Interrelated Worlds: The Africultures Manifesto

Since Africultures journal was launched in 1997, the Africultures Association has become a veritable hive of activity and has diversified its presence on the web. Its objectives, however, have remained unchanged. This text sets out what unites the tight-knit, committed team. It is a sort of manifesto on the issues at stake.

It is wholely barbaric to demand that a community of immigrants “integrates” into the host community. Creolization is not fusion. It needs each component to persist, even if already beginning to change. Integration is a centralizing, autocratic dream. . . . A country that undergoes creolization eschews standardization. The beauty of a country enhances its multiplicity.

—Édouard Glissant

The Africultures association, which publishes an initially monthly, now quarterly journal in France, a host of websites and—since 2007—the bi-monthly free magazine Afriscope, was set up in 1997 out of the desire to view African arts as contemporary; not contemporary in the sense that they are simply a reflection of our times in which case they wouldn’t be adding anything particularly new but in the sense that they reflect our present and future. Africultures thus seeks to document and analyze contemporary art forms that are both innovative and outward-looking, an antidote to the universalist tendencies that established racial hierarchies. This means highlighting these works’ role in deconstructing the colonial stereotypes that still fuel discrimination today. Our aim, therefore, is to contribute to a world in which all individuals are truly equal in both dignity and rights, in our shared belonging to humanity.

Neither ideological nor political, we above all defend art and creativity as a response, as a space in which to break down barriers in the French social context. Defending an analytical critical approach to the works of the African continent and diaspora is to assert the power and place of innovation. It is about eschewing exotic settings and folklore and returning to human factors. Africultures journal has constantly challenged the notion of Africanity and examined the creolization at work in the world in an attempt to escape identity-based fixations. Afriscope magazine, which was launched in 2007 as a complement to this critical approach to the arts, covers associations’ noteworthy activities and initiatives. It keeps its finger on the pulse of the diaspora’s cultural events, while at the same time avoiding presenting them solely through the prism of immigration.

Indeed, the heart of our critical work is to challenge these works’ being assigned to an identity: that of foreign. Racialization creates the subalternity of erased Black people and stigmatized Arabs, and racialization makes the cultural question central. Differences in skin color and physique—so varied they are impossible to categorize—denote the cultural diversity of this entity that we call the French nation. If there is such a thing as an identity, it is one that takes this diversity into account in all its dimensions, and notably its historic one; in other words, as part of the French national narrative too. There is no intrusion, no breaking and entering, no invasion: there is only a shared history. Standardization is impossible when it comes to humanity: the creolization underway in all societies makes a nonsense of all purist and conservative designs on identity. A living identity is always in the making, evolving.

This is the crux of our struggle! In other words, we work for this diversity’s imaginative realm, notably those works which draw on African cultures, to be sufficiently well-known, recognized, and taken into consideration so that these works participate in the richness of our society in the making. The impression of foreignness in our land diminishes when we take an interest in what already exists within our borders. If there is such a thing as foreignness, it is our own, in the diversity of our parts. Sociocultural experiences, especially those of our youth, deconstruct inequalities every day. But media discourse, economic practices and short-sighted electioneering political strategies tend to revive them. They fan the fears that degenerate into all levels of violence. This struggle thus remains essential and completely topical...