Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach

Abstract

How did African Americans in 1960s and 1970s Chicago create art rooted in working-class West Side and South Side communities? Art for the People’s Sake takes up this question by showing how these Black artists drew inspiration from neighborhood participation and protest politics. These were both controversial stances for artists to take, then as they would be now. These Black artists sought to engage and deepen antiracist activism against pernicious forms of urban renewal, deindustrialization, machine politics, and police repression. Like the artists she examines, Zorach analyzes art within its spatial historical contexts. This book thus brilliantly illuminates the complex dialectic among artists, activists, and other neighborhood residents as well as the cultural work and protest politics these interactions produced. Zorach details the emergence of the Black Arts movement in Chicago by referencing the previous generation’s artists while also explaining that this new generation reflected its own urban political and cultural moment. The artists of the Black Chicago Renaissance— especially Margaret Burroughs, who played a prominent role as an artist, educator, and museum movement leader—helped inspire and mentor this new generation, and spaces such as the South Side Community Arts Center and Abraham Lincoln Center became key incubators of intergenerational artistic collaboration. But this 1960s Black Arts scene was distinct. Zorach explains that its 1967 “founding moment” was also a “founding trauma” (p. 7). With the City of Chicago demolishing neighborhoods to make way for “renewal,” artists in Black Chicago neighborhoods claimed within Muridiyya’s collective memory, the author shows how the Sufis viewed it as the very embodiment of Islamic knowledge and a medium of mystically channeling/receiving Bamba’s blessing (baraka). Chapter 5 explores the screen adaptation of Senegalese stagecraft in relation to the local and global economic forces that led to such a development. The author argues that the same factors behind economic liberalization in the country also engendered the demise of Senghor’s traditional model of state-funded national cultural policy and created an overwhelming demand for a conjunctural social and moral critique that television was uniquely suited to provide. While Senghor’s presidency had provided large state funding to promote elitist cultural nationalism through national institutions such as Dakar’s polyvalent Daniel Sorano National Theater, the chapter shows that his successor, Abdou Diouf, made huge cuts to state spending on culture, due to global financial constraints. Such structural developments, coupled with the advent of television in Senegal in 1973 and video film technology later, precipitated the first screen adaptions of Senegalese popular theater. The author’s discussion of theater-to-screen adaptation, or “televised theater,” zooms in on the works of a pioneer troupe Daaray Kocc (The School of Kocc), whose actors were produced and paid by the Senegalese national television (ORTS/RTS). Analyzing the aesthetics and discourse of Daaray Kocc’s telefilms, the chapter shows how the troupe delighted the Senegalese viewership with “Wolof-language dramatizations of the kinds of domestic crises, acts of corporate corruption, and failures of governmental oversight that were seen as characteristic of a period steeped in economic and moral decline” (p. 107). The chapter closes with a discussion on the rise of Senegalese digital television series and its controversial subversion of local ethics of sutura (prudery, decency). The book’s last chapter investigates the rise and politics of Senegalese “popular theater” in the first section and dedicates its last section to a case study of “forum theater” as practiced by a Dakarois suburban theater troupe called Kàddu Yaraax. The author explores popular theater as a unique theatrical form where the Senegalese stagecraft strived significantly to decolonize local theater not just in the content as the pontins had tried, but also in the form by imagining a theatrical space devoid of Western standards. Although “popular theater” is a loose concept that Senegalese have used to designate an array of theatrical styles, the author describes it mainly as a normative discursive practice where the artists share a common “commitment to using theatrical performance as a tool to speak directly to the collectively imagined Senegalese masses, rather than to an audience of masses” (p. 125). Beyond simply making theater in indigenous African language, here, popular theater also takes on a Fanonian meaning, for its meaning is based on its cultural capacity to “respond dynamically and actively to its own political context” (p. 126). To examine this form of activist (or engagé) theater, the chapter’s second portion provides an ethnography of Kàddu Yaraax’s “forum theater” that responded to the socioeconomic impasse born in the failures of Senegalese neoliberal state politics. Citing Paulo Freire and Brazilian stage director Augusto Boal, the author describes forum theater as an interactive “theater of the oppressed” where the “spectators, or as [Boal] called them, ‘spect-actors,’ are invited to act immediately onstage to embody the type of social or behavioral changes necessary to address a given problem” (p. 134). The chapter traces Kàddu Yaraax’s first contact with forum theater to a 1998 workshop organized by Dakar’s French Institute. In analyzing the suburban troupe’s forums over the next decades, the author portrays it, somehow, as the voice of a voiceless Senegalese strata, but whose activist efforts are often met with challenges of financial survival. Overall, Senegalese Stagecraft provides a muchneeded contribution to the study of Senegalese theater aesthetics and discourse. The book comes in a context where Senegalese theater study has been a neglected subject for a long time. The book’s combination of Senegalese theater history with a contextualized critical analysis of important theatrical plays produces an interdisciplinary picture of Senegalese theater culture from the 1950s through the 2000s. The subsequent critical-historical study of Senegalese theatrical creativity and imagination does not only show historical intertextualities between written text, performance, and telefilm production as typical of postcolonial Africa, but it also gives useful insight into what Senegalese artists and youth did with the cultural legacies of French colonialism in general. In that regard, the book’s sited research on the history and evolution of Senegalese theater reveals a serious attempt at decolonizing local theater both in form and content, although its Francophone-centered approach to the subject matter allows only a little room for a discussion of other Senegalese theatricalities of decoloniality, especially those iterated in Wolofophone popular theater. Indeed, in addition to the author’s rich analysis of Daaray Kocc’s telefilms, other Wolofophone actors—such as Habib Diop (aka Baay Eli), Saint-Louis’s Golbert Diagne, and the more recent phenomenon of Saaneex (Mame Cheikhou Gueye)—have each produced a canon of stagecraft rooted in unique paradigms of decolonial theater. Regardless, Brian Valente-Quinn’s book remains a very important contribution, enriching the multidisciplinary scholarship on Francophone African studies, African literature, and African performance.