I wager the assumption beyond the arenas of African Studies is that--in the competitive encounters between emigrated or diasporic knowledges, and the knowledge(s) that Africa produced- -African knowledge always loses. Though colleagues in other fields will admit to the occasional originality of knowledge from Africa, they might also claim, given their inescapable (indeed foundational) Hegelian bents, that such knowledge has usually already been arrived at (or invented) elsewhere at earlier moments. Africa is seen as having only very little that is relevant, new, or interesting to offer others. Such formulations are pervasive, though they are rarely the stuff of published papers (unless one reads very carefully between the lines). It is thus critical that the question of Africa’s knowledge and identity be addressed again, and reconstructed and reiterated. The story of its formation (or accumulation) and dispersal, especially beyond that of its originary localities, and also of its annihilation, erasure or disappearance (if this, at least for its knowledge, has been its lot) needs retelling.

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

Jua kali means "hot sun" in Kiswahili, a reference to a place of work located in the open-air markets and back streets of Kenyan towns, and by extension to the informal transactions that take place there and the products or services themselves.1 In most poor countries such as Kenya, these range widely, from iron working to bicycle and radio repair to woodcarving, and typically are either small kin-based workshops or at their largest and most elaborate, organized artisanal cooperatives (Figure 1). In 1988, the Kenyan government even created a separate ministry to deal with these ubiquitous micro-enterprises which employ more people than those in formal sector jobs.2

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

This essay deals with the framing of a colonial subject, Ben Enwonwu, as a modern artist and his struggle to escape the limitations of his colonially assigned roles in order to define a culturally relevant mode of modernist representation through his art. The focus of art history is shifting to non-western contexts of practice and one of the fastest growing areas of this new discourse is the study of modern and contemporary African art. This shift is important because the canonical narrative of modern art in art history substitutes the ethnic practice of white Western (and mostly male) artists for a universal history of modernity in art. Against the normative context of European modernity, art history posits a context of primitivism represented by ‘tribal' artifacts from Africa. Through this juxtaposition, art history denies the emergence of modern African art in the 20th century. Instead, it subordinates modern African art to Eurocentric narratives of modernity in art and thereby effaces analysis of modern African artists and their contexts of practice.2 The systematic negation of modern African art reiterates a long-standing distinction in art history's construction of Africa as the antithesis of European culture. James Clifford defined this distinction as an art/culture complex in which the value of European ‘art' is determined by its difference and distance from African ‘culture.'3 The racial underpinning of this attitude is evident in colonial texts about Africans that contrast European law to African custom, European literature to African folktales and European medicine to African witchdoctor practices, and above all, European art to African culture, with the correlative comparison of European modernism to African primitivism. Nicholas Mirzroeff suggests, in this regard, that the perfect body in Western culture was sustained and made imaginable by the imperfect body of the racial Other.4 Art history constructs the modern artist as a white, Western European male whose perfection is sustained by the literal consumption (through appropriation) of the non-Western (most specifically African) Other.5 The representation of Enwonwu as a modern artist evaluated below appears to invert this process by inscribing the racialized African Other as a norm in a particular British narrative of modern art. This essay investigates the implications of this representation of an African as a modern artist, and reviews Enwonwu's interventions in the inscription of narratives about his practice as a modern African artist.

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

Moustapha Dimé has remained an enigmatic figure in art history, despite having exhibited globally and having seen his name and works appear in trade and scholarly publications over the course of his career.1 Born in Louga, Senegal in 1952, he did not achieve international recognition for his figurative and abstract wood sculptures until the Venice Biennale of 1993, despite being well- known since the mid-1970s to the Senegalese cultural and political elite. After progressing through various stages in his artistic production, he developed what would come to be known as his signature style, that of récupération (found-object sculpture). This style consisted primarily of abstractions of the human form created from found items, that were then assembled or modified slightly into a final bodily mass. Works in this style date from the early 1990s up until the artist's untimely death from stomach cancer in 1998. Most of the literature on the artist is primarily concerned with the nature of the found-object in Dimé's sculptures from the 1990s.2 While Dimé's formal turn from carving to récupération in the 1990s is an important subject of analysis, figuration as utilized by Dimé during this same period has not been pursued by scholars. The most likely, though contentious, reason given is that Dimé was a practicing Muslim. The seeming contradiction between his faith, which is understood to prohibit figuration in the visual arts, and his dedication to the human body in his sculpture, has caused critics to discuss either the religious or the figurative components of his sculptures, but never both together. Additionally, because of the significant reduction of naturalism in Dimé's late works, scholars have given pride of place to his use of abstraction, presuming a lesser importance for the human figure.3 But, though abstraction does visually dominate Dimé's compositions of the 1990s, the human body is rarely absent.

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

Durant Basi Sihlali was as a teacher and a collector of visual memories. Through the example of his precise and methodical art, he was a quietly influential art world figure in South Africa from the 1950s until his death in 2004 at age 69. This essay presents a framework for considering Durant Sihlali as a revisionist historian of black South African life during apartheid. I choose a selection of his work for extensive contextual analysis, and focus on the artist's pictorial interest in collecting personal memories of place in contrast to the official apartheid landscape. I discuss Sihlali's aesthetic appropriation of popular ideas about African tradition in the 1980s, and his engagement with forms of women's mural art. I also consider Sihlali's art in relation to the work of his white and black contemporaries. Through this comparative approach, I engage with contradictions inherent to the forms of primitivist modernism and documentary realism that were common in South Africa after mid-century. Sihlali's oeuvre spans the apartheid era, from the 1940s to the 1990s. Through him one can trace a history of the politics of art in South Africa from an individual's perspective. In retrospect, his art created a purposeful archive--a meditation on the conditions of black South African life under apartheid, and it performed subtle forms of aesthetic, and individual resistance.

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

This essay is a reading of Senghor's philosophy as, primarily, an answer to the hermeneutical question: What do African art objects say? What do they mean? In other words, what does it mean to sculpt the way the African artist did? This is the question Picasso posed at the beginning of the twentieth century when he visited the ethnographical Musée de l'Homme, in Paris, to see the so- called African "fetishes." Senghor's answer to that question is that the "significant forms" (Clive Bell) thus created by African artists of the past are to be read as signs that manifest a metaphysics. The essay shows in particular how, for Senghor, African art is the expression of an ontology of rhythms.

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

Unlike the many photographers in nineteenth century Europe who began their careers as portrait painters, photographers in West Africa often started out as tailors (Figure 1).1 This should come as no surprise: African photographers like to make their clients look picture-perfect in their clothes, and clients have themselves photographed in order to better remember the way their clothes looked. In many places, the tailor's shop and the photographic studio exist under the same roof, and, particularly on holidays when festively dressed clientele demand to be photographed, tailors sometimes earn a bit of extra money as photographers. Both tailors and photographers are "image-makers" and equally well versed in the design of outer appearance. The truism that the clothes make the man links the two professions; the notion that clothing itself is a medium that records and preserves traces of the people for whom it served as a "second skin," and itself evokes a presence, is another link occasionally thematized by modern art. "For me," says Christian Boltanski, "clothing is firmly bound to photography; a piece of clothing is, like photography, an object of remembrance of a subject. There is the smell, there are the folds; it is like a mold in comparison with the photograph."2

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

Strolling around the Royal Museum for Central Africa arouses impressions that can be both diverse and divergent.1 Most often, visitors remember a monumental building, stuffed wild animals, as well as an exceptional collection of African material culture and art. They admire the richness of the marbles, and are amused or annoyed by the outdated atmosphere of some of the rooms. If they stop in the new temporary showroom devoted to the Congo in the colonial time, they will inevitably lay their eyes on a painting, not very remarkable in style or imposing in size, but quite astonishing for its content. Its frame, made out of dark wood, bears the inscription La Civilisation au Congo (Figure 1). This painting depicts an African man on his knees and tied to a post, while another man dressed in uniform administers blows with a chicotte.2 Only one European appears in the painting. Standing behind the man receiving the beating, he seems to be taking notes. Where does this painting come from, who was its author, and what is its proper context?

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

Leni Riefenstahl is undoubtedly known to readers of this journal: a melodramatic actress, minor dancer, and sometime filmmaker whose infamy and initial fame basically stemmed from her film work during the Third Reich--especially the film Olympia (the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany) and Triumph of the Will (the Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg in the mid-1930s).1 Much has been written of this work; she was actually brought up on charges at war crimes trials after World War II, but she managed, with the help of highly placed and powerful friends to avoid internment.2 Riefenstahl's defense has always rested on her lack of knowledge of events (the most common defense of those charged after World War II), even though she was clearly enamored of the Nazi hierarchy, especially Adolf Hitler, shared his confidence on many occasions, is argued to have turned over lists of film technicians and cameramen to the Gestapo, and actually used concentration camp inmates as extras in at least one of her films.3

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

On June 2, 2006, two of Nigeria's cultural luminaries--writer Chinua Achebe and artist Uche Okeke--came together for a unique public dialogue at The Newark Museum. The occasion that prompted the gathering was the Museum's exhibition, Another Modernity: Works on Paper by Uche Okeke, featuring thirty works spanning a period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Okeke, one of Africa's foremost modernist artists, and Achebe, widely regarded as a founder of modern African literature, share a common Igbo heritage that has strongly influenced their work. Their friendship and professional association goes back many decades to the late 1950s, a time of extraordinary artistic ferment in Nigeria heralding the country's impending independence. Reunited for this program, the two offered important literary and visual perspectives on this rich and complex period of Nigerian history.

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.

I wager the assumption beyond the arenas of African Studies is that--in the competitive encounters between emigrated or diasporic knowledges, and the knowledge(s) that Africa produced- -African knowledge always loses. Though colleagues in other fields will admit to the occasional originality of knowledge from Africa, they might also claim, given their inescapable (indeed foundational) Hegelian bents, that such knowledge has usually already been arrived at (or invented) elsewhere at earlier moments. Africa is seen as having only very little that is relevant, new, or interesting to offer others. Such formulations are pervasive, though they are rarely the stuff of published papers (unless one reads very carefully between the lines). It is thus critical that the question of Africa’s knowledge and identity be addressed again, and reconstructed and reiterated. The story of its formation (or accumulation) and dispersal, especially beyond that of its originary localities, and also of its annihilation, erasure or disappearance (if this, at least for its knowledge, has been its lot) needs retelling.

Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article.

Full article is available to subscribers.