Introduction to “Art, Signs, and Cultures” (1977)

Abstract This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye, the French art historian Jean Laude, and a moderator, Roger Pillaudin. It took place on the occasion of the Festival des arts et cultures africaines in Royan, France (March 1977), and was later broadcast on the radio channel France Culture. What stands out in the conversation is the way Laude seeks to negate Ndiaye's cross-cultural experience and background, and arguably his very legitimacy as a contemporary artist. Laude's insistence on adhering to neat categories (linguistic, national, artistic) in engaging with Ndiaye, coupled with Ndiaye's steady defiance of these categories, point to broader tensions between structuralism and area studies, on the one hand, and poststructuralism and postcolonial studies, on the other. The conversation also invites careful scrutiny of the problem of Eurocentrism, in the sense that Laude's structuralist position is in fact anti-Eurocentric: colonialism is condemned for destroying local traditions, which are in turn revered at the expense of allegedly derivative expressions emerging from the same societies. Ndiaye nevertheless holds his own against Laude's aggressive paternalism, and manages to call into question a number of the art historian's assumptions around the perceived axes and obligations of artistic identity.