as their own or institutional collecting strategies and assessing
current trends and challenges.
Participants
in this roundtable will explore collecting from different perspectives,
addressing such issues as their own or institutional collecting strategies and
assessing current trends and challenges. After their short presentations, the
audience is invited to participate in the discussions.
Participants:
Herbert Cole (University of
California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Andrea Nicolls (National Museum
of African Art, USA)
Constantine Petridis
(Cleveland Museum of Art, USA)
Barbara Plankensteiner
(Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna, Austria)
Dorit Shafir (The Israel
Museum, Jerusalem, Israel)
William E. Teel (Marblehead,
MA, USA)
Roslyn A. Walker (Dallas
Museum of Art, USA)
Louis T. Wells (Harvard
Business School, USA)
VIII-1 Africa in Florida: The Aesthetics of
the Sunshine State
Chair: Amanda Carlson
(University of Hartford, USA)
With over 500 years of diasporic history flowing from Africa and
the Caribbean, Florida is the ideal destination for observing how a state (as a
cultural, political, and geographical entity) both shapes and is shaped by the
multiple African diasporas that move through it. They include Maroons,
Seminoles, Haitians, Afro-Cubans, African-Americans, Yoruba-Americans
(associated with Oyotunji village in South Carolina), and recent immigrants
from numerous countries in contemporary Africa. This panel will explore
interdisciplinary approaches to understanding Africa in Florida in order to
develop a more dynamic understanding of diaspora, which is becoming
increasingly more urgent in the 21st century. Papers will provide a new look at Florida and freshly
squeezed research.
Crowning the Orisha: A
Lucumi Art in South Florida
Joseph M. Murphy (Georgetown
University, USA)
Metal crowns made in Greater Miami, the center of an ongoing revival in orisha-related arts and religion are the result of nearly two hundred years of intercultural contact in Africa and Cuba and, more recently, the United States. They are creoles, born of the interaction of Yoruba, Spanish, Cuban, and American aesthetic values and religious meanings. The Lucumi metal crowns, with their finials, arches, circlets, chains and tools, both blend and juxtapose multiple cultural antecedents. In the organization of these elements they restate the movement from outer to inner, explicit to implicit, exoteric to esoteric, that lies at the heart of Yoruba spirituality. This juxtaposition and dynamism seems particularly apt in the case of the crowns with Catholic saint finials. The crowns speak of an exoteric religious identity, signaling the more esoteric presence of the orisha armed with tools of power. The Lucumi crowns reveal a community that has organized its creole heritage into a spirituality that moves from symbol to mystery.
Abakuá Practice
and Visual Arts in Florida: Exiled Members of the Cuban Brotherhood.
Ivor Miller (DePaul
University, USA)
The Abakuá society is a powerful
example of West African cultural influence in the Americas. A mutual aid
society for men based on religion, it was established by Africans in Regla,
Havana by the 1830s. Abakuá is derived principally from the male
“leopard societies” of the Àbàkpà (Qua Ejagham),
Efut and Èfìk peoples of the Cross River basin (Old Calabar), in
southeastern Nigeria, and Usak Edet in southwestern Cameroon. These societies
are called Ngbè and Ékpè, after the Ejagham and
Èfìk terms for ‘leopard’. This essay is concerned with
the impact of Abakuá practices in Florida brought by Cuban migrants from
the 1880s to the present. In order to establish what Cuban members were able to
bring to Florida and what they were not, one must understand the basic
mechanisms of Ekpe transmission. To do this I will examine various attempts to
recreate Abakuá in the Cuban Diaspora, including Spanish penal colonies
in northwest Africa and Fernando Po, today Bioko in Equatorial Guinea. After
ascertaining what aspects of Abakua practice were recreated in Florida, in part
by citing interviews with leading brothers, I will review significant
Abakuá inspired visual arts in Florida.
The Many Faces of Ogun:
The Ogun Shrine of Baba Onabamiero Ogunleye in North Central Florida
Robin Poynor (University of
Florida, USA)
Baba Onabamiero Ogunleye began to acquaint
himself with the Yoruba orisha in New York and eventually moved to Oyotunji,
SC, where he felt impelled to carve. His move to rural Archer, Florida, near
Gainesville, allowed him to create his own altar to Obatala as well as shrines
to other orisha, among them Ogun, patron of carvers. Self-taught as a carver,
he creates objects that are suggestive of Yoruba form, and he has carved wooden
figures for Elegba, Osun, Yemaya, Obabtala, Shango, Ogun, and Oshosi for altars
and for creating an environment conducive to living an "African"
lifestyle in North Central Florida. The arrangement of objects and figures on
the altars and shrines are determined by numerous factors, among them aesthetic
consideration. This paper will focus on the changes that have taken place in
the shrine to Ogun near the Temple Ile Tunbo as a result of both practical and
aesthetic considerations as well as at the requests of Ogun through divination.
From Masquerades to
Amusement Parks: African Realities and Hyper-realities in the Sunshine State
Amanda Carlson (University
of Hartford, USA)
I will
explore the performance of African culture in the United States through two
field studies based in Florida (masquerades from eastern Nigeria and African
theme parks) in order to better understand the processes of diasporic
experience. The first study examines masquerades among immigrant communities in
Florida whose recent or historical origins lie in eastern Nigeria. And the
second topic, which has typically not been considered within the rubric of
Diaspora Studies, examines the history of amusement parks in Florida that
recreate African culture. From this seemingly ironic comparison between
“real” and “simulated” performances of African culture,
I question how distinctions of authenticity, the original versus the copy, have
informed cultural practitioners as well as scholarly models of diasporic
experience. This project utilizes art historical, sociological, anthropological
theories to explore how authenticity, originality, reality, and hyper reality
are performed in relation to African cultures within highly complex,
politically oriented, systems of agency and power.
VIII-2 African Style: Negotiating Identities
in Global Fashion Markets
Chair: Victoria Rovine
(University of Iowa Museum of Art, USA)
This panel addresses
Africa’s role as both an active agent in and a source of inspiration for
global fashion design.
Participants will examine the work of designers from Africa, Europe, and
elsewhere, analyzing the diverse artistic strategies by which they make
reference to Africa. Fashion
designers have mobilized forms and materials, as well as personal identities
and marketing strategies, to signify Africa as a specific location or as a
generalized “Other.”
The growing visibility of African fashion in international venues
provides rich opportunities to examine the negotiations by which the
continent’s “traditional” attire has been adapted,
transformed, or discarded by contemporary designers.
The Biography of a Boubou
between Gift and Commodity
Leslie W. Rabine (University
of California at Davis, USA)
As
cultural objects circulate through systems of exchange, they come to signify
the economic, symbolic and emotional webs that entangle the exchangers. Such an object was a traditional,
hand-dyed boubou, which during my field research in contemporary Dakar,
Senegal, circulated out of the gift economy, and into the frenzy of commodity
exchange. The boubou in question
bears a fine, intricate resist design, which the women of a Saraxolé
family take six months to create.
A work of love and creativity, intended to be given to a daughter to
wear on her wedding day and to cherish as a precious family gift, the fabric is
not produced to be sold and has little or no value in Dakar’s lively
fashion market. Fabrics and
garments in Senegal are coded as “traditional” or
“European” (modern), and in a similar manner do we divide economic
systems, considering gift exchange as traditional in contrast to commodity
exchange as modern. Yet, Senegal
has, over a centuries-long history, intertwined the two. In the 1990s moreover, as the
thoroughly modern forces of globalization and structural adjustment have
weakened the formal economy of Senegal, forms of gift exchange have grown
stronger as they come to fill the void.
When a Saraxolé dyer and I set out to exchange the boubou for
money, we unleashed a prolonged, tension-filled negotiation involving many
people. As it circulated among
people and places, the boubou did indeed come to signify the uneasy interplay of
traditional dying and modern fashion, gift giving and commodity sale, global
economy and local survival.
Fashion and the Idea of
Africa
Hudita Mustapha (Emory
University, USA)
West
African fashion has come onto the global stage recently in venues as far apart
as Parisian runways and South African liberation movement rallies. What is the appeal and flexibility of
these cultural forms? What are the
claims that they advance? This
paper suggests that West African fashion enables a wide range of
agents—West African or not, elite and popular—to construct their
idea of Africa. They do so by
engaging with these garments/images as embodiments of both
‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ of cosmopolitan
sophistication and African authenticity.
In fact, the Idea of Africa has always
been a transnational project
of imperialist, panafricanist, African bourgeois agents. More recently, popular and diasporic
agents have entered this discourse, especially through practices of consumption
and popular culture. The
transnational composition and mobility of fashion make it an ideal site for
multiple agendas encompassed by the Idea of Africa.
African Fashion on the
Global Platform: The Work of Seidnaly Alphadi
Kristyne Loughran (Florence,
Italy)
Coverage
of African-style attire and adornment in mass media indicates that African
forms and aesthetic expressions continue to be a source of creative ideas in
the international fashion arena. The communicative and aesthetic roles
the "idea" of Africa play on the global marketplace raise interesting
questions. This paper considers
the work of Seidnaly Alphadi, a Nigerien fashion designer and the president of
the Federation Internationale de la Mode Africaine (FIMA), whose designs and
marketing strategies illustrate the globalization of African fashion. Alphadi
lives and works in Niamey, Niger, and has a boutique in Paris. His
designs are modern and he makes prolific use of hand-woven cotton textiles and
modern African jewelry forms. By first looking at his designs, I will
examine the renegotiation of African traditions to create new identities for a
global audience. As the president of the FIMA, Alphadi plays a fundamental role
in giving visibility to African fashion designers on an international scale.
He uses sophisticated marketing techniques, including a web site. Using
Alphadi’s site, I will explore the vital role of the internet in
expanding local platforms to global conversations between players in the
fashion arena.
Victoria Rovine (University
of Iowa Museum of Art, USA)
Lamine
Kouyaté, creator of the Xuly Bët brand, recycles and reshapes used
clothing to create distinctive garments that combine high fashion with thrift
shop cast-offs. Nearly all of the
press coverage devoted to Xuly Bët, focuses on two themes: the recycled
clothing (only one portion of the designer’s oeuvre), and
Kouyaté’s African origins.
In some interviews, he has made a connection between the two themes,
noting that in his home country Mali, tailors and their clients are adept at
disassembling and adapting imported garments to suit their own needs. But does Xuly Bët’s recycled
fashion grow out of Malian or African precedents? Can students of fashion distinguish between an African
aesthetic of recycling, based largely in a need to make do, and the
Western-based aesthetic of the thrift shop and grunge style? And to what degree have the two merged
in the globalized fashion and style markets? This paper will investigate the urban African context out of
which Xuly Bët’s successful line of recycled clothing emerged.
VIII-3 Mami
watas: The Roots and Routes
of African Water Spirit Arts, Beliefs, and Practices (Part 1)
Chair: Martha G. Anderson (Alfred University, USA)
This panel will examine the
nexus between the pan-African spirit or complex known (in various guises) as
Mami Wata and locally named water spirits, for whom the pidgin term mami
wata sometimes serves as a gloss.
The arts, beliefs, and practices associated with mami watas both intersect with and diverge from those
identified with Mami Wata.
Panelists may present papers on Mami Wata or mami watas in Africa and the Diaspora. In keeping with the theme of the
Triennial, they should address the roots of widespread ideas and practices and
consider the routes these may have traveled.
Brass Trays, Shrine
Cloths and Cafe Walls - Old and New Representations of Mammy Wata in Coastal
West Africa
Jill Salmons (Worcester
College of Technology, UK)
This
paper will discuss early twentieth century representations of Mammy Wata
on brass trays decorated in
Calabar, S.E. Nigeria, and will compare the iconography and use of these to
late twentieth century two dimensional images of the spirit in a variety of
mediums in Nigeria, Ghana and Benin. It will draw on the fieldwork of Jill
Salmons and Keith Nicklin and museum research of Jeremy Coote, Pitt Rivers
Museum
Mami Wata: An Urban
Presence or the Making of a Tradition in Benin City, Nigeria
Charles Gore (School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK)
This
article considers the making of a ritual tradition of Mami Wata in Benin City,
Nigeria during the 1990s. It highlights how Mami Wata develops in specific
trajectories at particular locations and historical moments. The making of such
traditions relates to both local contexts, other traditions and more wide
ranging social processes, drawing on both ritual practices but also more
diffuse popular imaginings of Mami Wata, portrayed in the arts, mass media and
elsewhere. The article investigates some of these sites through case studies
and the shifting relations between different religious traditions as well as
with popular imaginings of Mami Wata over time. In the 1990's Mami Wata has
become an important deity at local shrines developing into a particular
tradition that for its followers is imbricated in the making of local notions
of modernity and globalisation. The article highlights the antagonistic
interdependence between Mami Wata and the Pentecostal church movement in Benin
City where there is an exceptional vitality in the local shrines and an equally
strong rejection of them by the Pentecostal churches. Mami Wata is a key figure
in these competing claims.
Possible Roots and Routes
for Carvings of Hanuman Collected in Nigeria
Jessica Joye Stephenson
(Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, USA)
Two
wooden images of the Hindu deity Hanuman, are located in
collections of African art
in museums in the USA and Europe. Both sculptures are
reported to have been
collected in the Niger Delta region. There is much documented evidence, from
Ghana to Nigeria, for the incorporation of images
of Hindu gods, including
Hanuman, into Mami Wata belief systems. However,
there islittle evidence for
the presence of such imagery in the Niger Delta
region. Focusing on the
sculptures as primary evidence, and employing diverse
methods of inquiry, this
paper addresses issues of provenance and context of
use. Were the sculptures
made in southern India or southeastern Nigeria? Were
they used in a Hindu or African
shrine context? Comparison with Indian, Ibibio,
and Ogoni sculpture, in
terms of both style and construction techniques, gives
rise to tantalizing
questions. Wood species identification and chemical
analysis of surface
accretions will provide more conclusive answers.
VIII-4 New Directions in the Study of
Architecture and Symbolic Space
Chair: Monica Blackmun
Visoná (Metropolitan State College, USA)
While
the first studies of African architecture to appear in English documented the
formal characteristics of buildings, French writings often focused upon the
philosophical values assigned to both spaces and structures. How do
recent research projects either refine or refute the French insistence
that African cultures have constructed environments in response to social and
cosmological systems of thought? How have changing spatial configurations in
African homes, compounds, shrines, towns and cities prompted new approaches to
the study of architecture, and how are these approaches still shaped by the work
of earlier scholars?
Physical Space and the
Division of Supernatural Power in the Lagoon
Region of Côte
d'Ivoire
Monica
Blackmun Visoná (Metropolitan State College of Denver, USA)
The spatial format of
communities founded by all twelve of the Lagoon peoples of Côte
d’Ivoire appears to be related to a Cartesian grid, and has been easily
integrated into governmental attempts to divide towns into regular lots
(“la lotisation”). Yet
the axial arrangement of these communities is based instead upon the organization
of spiritual authority in Lagoon thought.
The need for both spatial and spiritual juxtapositions of these powers
becomes evident during the performance of age-grade ceremonies, where the
visible and invisible demarcation of territory underlies the sequence of events
Elizabeth Perrill (Indiana
University, USA)
Prior to the recent political unrest, many Zimbabwean galleries were successful commercial spaces that encompassed both the creation and consumption of stone sculptures. This paper is an exploration of shifting spatial worlds of Zimbabwean stone sculpture galleries and stone sculptors from the late-1970s and new millenium. Building off of Anthony Gidden’s theory of complex agency and Edward Casey’s conceptions of place, it also analyzes Dominic Benhura’s negotiation of his own creative space, from the sculpture parks of the 1990s to the international art market of 2004.
Jeff Fleischer (Lehigh
University, USA)
This
paper looks at the evolution of the most internal and sacred spaces in Swahili
houses—the innermost rooms that were adorned with complex niche systems
and objects of display. I discuss
the way these architectural forms may be read as ‘technologies of the
self’—attempts by nascent elites to constitute themselves as a
social class, beginning in the 14th century AD. Such an analysis requires the Swahili
house to be contextualized in a broad temporal frame, in order to understand
the evolution of structural oppositions that are often regarded as
timeless. When viewed as
technologies, the activities in and elaborations of private spaces of Swahili
houses can be seen as a means by which elites sought to neutralize fears about
their position within an increasingly competitive and divided society.
Landscapes of Conflict:
Ditches, Discord, and Discourse in the Coast
Forest of Benin, West
Africa
Neil L. Norman (University
of Virginia, USA)
Archaeological research has greatly increased the understanding of elements of the built landscape associated with urban settlements that flourished in the coastal region of Bénin from the late 17th century AD. Throughout the region, African groups used massive ditch systems to define social space and designate zones of protection and inclusion. The predominate interpretation of these landscape features draws from European travelers accounts and relates their use to defensive posturing aimed at checking military hostility from rival groups. Through drawing together, oral histories, archaeological, and anthropological data, this paper explores alternative understandings of these features based on West African cosmologies and local political maneuverings.
Vertigo: Fragmentation
and the Modern in an Izhon (Idzo, Ijo, Ijaw) House
Ikem Stanley Okoye
(University of Delaware, USA)
Against
a background of the history of critical writing on African architecture (beyond
African Studies as such), this paper will explore the spaces of a locally designed
locally built modern African house in Okrika, southern Nigeria. Using an
appropriate vocabulary of space, it will show how attention to this
building’s visual character links it to three of the ideologies of
modernity i) to the rhetorics of technology (photography especially), ii) to a
modern sculpture of the Izhon duen fogbara, iii) to a vertiginous and vortical sense of space iv) to an highly
itinerant trans-national design team. I especially also describe how the
house’s spatial complexity helped me reconstruct the history of
architectural modernity in southern Nigeria –pushing the idea of the
modern (even Modern) architecture and its spaces here back from the late 1950s
to the early 1910s, unexpected because produced by local Igbo builders for Izhon
(Idzo, Ijo) patrons. This history effectively coincides with its simultaneous
European moment, indicating that modernities were not ‘alternate,’
in the terms typically deployed in cultural studies, but were instead in mutual
contestation and competition --any one with all its others forms.
IX-1 Mami watas: The Roots and Routes of African Water Spirit
Arts, Beliefs, and, Practices
(Part 2)
Chair: Martha G. Anderson (Alfred University, USA)
Rosalinde G. Wilcox (Saddleback College, USA)
The
Duala and their coastal neighbors, the Suwu, share a belief in water spirits
known as miengu (jengu, s.). Mami
Wata is also a familiar term in the region for a water spirit or jengu. Using archival and field data
concerning local coastal water spirit rituals, this paper proposes that Mami
Wata is located in a European context, and refers to a specific set of ideas
that are not correspondent with miengu.
Whereas Mami Wata is discussed openly, references to the miengu are
circumspect. This paper argues
that Mami Wata is an independent and relatively recent phenomenon along the
Cameroon coast, associated with European trade and the European presence.
A Myriad of Mermaids:
Mami Watas, Mami Wata, and False Mami Watas in the Niger Delta
Martha G. Anderson (Alfred
University, USA)
The
Ijo, who live in the Niger Delta, find water "good to think," for
they express beliefs in a plethora of water spirits which vary widely in
appearance and behavior. Though they seldom refer to a particular spirit named
Mami Wata, they often employ the term as a pidgin gloss for a water spirits,
especially the type that bestows material wealth. Moreover, many of the aquatic
spirits that feature in Ijo shrines, stories, and "eyewitness" accounts
share traits commonly identified with Mami Wata. In a situation where many
spirits resemble Mami Wata, yet few deviate widely from local patterns,
separating the "indigenous" from the "intrusive" proves
difficult. This paper will
investigate the points at which Ijo beliefs and practices intersect with those
identified with Mami Wata in hopes of gaining a historical perspective on both.
Mammy Wata, Inc.
Joseph Nevadomsky
(California State University, Fullerton, USA)
This
paper provides new data based on an investigation of the Mammy Wata
phenomenon. Hank Drewal, CEO of
Mammy Wata, Inc., is guilty of selling Mammy Wata as an international
knockout. Besides pushing a
meta-narrative that deceives investors, Drewal is also charged with sucking in
art historical groupies who parrot their motivational speaker's vision of a
global empire. With Yoruba talking
drums they sell junk bonds to a gullible art historical audience. Evidence from Britney Spears and
Madonna (both of whom own live snake wraps) and from Benin City (on Pappy
Neptune and Mammy Neptune who don't own snake wraps) are offered to support the
prosecution's allegations against Drewal. Drewal and his Manson-like groupies
are offered a 10-20 max trip to the Big House.
IX-2 Out of Africa: Dress and Identity of
Africans beyond the Continent
Chair: Joanne B. Eicher
(University of Minnesota, USA)
In the last few decades,
African nationals have been migrating to North America, the UK and Europe as
refugees and immigrants, often remaining to put down new roots. This panel explores issues of identity
as expressed through dress by Africans who are now "Out of Africa."
Do patterns of gender, religion, occupation, and/or ethnic background encourage
the production and reproduction of dress signifying a link to African
heritage? Possible papers could
include examples such as Somalis who wear "ethnic dress" in
Minnesota, or Igbo and Kalabari who wear African clothing for their ethnic
festivals. Papers include examples such as Somalis who wear "ethnic dress"
in Minnesota, Tunisians whose dress has been influenced by a long history of
contact with many outside their culture, and a Brazilian Roman Catholic
Sisterhood whose dress also indicates their Yoruba heritage.
The Construction of
“African Dress” in
Minnesota
Heather Marie Akou
(University of Minnesota, USA)
In
the 1970s, Immigration and Naturalization Services (the INS) accepted the first
major groups of Africans to settle in this country since the abolition of
slavery. This was made possible by
the abandonment of the “quota system,” which severely limited all
legal migration from continents other than Europe and North America. Some of the first Africans to arrive
were political refugees from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Liberia. Individuals and smaller groups trickled
in from other countries such as Nigeria, Mali, the Congo, and South Africa, for
reasons including asylum, family reunification, and opportunities for education
and jobs. Since the 1970s, Minnesota
has become home to approximately 5,000 Eritreans, 10,000 Liberians, 10,000 to
15,000 Oromo, and an unknown number of immigrants from other parts of
Africa. Although the “Twin
Cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul have always had a small population of
African-Americans, this community also expanded in the 1970s and 80s due
largely to migration from Chicago.
In the mid-1990s, Minnesota began accepting refugees from Somalia. This population (both from new and
secondary migration from other parts of the United States) has grown very
rapidly to the point where the Twin Cities in now home to the largest Somali
community in the country, an estimated 60,000 people living in Minneapolis-St.
Paul and greater Minnesota.
Although
many of the earlier African immigrants were able to quickly and quietly find
new lives for themselves in Minnesota, Somalis have been highly visible. This is due to several different
factors including the sheer size and rapid growth of the community; relatively
low levels of education and ability to speak English; a willingness to become
politically involved in the larger community (a Somali man for mayor of
Minneapolis during the last election); ethnic profiling after the events of
9/11; a need for, ability, and interest in establishing new restaurants and
businesses; and styles of “ethnic dress” that are worn not just for
special occasions but every day.
Support from the Muslim community as well as new initiatives to help
refugees and immigrants (a result of earlier Hmong, Vietnamese and Latino
migrations), have led to the building of two “Somali malls” named
Suuqa Karmel and the African International Marketplace. What does this mean for the creation of
an “African” identity and style of dress in Minnesota? In my presentation, I will explore some
of the major styles of dress for sale, why Somalis are not “fitting
in” like earlier immigrants, and how their dress has shaped and reflected
tensions between Somalis and African-Americans. This is based on field research for an MA thesis and PhD
dissertation, which I have been conducting over the past four years.
Out of Africa in Africa:
What Is Tunisian Dress?
Meriem Chida (University of
Minnesota, USA)
Tunisia
has a 3,000-year history of invasions from outside civilizations, including the
Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs.
Paradoxically, the dress of contemporary men and women in Tunisian
society is almost indistinguishable from dress in Western countries. This is very different from other parts
of the continent (such as Nigeria and Ghana) where African dress is worn with
pride. Western sociologists and
economists have considered Tunisia a very ‘modern’ and
‘developed’ country—an assessment based not only on
statistics but perhaps on how Tunisians are dressed. What does this mean for Tunisian identity? Whose identity does their dress
reflect?
A Celebration of
Women’s Liberation from Bondage: Toward an Ethnography of Dress and
Adornment in an Afrobrazilian Festival
Bamidele Agbasegbe Demerson
(Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, USA)
The
Sisterhood of Our Lady of Good Death—a Roman Catholic lay sodality
composed of women of African ancestry—conducts an annual mid-August
festival in honor of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption into heaven. Set in
Cachoeira, Bahia, northeastern Brazil, the observance also celebrates the
liberation of women from the institution of slavery. Moreover, through dress,
adornment, and sacred acts, the sisters pay homage to Divinities of the West
African Yoruba derived religion, Candomble Nago. These Divinities inspired the quest for freedom. Not
surprisingly, the Catholic clergy, tourist industry developers, and
“Black consciousness” advocates have different responses to this
“meeting” of two religious traditions.
IX-3 Upper Guinea: Past and Present
Chair: Bill Hart (University
of Ulster, Ireland)
The Upper Guinea Coast
between Senegambia and Sierra Leone historically has been a site of interaction
between Africa and the outside world and between the coastal peoples and the
civilizations of the Sahel. The panel will examine how these cultural
influences manifest themselves in the arts of the area and, drawing upon the
wealth of historical sources available for Upper Guinea, attempt to situate
some of these artistic manifestations within the broad history of the area.
The Bansonyi Serpentine
Headdress: New Data from the Field (Bulongic Country, Guinea, Conakry)
David Berliner (Harvard
University, USA)
The
serpentine headdress mistakenly named Bansonyi is renowned as one of the
masterpieces of West African art. However, our knowledge of the local religious
uses of this mask is still fragmentary. This paper is an attempt to look at the
past ritual performances of the Bansonyi headdress in the Bulongic country (one
of the Baga subgroups). It will provide new ethnographic data about the various
social and ritual contexts in which the mask appeared; and, secondly, examine
the current persistence of religious representations, emotions and practices
linked to the Bansonyi in the absence of its material component, which is now
displayed in museums in the West.
Bill Hart (University of
Ulster, Ireland)
Ragbenle
survives today as an organisation or sodality among the Temne people of central
Sierra Leone, but it has a history stretching back at least to the first decade
of the 17th century when it was described in a manuscript by a
Portuguese Jesuit missionary Manuel Alvares. The paper will review present-day
activities of Ragbenle, including its masquerades, and will discuss the
problems of using such early ‘outsider’ sources as evidence of
historical change or continuity in the cultures of the Upper Guinea coast.
Labelle Prussin (New York,
USA)
To
date, Saharan, Sahelian and West African history has focused on the role of
Islam and the European presence in the development of West African trade
networks, state formation and artistic creation, whereas Judaism has never been
considered as having any significant role. However a re-reading of Saharan and
Sahelian art and technology in historic context, in combination with a focus on
material culture and the integration of Jewish smiths into the indigenous
milieu, suggests a new interpretation of African stylistic continuities which
stresses the contribution of Jewish traders-cum-scholars-cum-artisans to the
unfolding of the African artistic genius.
Two Seventeenth-century
Jewish Communities in Senegambia
Peter Mark (Wesleyan
University, USA)
Inquisition records recently
discovered in the Portuguese National Archives document in some detail the
presence of Jewish communities in Senegal by the early 1600s. The origins of
these communities are obscure but may well reach back to the earliest period of
Portuguese settlement on the west African coast. The paper argues that there is
primary evidence of such an earlier Jewish/New Christian settlement in the
‘Afro-Portuguese ivories’ made in Sierra Leone in the period
1490-1560, whose ostensibly Christian iconography could have held a double
meaning for Marranos or secret Jews.