Critical Interventions .::. Current Issue

Interrogating African Modernity: Art, Cultural Politics, and Global Identities

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
Welcome to this expanded special issue of Critical Interventions. Titled Interrogating African Modernity: Art, Cultural Politics and Global Identities, this double issue began with papers first presented at the 2007 Mbanefo Foundation Conference, which convened at the University of California Santa Barbara during May 4-5, 2007. This international conference brought together leading scholars of African art to deliberate on the history and critical reception of modern African art. The conference capitalized upon the reemergence of modernism as a primary intellectual concern in all spheres of the humanities and social sciences, especially in art history and cultural studies. Modernity is back in the news and the contemporary era after postmodernism has returned to modernist commitments and strategies with a vengeance, a process I have identified elsewhere as neomodernism.1 In this new dispensation, various theories have emerged to explain the persistence of debate about the nature and parameters of modernism, which suggest that postmodernism's earlier rejection of the modernist project failed to account for how cultures classified as "other" in Western discourses engaged the larger context of modernism. Simply put, the modernism of Western Europe must be linked with a history of global modernism, in which African, Asian, Oceanic, and Native American artists have been critical participants. While by now it is painfully clear that the usual discursive approach to the modernism of Western European artists cannot adequately explain the global phenomena of the modernist project, detailed studies that elucidate the subject in different contexts have only recently begun to appear. Bruce Knauft classifies these processes as alternative modernities.2 Art historical narratives have long subordinated modernist developments in Africa to Eurocentric narratives of modernity. In recent years, the turn to studies of alternative modernities appears to provide a space for engagement with non- Western contexts of modernity such as modern African art. However, too often discourses of alternative modernities actually continue to mediate the reception of non-Western contexts as secondary locations for the unfolding of the European ethos. Dipesh Chakrabarty calls this the historicist model and notes that its imposition on non-Western societies through European colonial conquest displaces alternative narratives of history or modernity in these contexts by subordinating their visual and cultural practices/ discourses to those of Europe.3 This historicist model has unduly victimized modern African art by making it practically impossible for African artists to emerge as active subjects/agents of modernity in art history where their endeavors are always considered superfluous in relation to the hegemonic narratives of the West.
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The Black Atlantic And The Paradigm Shift To Modern Art In Africa

Everlyn Nicodemus

Europe is indefensible. (…) That being settled, I admit that it is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other; that it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds (…); that for civilizations exchange is oxygen; that the great good fortune of Europe is to have been the crossroads, and that because it was the locus of all ideas, the receptacle of all philosophies, the meeting place of all sentiments, it was the best center for the distribution of energy. But then I ask the following question: has colonization really placed civilizations in contact? Or, if you prefer, of all the ways of establishing contact, was it the best? I answer no. (…) Since the Europeanization of the non- European continents could have been accomplished otherwise than under the heel of Europe; since the movement of Europeanization was in progress; since it was even slowed down; since it was in any case distorted by the European takeover.
—Aimé Césaire

A Voice from the Black Atlantic Diaspora

The paradox inscribed in the above lines from Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire (the great poet from Martinique, a political thinker as sharp as Fanon) touches upon two sides of the whirlwind of modernization through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and upon Europe's role as its eye, the side of destruction and the side of multidirectional exchanges.1 Aimé Césaire cuts through much of our politically-correct thinking when he asserts that the storm could have followed another track than the one beaten by European boots, and especially when he asserts that the movement of modernization was indeed already in progress. It is a statement supported by the entire historical and cultural experience of not only the Caribbean but the whole black Atlantic diaspora with its vast movements of people, goods, and ideas, both terrible and exciting to contemplate. At a point, what constitutes "European" in it is more or less dissolved in the wind. As an "energy," the movement of modernization produced new centers and new dynamics, which simply cannot be circumscribed by referring to this or that contact with Europe. Reflecting on this, I felt I had to reinvestigate part of the discourse on the genesis of modern art in Africa.

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Unmixing the Chaos: Contemporary African and Diasporic Art on Display in Global Context

Bennetta Jules-Rosette, University of California San Diego, J.R. Osborn, American University in Dubai

Realizing that you will have to go elsewhere to find a silence that corresponds to you. This is no doubt what being contemporary is all about. Artists share the same quality of silence, expressed according to different accents and sensibilities, and through these silences their background and vision of the world appear. … The collective silence becomes replaced by a more profound, egotistical silence, which for artists can sometimes be salvational
—Simon Njami

This essay addresses three exhibitions, Africa Remix (2004), African Art Now (2005), and Josephine Baker : Image and Icon (2006) in terms of the political economy, audiences, and semiography of their displays as they move across diverse venues. Both Africa Remix, curated by Simon Njami, and African Art Now, organized by collector Jean Pigozzi, reinvent and reconfigure contemporary African art in relationship to avant-garde genres, new aesthetic themes, and contrasting audience demands. In fact, Simon Njami opens his introduction to the 2005 version of Africa Remix catalog with a description of the chaos and metamorphosis of contemporary African art in the global context. Audience responses to and critical interpretations of all three exhibitions differed as they moved from site to site. Although Josephine Baker : Image and Icon, curated by Olivia Lahs- Gonzales, was not planned as an international exhibition, it introduced similar issues of provenance, ownership, and audience response. The exhibition raised questions concerning the iconographic representation of Africa in diasporic settings. All three exhibitions interrogated how the term "contemporary" is configured and transmogrified in African art, a question that compels curators and participants to "unmix" the chaos and locate traces of homogeneity and difference in the metamorphosis of the global art scene. In this essay, Unmixing will be used as a performative semiotic method of exploring layers of artistic production and display by bringing to life elements of artworks and their environments. This process will allow the remixing of artistic components for comparative analysis.

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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Mamiwata, and African Modernity

Moyo Okediji, University of Texas, Austin

My apparition rose from the fall of lead, Declared, ‘I am a civilian.' It only served To aggravate your fright. For how could I Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is Your quarrel of this world.
—Wole Soyinka,

"Civilian and Soldier." A Foreign Indigenous Masquerade In a small village deep in the heart of Africa, a fast-paced percussive rhythm by young men fills the evening air with a festive atmosphere at the market square. With sweat streaming down their bodies, the drummers were beating death and pestilence out of the village with their tempo. A large crowd has gathered, and they all patiently wait with unconcealed anticipation for the appearance of their ancestral masquerade—the Big One—as they submit to the overpowering rhythm of prelude percussion music. With no inhibition, some young men and women are dancing stylishly to entertain the excited audience, as a side attraction. They move in unison to the changing rhythms and seem to have memorized every beat of the intricate drumming. Suddenly the lead masquerade steps out of the adobe shrine and all attention shifts away from the dancers as everyone focuses on the spectacular view of the gyrating complex of mask and fabrics displayed in flamboyant color in front of them.

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Questioning Moroccan and Algerian Modernity Through Language, Literature, and Cinema

Hakim Abderrezak, University of Minnesota
This ar ticle investigates modes and representations of modernity as encountered in the daily usage of language in Morocco and Algeria.1 I approach Maghrebi (North African) modernity by focusing first on vernacular language and then discussing some key cultural productions. Drawing first on Driss Chraïbi's novel, Le Passé simple,2 I later turn to the film, Viva Laldjérie, for these texts pose important questions with regard to Maghrebi cultural modernity at large. Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article. Full article is available to subscribers.
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Victor Ekpuk: The Fortune Teller Suite

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, University of California Santa Barbara

Uyo, 1989. In the waning light of day, a young man stands in front of an easel in a painting studio at the art department of the university of Awka Ibom state, Nigeria. He works slowly and methodically, without sketches, but with firm strokes and a very well defined sense of purpose. But the assured occupant of the studio is not a student at this particular university: Victor Ekpuk was simply passing time here, waiting out a closure of his institution—the University of Ife—as a result of a strike action by its teachers. These kinds of work stoppages were common in Nigeria at that time and Ekpuk was passing his downtime working on his art as he is wont to do and has done for most of his adult life. From the evidence of ongoing work at this time, he was already focusing on indigenous African graphic systems and rejecting outright any attempt to modify his style of representation.

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(Dis)locating Freedom: The Photographic Portraiture of Seydou Keïta

Jennifer Bajorek, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Treatments of the ethicopolitical dimensions of photography have tended to universalize or generalize about the violence of photography or, conversely, about a peculiarly photographic freedom as if these were properties essential to photography as a medium or technology, without attending to the specificities of cultural differences or historical conditions.1 Colonialist uses of photography have been an important exception to this rule, but their analysis has often paid for the desired historical fine grain by remaining confined to the past, in the sense that the relations between these and present-day photographic practices tend not to be discussed.2 One of the questions I have begun to ask in my recent research is whether there is a use or practice of photography, and especially of photographic portraiture, adapted to the experience of the human being who has been left off the map of the neoliberal world order: a portraiture adapted to the being, face, or body that remains illegible or invisible within the visual and epistemological regimes of global capital.3 Is it possible to think or speak of neoliberal or, to borrow a term from Achille Mbembe, "necropolitical" forms of portraiture, as well as modern, "Republican," or democratic forms? Any thorough consideration of this question requires an engagement with the history of photographic portraiture in non- European spaces. This material remains a crucial and largely unplumbed resource for anyone wanting to explore the most basic ethico-political questions in relation to photography. How are different kinds of bodies produced on the basis of different photographic practices? How can different power relations between bodies be made visible or visualizable? Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article. Full article is available to subscribers.
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Towards "Radical Contemporaneity" in African Art History: The "Glocal" Facet of a Kinship-Based Artistic Genre

Gitti Salami, University of Kansas
The discourse on African art history since the mid-1980s has been characterized by a division of the scholarship between "contemporary" art and coeval "traditional" art.1 This partition is based upon flawed assumptions; it selectively attributes or denies African artists a capacity to communicate cross-culturally. It favors African artists who stress their identity as "individuals" engaged in dialogue with transnationally linked art worlds.2 It acknowledges the individual contribution of these artists (e.g. paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, performance pieces, and new media works) to the "emergence of a global art culture."3 Conversely, it marginalizes contributions to the aesthetics of a globalizing world made by African artists who live in kinship-based communities and think of themselves primarily as "dividuals," that is, people who experience themselves to a large extent in relation to others and create meaning through community-based genres of artistic production.4 In this article, I set out to deconstruct the division in the discipline through analysis of the Yakurr Leboku festival. I reject a priori categorization of this kinship-based artwork as "traditional" art, an ideologically loaded frame, on the basis that Yakurr people explicitly try to address a global audience as one facet of their festival. Art historian Salah Hassan confirms that classifications along the lines of "rural vs. urban," "peasant vs. industrial," "‘contemporary traditional' vs. contemporary," etc., "cannot withstand rigorous analysis, and prove problematic when tested against the realities of the contemporary art scene in Africa." Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article. Full article is available to subscribers.
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Indigenous Relations: Art and Modernity in South Africa

Julie L. McGee, University of Delaware

In 1997 UNESCO included in its Memory of the World Register an archive best known as the Bleek Collection and described thusly:

The Bleek Collection consists of papers of Dr W.H.I. Bleek (1827-1875), his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd (1834-1914), his daughter Dorothea Bleek (1873-1948) and G.W. Stow (1822-1882) relating to their researches into the San (Bushman) language and folklore, as well as albums of photographs. Bleek developed a phonetic script for transcribing the characteristic clicks and sounds of the !Xam language which is used by linguists to this day. Although some of the material was published by Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek, a great deal remains unpublished. The material provides an invaluable and unique insight into the language, life, religion, mythology, folklore and stories of this late Stone Age people.

The Bleek Collection does indeed offer many invaluable lessons, chief among them being how Western constructions of modernity are imbedded in tropes of prehistory and indigeneity and wedded to proclamations of science and salvage. Robert Gordon has suggested the archive be seen in the context of South Africa's "incipient scientific nationalism." The Bleek Collection was recently published in a lavish volume and accompanying CD ROM, edited by scholar and artist Pippa Skotnes. This publication, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (2007), continues Skotnes's scholarly and artistic inquiry into the lives of the Lloyd and Bleek family and their informants and was preceded by Skotnes's Sound of the Thinking Strings (1991) and the controversial exhibition (with catalogue) Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushman (1996). Skotnes's latest exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow's History Paintings of the San, launched in November 2008 at Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, centers on Lucy Lloyd and the geologist/ ethnographer George Stow in connection to Stow's rock painting studies. Sustained and legitimized by exhibitions, publications, and national museums, universities, and archives, these projects have provided privileged reinscriptions of archival materials gathered during an era of cultural plunder of South Africa's indigenous heritage by colonial forces. Skotnes's scholarly and artistic contributions to contemporary conceptualizations of South Africa's earliest inhabitants are immensely valuable. Her appropriation of San heritage is deeply inflected by her scholarship on the San and most particularly Bleek, Lloyd, and Stow's interpolations of the San and early rock art painting. Her publications and exhibitions offer rich and at times competing layers of analyses that seem to position her as a keen, insightful and detached observer-scholar and then again as a romanticizing dramaturgist and scenographer. To this end, there are parallels with the endeavors of Bleek and Lloyd and renewed courtship with the constructions of Western modernity through and against African indigeneity.

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From Masks to Metal Cloth: Artists of the Nsukka School and the Problem of "Ethnicity"

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, University of California Santa Barbara
Critical Interventions 3/4, Spring 2009 The Mask stands tall: at over fifteen feet high, it is easily one of the largest mask ensembles ever created in any indigenous African culture. Its conical shape is constructed out of strips of appliqué cloth in bright red, yellow, and black colors. Numerous sculptures and small flag posts adorn a superstructure bisected by a sinuous sculpture of a royal python. Strips of finely woven cloth decorated with Uli imagery fall in broad swatches below this boundary, one of which is shorter than the rest. This shorter strip represents the face of the mask and identifies the ensemble as the "regalia" of the Igbo Ijele, the king of masquerades. The image of a king is the king, it is said, but crucial components of this Ijele's representation of royalty are missing in the museum setting: there is no crowd of adoring audiences, no master drummers calling the masquerade to the sacred arena, and above all, the mask ensemble itself is motionless, static in the formal display protocols of the museum space. It is thus not an actual Ijele but a representation, a simulacrum if you will, which aggregates the iconic archetype of the masquerade for purposes of visual display. In this case, there is a dissonance between the image and what it represents. The masquerade is absent: only the shell remains. It is nevertheless still very beautiful. Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article. Full article is available to subscribers.
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To God Be the Glory: Home Videos, the Internet, and Religio-Cultural Identity in Contemporary African Christianity

Afe Adogame, University of Edinburgh
In the past couple of decades, media texts have increasingly served as significant maps through which Africa's new religious movements (ANRMs) distinguish themselves on local/global religious landscapes. There has been an unprecedented upsurge in the production, consumption, and commodification of home videos as one specific form of popular culture in Africa and the new African diaspora. Nigerian videos, a phenomenon barely two decades old, are now being produced at a phenomenal rate. These video genres perhaps offer one of the most formidable and accessible expressions of contemporary African popular culture. Home video technology represents a basic instance of the interconnectedness of the global and the local on the level of cultural marketing, as part of the processes of African modernity. This paper explores how versions of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity increasingly engage video technology as conduits for the dissemination of their religious ideologies, as a means of developing new visual publics, and as a channel towards negotiating old and new identities. It assesses how and to what extent these alternative strategies impact old and the new publics within Africa and beyond. Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article. Full article is available to subscribers.
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The "Rediscovery" of Religion in Contemporary Nigerian Art History

Nicholas J. Bridger, Ohlone College
This paper analyzes Christian art in African art history with particular emphasis on the challenge of researching Yoruba-Christian art, a genre created through the collaboration of Yoruba artists and Irish Catholic missionaries in the context of the Oye-Ekiti Workshop (1947 to 1954: Figure 1). While the genre was widely known over four decades ago, especially through the publications of the principal patron, Reverend Kevin Carroll, little academic work or interest appeared before my research on this topic began. I have attempted here to develop a partial answer to the perplexing question of why African art historians seem to have avoided or worked around this mid-century Yoruba-Christian fusion and how the role of Euro-American secularist influences may figure in an answer. Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article. Full article is available to subscribers.
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The Grey Areas of Modernism and "Black Art" in South Africa

John Peffer, Ramapo College
From the first stirrings of modernism at midcentury, until the 1990s, black South African artists had difficulty gaining access to art historical knowledge, advanced education, art world influence, and exhibition venues.1 A legacy of informal training combined with paternalistic market pressures consigned many black artists to a repetitive, sentimental, self-regarding, and limited set of styles collectively and pejoratively termed "township art." Paradoxically, the development of black modernist art during the decades before 1994 occurred within a social and intellectual setting that was more multiracial, more multicultural, and more internationally inclined and intellectually curious than most of the rest of South Africa's polarized black and white society. I would like to propose a new framework for interpretation in which conceptually, socially, aesthetically, and geographically, black modern art in South Africa may be thought of as a "grey area," as a space for interactions of the sort not permitted in the larger society under apartheid.2 As the State's segregationist program became more onerous after the 1950s, it was the black art scene that preserved the promise of a future nonracial South Africa. In what follows I begin with a close look at key works by one of the "fathers" of modernism in South Africa, Gerard Sekoto, in order to give substance to the idea of grey areas. I conclude with a discussion of how—in terms of hybrid aesthetic and social worlds—the South African art world (particularly the "black art" scene) was historically a creative space that resisted the imposition of apartheid, via social praxis as much as through image and style. Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article. Full article is available to subscribers.
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From "Primitive" to Postmodern: Artists of African Descent in Britain

Monique Fowler Paul Kerman, Western Washington University
This essay investigates changing perceptions of artists of African descent in Britain. In the first half of the last century, modernity proclaimed a linear progression of artistic development that did not allow for multiple voices, diverse cultures, or alternate trajectories. For example, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso has been lauded as a genius of modern art while his European peers characterized as primitive savages the African artists who inspired his signature achievements. When these so-called primitives migrated to Europe to train in its academies and stake their claim as modern artists, they were denied praise for their engagements with modernism.1 In a spectacular double standard, instead of being seen as innovative, their art was labeled derivative. Not withstanding, between 1940 and 1970, the population of Britain swelled with unprecedented numbers of immigrants from countries under British colonial rule and former British colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. These immigrants included artists who came seeking opportunities in education, employment, and access to an established international art scene. Their work was often met with skepticism based on racist assumptions that excluded their practice of modernist formalism or representation of modern subject matter. However, this "first wave" of artist immigrants helped to redefine modernity by synthesizing its stylistic trends and formal ideologies with their non-European heritage and individual creative innovations. Frank Bowling, Uzo Egonu, and Aubrey Williams are all artists whose bodies of work are formally and conceptually modern, yet modernity is a concept from which they were originally barred and to which they were viewed as tangential. Their very existence and professional practice necessitates a paradigm shift, from a modernity founded on racial superiority and oppression to one that embraces artistic innovation and appropriation from all artists regardless of ancestry. This analysis focuses on these artists' specific responses to modernism in Britain and reviews how they negotiated their marginalization within the turbulent ethnic politics of their new homeland. Non-subscribers may use PayPal to purchase this article. Full article is available to subscribers.
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Inter-Action (1982)

Manfred Zylla was born in 1939 in Germany and moved to South Africa in 1970. He is well regarded in South Africa for his precise draftsmanship, his mastery of high political satire in support of the anti-apartheid movement, and for his formal mash-up style combining a critical realism with postmodern montage and pastiche. During a period that witnessed the gathering of forces into the United Democratic Front and the final push by artists (a.k.a. "cultural workers") and activists to end apartheid, Zylla made a profound impact with his interactive event hosted at the Community Arts Project in Cape Town, just before the sixth anniversary of the 1976 youth uprising in Soweto.

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