Using Dirt to Write History

Abstract

keeping) and a broadening canon (and hence more marketable objects). With Ratton, Monroe argues, the trade of African art shifted from the contemporary art context Guillaume had cultivated to that of the antiques trade. Interestingly, Monroe considers how the growing importance of African diasporic interest in African art objects, as well as the booming American art market during this period, played a significant role in both the contemporary art and the primitivist approach. Guillaume’s connection with the American collector Albert C. Barnes fed his business, while Ratton cultivated African art as a form of ancestral arts with the avant-garde role of black American artists and intellectuals, thereby heightening its profile with collectors. The last chapter circulates around the shifting meanings of authenticity in African art, one of the central threads Monroe develops throughout the book. The ‘authenticity problem’ (236–7), as he describes it, reflected the tension between competing historical (based around aesthetic and material analyses of the objects) and cultural (based around the presumed identity of the maker of the objects) interpretations of the concept, and the political implications of each of these interpretations. Monroe brings empire more tangibly to the fore here, both as the site of collecting enabled by colonial states, as well as the location of state-sponsored craft production (especially of sculpture), which was enabled by a cultural interpretation of authenticity in the context of interwar colonial humanism. Ultimately, Monroe argues, the aesthetic category of ‘primitive art’ was of primary importance. The concept had a long-term impact on the way African art is regarded because of the late appearance of academic ethnology in France and the deep-seated racism of the colonial system. This book thus presents a French history that will be of interest to scholars who study African art, as well as those interested in colonial knowledge cultures. Not all of its content breaks new ground, but its singular focus on several generations of art dealers, collectors, and scholars in Paris is relevant because of the longstanding power of the category of ‘primitive’ art, which as Monroe points out is still influential, despite its ‘racist paternalism’ (293).