Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics

Introduction: Generic Transformations at the Crossroads of Capital

Introduction: Generic Transformations at the Crossroads of Capital Kò sáàyè àpàlà nilùú òyinbó; Hárúnà tó re’be Ogbón eré ló bá lo. (ἀ ere is no place for apala [music] in the white man’s country; Haruna [Isola] went there On the pretext of his craft.) —A Lagosian saying Rather than ask, “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?” I should like to ask, “What is its position in them?” —Walter Benjamin, “ἀ e Author as Producer” In 1973, while waiting to complete the film that would be released the following year as Xala, the filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene1 published a novel of the same title. As anyone familiar with the two works knows, there are significant differences between the novel and the film, and the distinct character of each is inseparable from the process of bringing them into circulation. ἀ e scenario for the film provided the basis for the novel, which in turn was used in developing the final film script. Xala the film is the subject of chapter 2 of the present book, so an extensive discussion of it lies ahead. In the meantime, however , I want to focus on Sembene’s ambidexterity in working on the two texts, because the contexts of the choices he made in doing so are fundamental to the arguments at the core of this book. ἀ e film would become the more famous of the two works, but that is because “filmmaker” is the more frequently worn of Sembene’s two hats. In shuttling between the scenario, the novel manuscript, and the film script, Sembene underlined the peculiar condition of making art in a postcolonial context, a condition he once captured evocatively in the neologism mégotage (calling filmmaking an act of “collecting cigarette butts”), and of which, in relation to this book, three issues are symptomatic. ἀ e first is the socioeconomic and institutional context of a work and its contingency on the genre in which the work appears. By this, I mean that genre, the 2 Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics aesthetic typology of kinds in textual production, does not exist independent of context, and that for postcolonial texts in particular the context often determines the genre. ἀ e second is the challenge of representing decolonization, that is, the specific problems posed by speaking about or for societies existing under social systems which cannot survive if they must. In the film Xala, the economic arrangement in Senegal (or West Africa) is portrayed as neocolonial, but the work itself is made possible in part by this neocolonial system. Following directly from this, the third issue is the intellectual nature of postcoloniality, the fact that it is individuals, as artists, writers, activists, filmmakers, musicians, and so on, who have been able to clearly articulate the problems of postcolonial societies, but they do so in ways that reinforce the tensions between a pragmatic use of the apparatus of representation (whether technological, formal, or personal ), and an intellectual commitment to varieties of cultural or political assertion . ἀ e institutional and aesthetic challenges which these issues throw into relief are the focus of this book, and the purpose of this introduction is to describe its central arguments while laying a theoretical basis for the chapters that follow . If genre is contingent on context, as the first point indicates, what are the institutional contexts in which postcolonial texts are produced, and what is significant about them? I start from the premise that, in looking at postcolonial texts (works of art depicting contemporary manifestations of colonial modernity ) of the last three decades, one sees fundamental changes in the ways those works are put together and in the socioeconomic institutions that sustain or fail to sustain them. ἀ ese changes are reflected in the renaming of “the ἀir d World” as “the postcolony.” To get a coherent sense of what they entail, I think, requires a simultaneous attention to a number of structural processes that do not always appear to have much to do with one another. ἀ ese changes are technological (compare the celluloid format of Sembene’s Xala to the video format of Tunde Kelani’s ἀ underbolt: Magun); they are generic (the resolutely Aristotelian style of ἀ underbolt stands in contrast to the reflexive questioning of mimesis in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot); they are generational (the sense of belonging in the writings of C. L. R. James differs greatly from that in the work of Caryl Phillips); and...