| african arts SUMMER 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 2 The French word récade is a neologism formed from the Portuguese word recados, meaning “message” or “messenger.” The word récade specifically refers to a type of object used in the Fon kingdom of Dahomey (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries ce, now part of the Republic of Benin). Récades often are axeor crook-shaped staffs. Their handle is often made of wood and is roughly 50 cm high. The blade of an axe-shaped récade is often sculpted in the shape of a king or of a battalion’s emblems, figures that often refer to quotes or proverbs (Fig. 1). When used by royal messengers, the récade authenticated the provenance of their message. The word récade also refers to formally similar staffs used by priests of the Fon deity of thunder, So, also known by the names Hevios(s)o, Hevies(s)o, Hebios(s)o, Hebies(s)o, or Djis(s)o. These two kinds of object were also used in the context of ritual dances. In Dahomey art historical studies, the dominant view of the origin of the récade is the one first recorded by Adande (1962; cf. recently Beaujean 2015). According to the tradition recorded in this work, the récade originated during the reign of Wegbaja (ca. 1645–1685), the first king of Dahomey. The ancestors of the Fon people, taken by surprise by their enemies during their agricultural work, used their hoe handles as ad hoc weapons to fight off their assailants. This tool was later used in parades as a symbol of Fon bravery, a reminder of their victory, and then as a symbol of royal authority and messengers. In this paper, I challenge this widely accepted hypothesis. I suggest that while derivation of some récades from battle weapons is not unlikely, there are certainly other sources for this very diverse type of object. My position is that the récade was functionally inspired by at least two different kinds of staff. One is a staff called opa ase. It is widely used in Yorubaland and neighboring areas by royal messengers. The other one is the ose Sango, the staff used by priests of the thunder cult in the Yoruba empire of Oyo. Dahomey was tributary to Oyo between the first part of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. It was deeply influenced by Oyo in many respects, including arts, religion, and political structure. One such influence dealt with the thunder deity Sango, who was associated with Oyo’s expansionism. I suggest that as Sango was considered the ancestor of the Oyo rulers, who were antagonistic to Dahomey kings, the latter took the association of the thunder deity with expansionism and applied it to So, the Fon deity of thunder. It is known that Sango priests were part of Oyo diplomatic and tribute collecting missions through the empire and beyond. It was customary for Sango priests to take with them their ose Sango, a kind of staff associated with the cult of Sango as their badge of office during their travels. I suggest that a similar practice was followed in Dahomey, where I claim priest
{"title":"On the Origins of the Récades of the Kings of Dahomey","authors":"Sandro Capo Chichi","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00706","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts SUMMER 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 2 The French word récade is a neologism formed from the Portuguese word recados, meaning “message” or “messenger.” The word récade specifically refers to a type of object used in the Fon kingdom of Dahomey (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries ce, now part of the Republic of Benin). Récades often are axeor crook-shaped staffs. Their handle is often made of wood and is roughly 50 cm high. The blade of an axe-shaped récade is often sculpted in the shape of a king or of a battalion’s emblems, figures that often refer to quotes or proverbs (Fig. 1). When used by royal messengers, the récade authenticated the provenance of their message. The word récade also refers to formally similar staffs used by priests of the Fon deity of thunder, So, also known by the names Hevios(s)o, Hevies(s)o, Hebios(s)o, Hebies(s)o, or Djis(s)o. These two kinds of object were also used in the context of ritual dances. In Dahomey art historical studies, the dominant view of the origin of the récade is the one first recorded by Adande (1962; cf. recently Beaujean 2015). According to the tradition recorded in this work, the récade originated during the reign of Wegbaja (ca. 1645–1685), the first king of Dahomey. The ancestors of the Fon people, taken by surprise by their enemies during their agricultural work, used their hoe handles as ad hoc weapons to fight off their assailants. This tool was later used in parades as a symbol of Fon bravery, a reminder of their victory, and then as a symbol of royal authority and messengers. In this paper, I challenge this widely accepted hypothesis. I suggest that while derivation of some récades from battle weapons is not unlikely, there are certainly other sources for this very diverse type of object. My position is that the récade was functionally inspired by at least two different kinds of staff. One is a staff called opa ase. It is widely used in Yorubaland and neighboring areas by royal messengers. The other one is the ose Sango, the staff used by priests of the thunder cult in the Yoruba empire of Oyo. Dahomey was tributary to Oyo between the first part of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. It was deeply influenced by Oyo in many respects, including arts, religion, and political structure. One such influence dealt with the thunder deity Sango, who was associated with Oyo’s expansionism. I suggest that as Sango was considered the ancestor of the Oyo rulers, who were antagonistic to Dahomey kings, the latter took the association of the thunder deity with expansionism and applied it to So, the Fon deity of thunder. It is known that Sango priests were part of Oyo diplomatic and tribute collecting missions through the empire and beyond. It was customary for Sango priests to take with them their ose Sango, a kind of staff associated with the cult of Sango as their badge of office during their travels. I suggest that a similar practice was followed in Dahomey, where I claim priest","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"10-19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42153067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
| african arts SUMMER 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 2 Sinethemba Ngubane is an artist who works predominantly in the medium of ceramics but includes sculptures in large installations. She was born in 1991 in Durban, South Africa, and completed a national diploma in Fine Art in 2014 and Bachelor’s degree with distinction at Durban University of Technology in 2015. She has exhibited in academic group shows in KZNSA Gallery, Durban University of Technology, Steve Biko Art Gallery, and artists’ group shows in art space, Durban. Ngubane is currently studying for a Master in Fine Art degree at Durban University of Technology. She is an award winner of the Emma Smith Scholarship. This paper critically analyzes the vernacular symbols of Black intersex children articulated in her works produced between 2007 and 2016 and the ideas they convey. In defining “vernacular,” Gupta and Adams (2018: 2) posit that “vernacular defines that which is domestic or indigenous.” While the definition of “vernacular” implies “indigenous,” this does not mean Ngubane’s artworks are indigenous African art or its continuation; the term is adopted in theorizing her contemporary African art for representing symbolism rooted in cultural practices and experiences that are indigenous to Africa. In this context, it is in discourse with installations that represent human elements and symbols deeply rooted in African cultures. However, such portrayals in Ngubane’s installation sculptures may reference not identifiable cultural elements, but rather symbols associated with certain cultural practices against Black intersex children in Zulu culture. This focus on her installations is significant, not merely because she is a Black female artist on the African continent who is marginalized in mainstream art historical discourse, but because her installations contribute an important thematic nuance to African art. Although Ngubane is a young, practicing contemporary African artist, her inclusion in a mainstream paper was informed by her unique mode of exploring the distorted bodies of those Black children in art. This paper thus contributes an art historical discourse on the artist’s vernacular symbolism to global African art history. This is also significant for South Africa, as her works contribute narratives of different forms of contemporary distortions to a national history that had been marred with tortured and distorted bodies from apartheid brutality. In this paper, the term “intersex” is defined as the condition of a child whose sex deviates from “male” or “female” because he or she mixes anatomical components of both sexes that do not correspond to typical definitions of male and female (Husakouskaya 2013: 11; Jenkins and Short 2017: 92). To interrogate Ngubane’s installation sculptures that reflect on the vernacular symbols of those children, five works were selected: Rebirth of Bio-politics (2015) (Figs. 1–5), Nonkiloyi (2016) (Fig. 6a–b), Impaired (2016) (Fig. 7), Gaze of Disfigured (2016) (
{"title":"African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)","authors":"S. James","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00707","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts SUMMER 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 2 Sinethemba Ngubane is an artist who works predominantly in the medium of ceramics but includes sculptures in large installations. She was born in 1991 in Durban, South Africa, and completed a national diploma in Fine Art in 2014 and Bachelor’s degree with distinction at Durban University of Technology in 2015. She has exhibited in academic group shows in KZNSA Gallery, Durban University of Technology, Steve Biko Art Gallery, and artists’ group shows in art space, Durban. Ngubane is currently studying for a Master in Fine Art degree at Durban University of Technology. She is an award winner of the Emma Smith Scholarship. This paper critically analyzes the vernacular symbols of Black intersex children articulated in her works produced between 2007 and 2016 and the ideas they convey. In defining “vernacular,” Gupta and Adams (2018: 2) posit that “vernacular defines that which is domestic or indigenous.” While the definition of “vernacular” implies “indigenous,” this does not mean Ngubane’s artworks are indigenous African art or its continuation; the term is adopted in theorizing her contemporary African art for representing symbolism rooted in cultural practices and experiences that are indigenous to Africa. In this context, it is in discourse with installations that represent human elements and symbols deeply rooted in African cultures. However, such portrayals in Ngubane’s installation sculptures may reference not identifiable cultural elements, but rather symbols associated with certain cultural practices against Black intersex children in Zulu culture. This focus on her installations is significant, not merely because she is a Black female artist on the African continent who is marginalized in mainstream art historical discourse, but because her installations contribute an important thematic nuance to African art. Although Ngubane is a young, practicing contemporary African artist, her inclusion in a mainstream paper was informed by her unique mode of exploring the distorted bodies of those Black children in art. This paper thus contributes an art historical discourse on the artist’s vernacular symbolism to global African art history. This is also significant for South Africa, as her works contribute narratives of different forms of contemporary distortions to a national history that had been marred with tortured and distorted bodies from apartheid brutality. In this paper, the term “intersex” is defined as the condition of a child whose sex deviates from “male” or “female” because he or she mixes anatomical components of both sexes that do not correspond to typical definitions of male and female (Husakouskaya 2013: 11; Jenkins and Short 2017: 92). To interrogate Ngubane’s installation sculptures that reflect on the vernacular symbols of those children, five works were selected: Rebirth of Bio-politics (2015) (Figs. 1–5), Nonkiloyi (2016) (Fig. 6a–b), Impaired (2016) (Fig. 7), Gaze of Disfigured (2016) (","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"20-29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43625130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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
{"title":"Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach","authors":"E. Gellman","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00704","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":" ","pages":"95-96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46066371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times is an exhibition drawn from the Museum Affordances/[Re:]Entanglements project led by Paul Basu, formerly at SOAS University of London. The exhibition revisits the ethnographic archive assembled by the colonial anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. The title itself plays on the ideas of the entangling of Africa and the West during the colonial period, and with a continued, renewed, and expanded process of reengagement that includes community involvement and works by artists inspired by (and critical of) the collection and its original frame of reference. A central question raised by the exhibition is whether we can see beyond the violence of the colonial period, especially now, when the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to continued inequities in Western cultures as well as between world populations. The archive itself includes some 3,000 objects; at least 700 sound recordings (now digitized); a large body of photographic material consisting of 5,200 surviving glass negatives, 6,200 loose prints, and three eight-volume album sets; published work and fieldnotes; and botanical specimens. 1 [Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times, installation view of “The Making of a Colonial Anthropological Archive” display, including objects collected by Northcote Thomas in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. Photo: Paul Basu
{"title":"[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times curated by Paul Basu","authors":"Jean M. Borgatti","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00699","url":null,"abstract":"[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times is an exhibition drawn from the Museum Affordances/[Re:]Entanglements project led by Paul Basu, formerly at SOAS University of London. The exhibition revisits the ethnographic archive assembled by the colonial anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. The title itself plays on the ideas of the entangling of Africa and the West during the colonial period, and with a continued, renewed, and expanded process of reengagement that includes community involvement and works by artists inspired by (and critical of) the collection and its original frame of reference. A central question raised by the exhibition is whether we can see beyond the violence of the colonial period, especially now, when the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to continued inequities in Western cultures as well as between world populations. The archive itself includes some 3,000 objects; at least 700 sound recordings (now digitized); a large body of photographic material consisting of 5,200 surviving glass negatives, 6,200 loose prints, and three eight-volume album sets; published work and fieldnotes; and botanical specimens. 1 [Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times, installation view of “The Making of a Colonial Anthropological Archive” display, including objects collected by Northcote Thomas in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. Photo: Paul Basu","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"82-85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41660430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The book under review explores modern Senegalese theater from its colonial inception at the scholastic stage of the William Ponty elite training school, to the screen adaptation of the theatre populaire (popular theater) of grassroots theater troupes, to the emergence of Senegalese digital television series. Brian Valente-Quinn’s study of Senegalese theater across time foregrounds an analysis of the practices of “theater-making” and “stagecraft.” He describes the former as “the work of crafting the stage space through the use of text, place, and embodied performance,” and the latter as “the nuts-and-bolts work that goes into the craft of theater-making from conception to reception” (pp. 1, 13). The book employs both terms to conceptualize theatrical practice and meaning while drawing on both textual analysis and fieldwork. Senegalese Stagecraft explores the development of modern Senegalese theater in six chapters. The initial chapter traces the origins of Senegalese theater to 1930s colonial French West Africa, when the pontins, or African students of the elite École Normale William Ponty school, began almost incidentally to experiment with Western-style theater performance to stage their respective ethnic cultures as part of the school’s extracurricular program launched by Charles Béart (p. 3). The outcome was the birth of a colonial théâtre indigene (indigenous theater) that combined French-style dramaturgy and African music, ritual, and dance to bring African stories on stage. While the pontins were political subalterns under an assimilationist French colonial public policy, the author argues that the pontin actors—who arrived in Senegal’s historic Gorée Island from different French colonies of Africa — could use “the stage to project themselves beyond the limited roles assigned to them as colonial intermediaries,” thereby engaging in a form of “decolonizing stage space” (p. 3, 6). By writing and/or enacting local stories, such as Bernard Dadié’s Assémien Dahyle, King of the Sanwi, The Conference of Samory and Captain Peroz – 1887, or Lat Joor, the pontins staged moral values of valor and honor—typical of Jean Racine’s and Pierre Corneil’s tragedies—in order to revise or question Western colonial metanarratives about Africa. The author reads the pontins’ performances as a subtle subversion of Ponty’s scholastic stage aimed not just at repositioning African historical figures as agents of history, but also at speaking to an important audience of colonial administrators during annual events. The next chapter investigates how the colonial centres culturels français (CCF), or French cultural centers, shaped theater-making in colonial and postcolonial Senegal and broader French West Africa. It contextualizes the emergence of the cultural centers in the transformative aftermath of World War II, when West Africa’s French-educated elite embraced a transnational French identity that reconciled “Africanness” with “Frenchness” (p. 41). In the absence of
塞内加尔首任总统、法兰西学院前成员Lépold Sédar Senghor是该艺术节的名义负责人，但作者正确地指出，它的成立首先归功于塞内加尔泛非主义作家Alioune Diop的坚韧，他创办了传奇的《非洲文学杂志》。本章探讨达喀尔艺术节如何通过各种艺术展览以及来自30个非洲国家和非洲侨民在法国、英国、美国、巴西、海地和特立尼达和多巴哥的代表的表演，展示黑人作为泛非身份。它还记录了桑戈尔的节日是如何成为法国文化事务部长安德烈·马尔罗的新殖民主义政治场所的，他作为文化名人和政治家出现在那里，说明了这个前大都市现在是如何将文化作为后帝国主义影响前殖民地的工具的。虽然1966年的电影节有很多争议，但作者指出，它帮助创作了一部独立后的“塞内加尔舞台史诗”，如威廉·庞蒂毕业生阿马杜·西塞迪亚的戏剧《Les Derniers Jours de Lat Dior》和谢赫·阿柳恩·恩多阿的戏剧《流亡》所示，这两部戏剧都带有民族主义色彩。在电影节的舞台上，作者指出，这部历史史诗“将英雄的抵抗叙事置于一群开国元勋的群体中”，从而表现出国家身份的象征（第71页）。这本书的第四部分探讨了苏菲主义——通常被美化为神秘的伊斯兰教——对塞内加尔舞台艺术的影响。本章追踪了一部名为Bamba Mos Xam（《谁尝到了Bamba Knows》）的巡回演出的历史和影响，该剧由同名剧团演出。为了纪念当时的塞内加尔第一夫人，该剧团最初被命名为Amicale Sérère Colette Senghor。1968年，该剧团更名为Bamba Mos Xam，象征性地将国家对苏菲派伊斯兰权威的忠诚转变为苏菲派，同时实际上致力于上演塞内加尔穆斯林兄弟会Muridiyya的创始人Ahmadu Bamba的传记故事。本章描述了剧团的蜕变，这是对森戈尔在第一届世界黑人艺术节上表现漠不关心的回应，也是演员们对法语国家、森戈尔中央集权的文化政策和精英民族主义的幻灭的结果。作者很好地注意到了这一点，他写道，剧团“设想了一种不受文化全球化和法语国家概念束缚的舞台文化”（第87页）。在这一努力中，Bamba Mos Xam的舞台表演展示了苏菲故事如何成功地将西方戏剧舞台作为苏菲意识形态和世界观的中心，同时表达了对桑戈尔以法国为中心的现代主义的抵制。此外，本章还表明，穆里德的观众并不是简单地将戏剧视为一种艺术象征或隐喻。解读戏剧的具体意义
{"title":"Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa by Brian Valente-Quinn","authors":"S. Camará","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00703","url":null,"abstract":"The book under review explores modern Senegalese theater from its colonial inception at the scholastic stage of the William Ponty elite training school, to the screen adaptation of the theatre populaire (popular theater) of grassroots theater troupes, to the emergence of Senegalese digital television series. Brian Valente-Quinn’s study of Senegalese theater across time foregrounds an analysis of the practices of “theater-making” and “stagecraft.” He describes the former as “the work of crafting the stage space through the use of text, place, and embodied performance,” and the latter as “the nuts-and-bolts work that goes into the craft of theater-making from conception to reception” (pp. 1, 13). The book employs both terms to conceptualize theatrical practice and meaning while drawing on both textual analysis and fieldwork. Senegalese Stagecraft explores the development of modern Senegalese theater in six chapters. The initial chapter traces the origins of Senegalese theater to 1930s colonial French West Africa, when the pontins, or African students of the elite École Normale William Ponty school, began almost incidentally to experiment with Western-style theater performance to stage their respective ethnic cultures as part of the school’s extracurricular program launched by Charles Béart (p. 3). The outcome was the birth of a colonial théâtre indigene (indigenous theater) that combined French-style dramaturgy and African music, ritual, and dance to bring African stories on stage. While the pontins were political subalterns under an assimilationist French colonial public policy, the author argues that the pontin actors—who arrived in Senegal’s historic Gorée Island from different French colonies of Africa — could use “the stage to project themselves beyond the limited roles assigned to them as colonial intermediaries,” thereby engaging in a form of “decolonizing stage space” (p. 3, 6). By writing and/or enacting local stories, such as Bernard Dadié’s Assémien Dahyle, King of the Sanwi, The Conference of Samory and Captain Peroz – 1887, or Lat Joor, the pontins staged moral values of valor and honor—typical of Jean Racine’s and Pierre Corneil’s tragedies—in order to revise or question Western colonial metanarratives about Africa. The author reads the pontins’ performances as a subtle subversion of Ponty’s scholastic stage aimed not just at repositioning African historical figures as agents of history, but also at speaking to an important audience of colonial administrators during annual events. The next chapter investigates how the colonial centres culturels français (CCF), or French cultural centers, shaped theater-making in colonial and postcolonial Senegal and broader French West Africa. It contextualizes the emergence of the cultural centers in the transformative aftermath of World War II, when West Africa’s French-educated elite embraced a transnational French identity that reconciled “Africanness” with “Frenchness” (p. 41). In the absence of ","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"94-95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48883149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The fact that U.S. slavery has both officially ended and yet continues in many complex forms of institutionalized racism, makes its representation particularly burdensome. [...] As writer James Baldwin says, “there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence will wreck it. [...] The facts are staring us in the face.” (Exterminate All the Brutes Episode 4, “The Bright Colors of Fascism,” 20:49–21:35)
{"title":"Exterminate All the Brutes directed by Raoul Peck","authors":"Manar Ellethy","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00702","url":null,"abstract":"The fact that U.S. slavery has both officially ended and yet continues in many complex forms of institutionalized racism, makes its representation particularly burdensome. [...] As writer James Baldwin says, “there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence will wreck it. [...] The facts are staring us in the face.” (Exterminate All the Brutes Episode 4, “The Bright Colors of Fascism,” 20:49–21:35)","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"92-93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43307306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"We Write to You About Africa curated by Laura De Becker and Ozi Uduma; Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution curated by Laura De Becker, Bridget Grier, Timnet Gedar, and Ozi Uduma","authors":"Carlee S. Forbes","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00700","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"86-88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41320176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In times of confusion and change, the human mind tends to escape the present moment, wandering in past and future tenses. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibitions on African and African American art rendered visible what I suggest is a transitional period being undergone by both fields. The exhibition The African Origin of Civilization, which included insightful “guest appearances” spread throughout the Met’s galleries, demonstrated the strong ancient Egyptian artistic influences enacted by and on other African arts in the past three millennia. On the other side of the museum, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room offered a counternarrative, opening avenues for new perspectives on both history and the future. Together, the two exhibits fostered potential recontextualizations of African and African American histories highlighting the roles of archaeology within our contemporary lives and fabulating about human futures. Nestled in the middle of the Egyptian collection, The African Origin of Civilization offered twenty-one pairings of forty-two individual ancient Egyptian and other African artworks from the Met’s collection. Gathered under a chronological banner highlighting historical events on the African continent, and punctuated by descriptive paragraphs of the exhibit’s project as shaped by Cheikh Anta Diop’s philosophy, these pairings aimed at catalyzing temporal, geographical, and topical discussions. A redefinition and reconsideration of Egyptian art within the African art historical canon became possible through some of these pairings—not only through aesthetic similarities, but also through meaningful connections made in the wall texts. Gathered under telling subtitles such as “Exceptional Women” (Figs. 1–2), “Masks as Doubles,” “Active Enlightenment” (Fig. 3), or “Lineage of Knowledge” (Fig. 4), Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch’s curatorial choices showed the range of inspirations drawn from each civilization, and the influence of Egypt on African aesthetic productions, (above, l–r) 1 Edo artist, Igbesanmwen guild, Court of Benin; Nigeria Iyoba (Queen Mother) Pendant Mask 16th century Ivory, iron, copper
在混乱和变化的时代，人类的思维倾向于逃离当下，徘徊在过去时态和未来时态中。大都会艺术博物馆最近举办的关于非洲和非裔美国人艺术的展览让人看到了这两个领域正在经历的过渡时期。展览《文明的非洲起源》（The African Origin of Civilization）包括遍布大都会艺术博物馆画廊的富有洞察力的“客串”，展示了过去三千年来古埃及对其他非洲艺术的强烈艺术影响。在博物馆的另一边，《昨天之前我们可以飞：非洲游客时代的房间》提供了一个反叙事，为对历史和未来的新视角开辟了途径。这两个展览共同促进了对非洲和非裔美国人历史的潜在重新文本化，突出了考古学在我们当代生活中的作用，并对人类未来进行了推测。《非洲文明起源》（the African Origin of Civilization）坐落在埃及收藏中心，提供了大都会博物馆收藏的42件古埃及和其他非洲艺术品中的21对。聚集在突出非洲大陆历史事件的按时间顺序排列的横幅下，并穿插着由谢赫·安塔·迪奥普哲学塑造的展览项目的描述性段落，这些配对旨在促进时间、地理和主题讨论。通过其中的一些配对，埃及艺术在非洲艺术历史经典中的重新定义和重新思考成为可能——不仅通过美学上的相似性，还通过墙壁文本中建立的有意义的联系。Alisa LaGamma和Diana Craig Patch的策展选择展示了来自每个文明的灵感范围，以及埃及对非洲美学作品的影响，贝宁法院Igbesanmwen公会；尼日利亚Iyoba（王母）吊坠面具16世纪象牙色，铁，铜
{"title":"The African Origin of Civilization curated by Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch; Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room curated by Hannah Beachler, Michelle Commander, Ian Alteveer, and Sarah E. Lawrence","authors":"Yann K. Petit","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00701","url":null,"abstract":"In times of confusion and change, the human mind tends to escape the present moment, wandering in past and future tenses. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibitions on African and African American art rendered visible what I suggest is a transitional period being undergone by both fields. The exhibition The African Origin of Civilization, which included insightful “guest appearances” spread throughout the Met’s galleries, demonstrated the strong ancient Egyptian artistic influences enacted by and on other African arts in the past three millennia. On the other side of the museum, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room offered a counternarrative, opening avenues for new perspectives on both history and the future. Together, the two exhibits fostered potential recontextualizations of African and African American histories highlighting the roles of archaeology within our contemporary lives and fabulating about human futures. Nestled in the middle of the Egyptian collection, The African Origin of Civilization offered twenty-one pairings of forty-two individual ancient Egyptian and other African artworks from the Met’s collection. Gathered under a chronological banner highlighting historical events on the African continent, and punctuated by descriptive paragraphs of the exhibit’s project as shaped by Cheikh Anta Diop’s philosophy, these pairings aimed at catalyzing temporal, geographical, and topical discussions. A redefinition and reconsideration of Egyptian art within the African art historical canon became possible through some of these pairings—not only through aesthetic similarities, but also through meaningful connections made in the wall texts. Gathered under telling subtitles such as “Exceptional Women” (Figs. 1–2), “Masks as Doubles,” “Active Enlightenment” (Fig. 3), or “Lineage of Knowledge” (Fig. 4), Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch’s curatorial choices showed the range of inspirations drawn from each civilization, and the influence of Egypt on African aesthetic productions, (above, l–r) 1 Edo artist, Igbesanmwen guild, Court of Benin; Nigeria Iyoba (Queen Mother) Pendant Mask 16th century Ivory, iron, copper","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"89-91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44755758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The contemporary African city runs on informal modes of public transportation. Typically, minibuses provide the core, but motorbikes, tricycles, and shared taxis all contribute to informal transport ecosystems. These privately operated services are ground-level responses to growing demand for mobility in the face of absent or inadequate formal public transportation services. For many African urbanites, it is impossible to imagine city life without its ubiquitous minibuses, which constitute a distinctive feature of many African urban environments and are the stuff of news, gossip, rumors, and urban myths. Far from being mere containers that form part of the mise en scène in African cities, the dilapidated yet decorated bodies of these minibus taxis mirror for urbanites the duplicity of the African city: both as a place filled with hope and joie de vivre and as a redoubt of stuckedness and immiseration. Minibus taxis account for an estimated 80% of Africa’s total motorized trips (Medium 2018), contributing 50% of all motorized traffic in some corridors (Kumar and Barrett 2008: 5). They go by various appellations: danfo1 in Lagos (Fig. 1), trotro in Accra, daladala in Dar es Salaam, poda-poda in Freetown, matatu in Nairobi, otobis in Cairo, car rapides in Dakar, condongueiros in Luanda, gbaka in Abidjan, kamuny in Kampala, magbana in Conakry, sotrama in Bamako, songa kidogo in Kigali, and kombi in Cape Town. Minibuses are supplemented by motorcycle taxis, popularly known as okada in Nigeria, oleiya in Togo, zémidjan in Benin, pikipiki in Kenya, and boda-boda in Uganda. This urban transportation complex expresses, shapes, produces, and refracts political, social, and economic relations. Informal transport indicates an alternate mode of flexible passenger transport services that cater to the urban poor in the Global South. Unlike modern mass transit systems with fixed stops, fares, routes, and timetables, informal transport services have no predictable schedule: “they depart when they have reached maximum capacity and they arrive when they have successfully passed through all the checkpoints, paid all necessary fees and bribes, and fixed all parts that have broken down during the journey” (GreenSimms 2009: 31). The failure of state-owned mass transportation services occasioned the growth and popularity of these local and ostensibly unregulated services. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and Africa’s most populous city, okadas emerged in the 1980s as a popular means of mobility for hard-pressed subalterns during a time of massive economic crisis and urban population growth, when increased demand for mobility widened the gap between supply and demand (Agbiboa 2022a). In Nigeria, the Lagos state government aims to phase out the use of the iconic danfos. Former governor Akinwunmi Ambode (2015–2019) lamented that, “When I wake up in the morning and see all these yellow buses ... and then we claim we are a megacity, that is not true and we must acknowl
{"title":"Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts","authors":"Daniel E. Agbiboa","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00697","url":null,"abstract":"The contemporary African city runs on informal modes of public transportation. Typically, minibuses provide the core, but motorbikes, tricycles, and shared taxis all contribute to informal transport ecosystems. These privately operated services are ground-level responses to growing demand for mobility in the face of absent or inadequate formal public transportation services. For many African urbanites, it is impossible to imagine city life without its ubiquitous minibuses, which constitute a distinctive feature of many African urban environments and are the stuff of news, gossip, rumors, and urban myths. Far from being mere containers that form part of the mise en scène in African cities, the dilapidated yet decorated bodies of these minibus taxis mirror for urbanites the duplicity of the African city: both as a place filled with hope and joie de vivre and as a redoubt of stuckedness and immiseration. Minibus taxis account for an estimated 80% of Africa’s total motorized trips (Medium 2018), contributing 50% of all motorized traffic in some corridors (Kumar and Barrett 2008: 5). They go by various appellations: danfo1 in Lagos (Fig. 1), trotro in Accra, daladala in Dar es Salaam, poda-poda in Freetown, matatu in Nairobi, otobis in Cairo, car rapides in Dakar, condongueiros in Luanda, gbaka in Abidjan, kamuny in Kampala, magbana in Conakry, sotrama in Bamako, songa kidogo in Kigali, and kombi in Cape Town. Minibuses are supplemented by motorcycle taxis, popularly known as okada in Nigeria, oleiya in Togo, zémidjan in Benin, pikipiki in Kenya, and boda-boda in Uganda. This urban transportation complex expresses, shapes, produces, and refracts political, social, and economic relations. Informal transport indicates an alternate mode of flexible passenger transport services that cater to the urban poor in the Global South. Unlike modern mass transit systems with fixed stops, fares, routes, and timetables, informal transport services have no predictable schedule: “they depart when they have reached maximum capacity and they arrive when they have successfully passed through all the checkpoints, paid all necessary fees and bribes, and fixed all parts that have broken down during the journey” (GreenSimms 2009: 31). The failure of state-owned mass transportation services occasioned the growth and popularity of these local and ostensibly unregulated services. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and Africa’s most populous city, okadas emerged in the 1980s as a popular means of mobility for hard-pressed subalterns during a time of massive economic crisis and urban population growth, when increased demand for mobility widened the gap between supply and demand (Agbiboa 2022a). In Nigeria, the Lagos state government aims to phase out the use of the iconic danfos. Former governor Akinwunmi Ambode (2015–2019) lamented that, “When I wake up in the morning and see all these yellow buses ... and then we claim we are a megacity, that is not true and we must acknowl","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"42-61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43663897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
It’s about who is present, and what are you responding to, and who is involved, and all of these factors. In that sense, it really is hyper-localized. If we don’t have an exhibition on, there’s a reason why we don’t have an exhibition on. And a lot of times that is corresponding to things happening inside the institution, or in the neighborhood, or in the country … Everything is in flux all the time. We have a very volatile and fast changing environment. Sociopolitical fluctuations daily. As a space, you are very responsive to that. 22
{"title":"Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities","authors":"Kim Gurney","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00696","url":null,"abstract":"It’s about who is present, and what are you responding to, and who is involved, and all of these factors. In that sense, it really is hyper-localized. If we don’t have an exhibition on, there’s a reason why we don’t have an exhibition on. And a lot of times that is corresponding to things happening inside the institution, or in the neighborhood, or in the country … Everything is in flux all the time. We have a very volatile and fast changing environment. Sociopolitical fluctuations daily. As a space, you are very responsive to that. 22","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"26-41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45819048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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