The Verbal and the Visual in a Globalizing Context: African and European Connections as an Ongoing Process

In the twentieth century painters, sculptors, poets, storytellers, novelists, singers, and their works went global. Artists and arts from all over the world and widely different origins started to meet and influence each other. In the fields of the arts and literature as well as in the domain of theory, this fact has been taken into account. In this paper I would like to connect some verbal and visual representations resulting from the contacts between Africa and Europe in both continents. Representation is understood here "as relationship, as process, as the relay mechanism in exchanges of power" (Mitchell 420). If we thus look at some verbal and visual aspects in combination, we should be able to gain some insight in their interconnectedness.

As a result of the history of colonization, a number of European and African intellectuals, artists, and writers have been actively involved in processes of negotiating power, along the lines of their own imagination. In the academic world the nonexperienced and the nondescribed are mostly referred to in terms of the already described: nonresearched objects are identified on the basis of what "we" already know. This holds for both the verbal and the material arts. Inevitably this directs and possibly biases the research. In literary studies, for example, the definition of African literary genres or the periodization of literary movements often seem to have been determined by the earlier use of those concepts in Western literary history. And in Western art history one is still often inclined to consider the passage from realistic to abstract as a self-evident chronological order, since this was their order in the context of Western avant-garde, without even considering the possibility that this is not necessarily the order of things to happen. Indeed, over the last century, African arts and literatures have mostly been studied from the angle of a non-African history, which only recently has begun to change. But the artist's practice always defies theory and research.

I will first go briefly into the invention of "the primitive" by Western avant-garde artists and the influence of African art on a number of European artists, a matter of orally transmitted ideas resulting in visual forms of expression. Secondly, I will discuss the impact of the colonial presence on some narrative genres and visual art forms in Africa. Thirdly, I will try to compare and connect the various issues discussed, as "participants" in this interlocked process of representation. In this process of negotiation and appropriation there will certainly be more differences than similarities, but are not differences as relevant in such a globalizing rendez-vous du donner et du recevoir?

From the nineteenth century onward, large numbers of material objects of African origin unfamiliar to European artistic traditions were bought or stolen in Africa and shipped to Europe where they were sold by dealers, collected by amateurs, and more and more also exhibited in anthropological museums. By the end of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of evolutionism, the current idea in Europe was still that the West was superior to societies that were designated "primitive": "In their representation of the ugly no people surpasses those West Africans," the German anthropologist Friedrich Ratzel observed in 1885. "Let us not talk about their indecency [. . . ;] for the most part they are as brutal by nature as they are exaggerately ugly; and at that there is the clumsiness expressed in the sculpures of their gods" (85, my trans.).

In European Primitivism, Dadaïsm, and Surrealism, however, artists and writers expressed great sympathy for Africa, although they had never been there. Western artists who looked at African objects were conditioned by their own preconceived idea of what they thought "primitive culture" was. They invented their own Africa based on both visual and oral traditions transmitted over the centuries by travelers as well as...