Figuring the (In)Visible in an Imperial Weltstadt: The Case of Benjamin's Moor

[Southwest Africa] must be inhabited by white colonists. Therefore the natives must disappear or rather put themselves at the disposal of the whites, or retire into the reserves that are set apart for them.

—Evans Lewin, Germans and Africa

We cannot draw closed the net [of capitalism] in which we are caught. Later on, however, we shall be able to gain an overview of it.

—Walter Benjamin, "Capitalism as Religion"

[T]he traces of imperialism can be detected in Western modernism, and are indeed constitutive of it; but we must not look for them in the obvious places.

—Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism"

 

Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare has made a career of cultural mélange. His installations have featured staid Victorian interiors reupholstered and repapered in shockingly brilliant "African" prints. He has likewise dressed Gainsborough's "Mr. and Mrs. Andrews" (those smug symbols of private landed property and English respectability), along with numerous other historical, futuristic, and contemporary figures, in purposefully outlandish fabrics (often rendering the overall effect of the tableaus more unsettling by beheading the mannequins as well). He emphasizes that the textiles his work evocatively deploys represent a far-flung geography: Indonesian batik techniques were appropriated by Dutch traders and taken over in turn by English manufacturers, who shipped the brightly colored fabrics to colonial markets in Africa, where they have since become markers of "authentic" African identity. Of his own "return" of these fabrics to Europe, Shonibare muses: "by making hybrid clothes, I collapse the idea of a European dichotomy against an African one. It becomes difficult to work out where the opposites are. There is no way you can work out the precise nation-ality of my dresses, because they do not have one" (Waxman, 36). Although Shonibare tends to read his own work consistently in this culturalist way, as a critique of authenticity and as an evocation of identity crises in a globalizing world, it is nonetheless possible to see his vibrant fashion statements and satiric interiors as exposing simultaneously a political-economic "unintentional truth" in which a "dichotomy" is far more evident: the (occluded) reliance of European wealth on imperial control of global trade, which literally put clothes on the backs and furnished the houses of European elites in the colonial period, and continues to underwrite global inequalities today. ¹

Economist magazine—hardly a left-wing publication—recently enumerated some of the metropolitan strategies that reinforce global structural inequality in relation to Africa, confessing:

The World Bank reckons that, if North America, Europe and Japan were to eliminate all barriers to imports from sub-Saharan Africa, the region's exports would rise by 14%, an annual increase worth about $2.5 billion. Another calculation shows that developed countries' farm subsidies amount to over $360 billion a year, some $30 billion more than Africa's entire GDP. And while the prices of rich countries' exports have been rising, those of Africa's primary products have, on average, been falling (by 25% in 1997-99). Nor has the rich world always been at pains to promote good government in Africa. During the cold war, it was happy to fight its wars through African proxies, to prop up corrupt regimes and sell them weapons with which to suppress their subjects and swell their foreign debt. Partly as a result, that debt has been crushing for Africa: several countries have been spending more on service payments than on education and health. Meanwhile the aid that helped to assuage western consciences has often been tied to western exports. ("Africa's Elusive Dawn," 17)

When confronted with such political-economic realities (and these are merely the tip of the iceberg, being limited to mainstream economists' understandings of what matters), any suggestion that it is "difficult to work out where the opposites are" starts to look suspect. The point here is not to suggest that Shonibare's intended critiques...