Introduction

In humanity's artistic legacy innumerable mixtures of words and images exist. However, the various disciplines (largely based on Western models, traditions, and background thinking) doing research on those artistic achievements in general continue to study both forms of expression separately. In spite of the mixed media in the artistic practices, literary studies and art studies mostly continue to be divided along disciplinary lines.

African literatures and African arts are no exception to the rule. Both too have mostly been studied apart, in spite of their many connections. Literature creates images; artists, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths feature as fictional characters in novels; artistic objects such as masks, paintings, sculptures play various roles in poetry, stories, novels, and theater. The material arts present narratives in their own way, referring by means of their artefacts to myth, epic, animal stories, songs, proverbs, to historical or fictional kings and heroes, to water spirits and mountain gods who are also represented in oral and written literatures. Proverbs are represented in gold weights, sculpted on pot lids, or woven into cloth. Painters represent oral and written texts, past and contemporary popular history, myths, songs, and fiction. And there are the double talents, those who are griot, writer, poet, playwright, and artist at the same time. Or literary critic and art critic at the same time.

In this special issue, the first of its kind in the history of Research in African Literatures, parallels and differences in form, meaning, and function between productions in the two fields of artistic expression are examined, as well as historical developments, intercultural contacts, and reflections on aesthetic norms, concepts, and methods of approach.

A dialogue between the scholarly fields of literature and the arts has many aspects to it. Theoretical aspects such as the usual question of how to cope with eurocentrisms and/or other ethnocentrisms. Or, to what extent do or can African studies make a difference as far as the conventional disciplines of literary studies and art history are concerned? All such and other questions result from the underlying central question here, which is how to study words and images in connection.

In the study of literature, to analyze texts for their "images" is nothing new; it is even considered, according to Tom Mitchell, old business, an outmoded paradigm, a relic like the search for motifs at the expense of cultural history. On the other hand, in art history, he notes, the idea that images can be read as "texts" is the latest thing (99). In art history as well as in literary studies, certain methods of approach have mainly been developed on the basis of Western material. Today more than ever researchers have become aware of the problems resulting from this academic legacy: the problem cannot easily be solved, but awareness means a certain advantage.

The official discipline of art history has mostly concentrated on Western art history with its own traditions, rules, norms, and methods. Other arts, non-Western arts as they have been labeled, have mostly been collected by so-called connoisseurs and studied by anthropologists who were not necessarily professional art historians. And if they were, they often had to struggle with a strong eurocentric legacy of methods of approach that has proved hard to get rid of (see Price). And anthropologists studying art and literature were usually less interested in artistic issues than in the documentary value of products that suited their monographic needs.

Fortunately, many such stereotypical gaps between the disciplines are narrowing and a number of those old legacies have been buried, along with evolutionism, at least in the field of anthropology. Whether evolutionism has also been buried by faculties of arts and letters remains to be seen, for judging from current discussion and writing, there is room for doubt on the matter. However that may be, it seems advisable for us to co-operate, as scholars in the fields of the arts, literature, and the social sciences, in an interdisciplinary way, as has been done in this particular volume to which representatives from...