Introduction to Special Issue: Visual Experience in Urban Africa

Cities in Africa, like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, are intensely visual environments. For visitors and residents alike, it is seemingly impossible to amble through certain city neighborhoods without visual traffic pulling the eye in several directions at once. Myriad ocular phenomena—from the spatial configurations of neighborhoods and the built environment to public spectacles, billboards, graffiti, personal sartorial expression, and print and electronic media—are central to visual experience in, and of, urban Africa.

This special issue of Africa Today presents articles that examine such visual experience in selected urban sites: Bamako, Johannesburg, Dakar, Kumasi, Cape Town, and Lagos. By focusing on the operations and interpretations of visual forms within urban sites, the articles center the city as a discursive field at the heart of visual experience. Rather than positioning the city as a backdrop or stage, the articles explore the relationships and processes connecting visual experience to urban life. This special issue thus illuminates how urban elements are crucial to constructing the visual and how urban experience is predicated on and contoured by visual experience. Specifically, the following questions frame the articles: How do visual forms operate as individual expressions and collective urban resources? How is belonging—whether to community, city, or nation—articulated and engendered through urban visual experience? How do visual projects entangle and interface with political agendas, social practices, and expressive forms inflecting urban life? How do urban residents engage the world of images to make images? In addressing these questions, this special issue underscores the visual as a critical area of focus for African urban studies.

A steadily growing corpus of scholarship, largely by social historians and anthropologists, focusing on urban Africa has taken new directions in the past decade. As Coquery-Vidrovitch (2005) assesses in her discussion of scholarship on African urban spaces, recent interdisciplinary studies have done much to expand the core body of groundbreaking literature on this subject. Representing diverse perspectives by urbanists in the social sciences and humanities, both monographs and edited volumes have treated a vibrant constellation of subjects, from city-specific studies to thematic and issue-based edited volumes (De Boeck and Plissart 2004; Enwezor et al. 2002; Malaquais 2005; Mbembe and Nutall 2004; Roberts and Roberts 2003; Salm and Falola 2005; Simone 2004).

While analytical frames and questions resonant in the aforementioned scholarship may extend to the realm of the visual, the specific theme of visual experience in urban Africa remains relatively underdeveloped. To some extent, its underdevelopment reflects what Holston describes as the long-standing primacy of "the rural paradigm" in Africanist scholarship (Holston 1999:3; see also Coquery-Vidrovitch 2005:xvi and Roberts 2005:4). Until the 1990s, research in Africanist art history consisted primarily of studies about objects associated with specific ethnic groups, predominantly in West and Central Africa. Attention to the rural environment and concomitant assumptions about the locus of authenticity precluded the focus on visual expression associated with urban centers. Additionally, the emphasis on examining objects and contexts, rather than visual experience and the processes around it, reveals the interpretive frames at the core of art historical and visual culture studies respectively. In characterizing the purview of visual culture studies, Irit Rogoff (1998) emphasizes its embrace of questions relating to relationships, processes, and operations around images, specifically the dynamics entwining acts of looking with the field of vision.

Within Africanist visual studies, attention to the city and associated visual forms has increased since the late 1990s, aligning with current directions in the field (Roberts 2005:6). This shift is partly traceable to the burgeoning enthusiasm for contemporary art whose production, exhibition, and collection are centered in cities. Furthermore, contemporary artists taking the city and city life as their explicit subject are plentiful. One need think only of Cheri Samba's paintings, Modou Dieng's mixed media works, Bodys Isek Kingelez's maquettes, and a rich body of photography, including work by James Muriuki, Boubacar Touré Mandémory, and Kelechi Amadi-Obi. Prominent exhibitions, such as Africas: The Artist and the City (2001), Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (2001), Documenta 11 (2002), and...