Sight Reading Space Clearing: Africa and the Curious Case of North America

Sight Reading Space Clearing Africa and the Curious Case of North America Gordon Bleach Pinhole Photograph: Gordon Bleach, 1995. Posing the Question: to North American Futures W hat if'contemporary African art' was posed differently? What if one sidestepped its show-casing as eclectic extrusion from the African past (and exotic latecomer to international markets), and, from the broad array of visual production, began to identify aspects that seem relevant for North America's postcolonial future? That is, to seek a complex of spatial practices from contemporary Africa that are constructive precursors for the FirstWorld, not merely attractive additives to the marketplace. These questions are prompted by the recognition that both Africa and North America are explicitly defined by spatial configurations imposed by settler communities - but only in Africa have nation-states with indigenous majorities emerged from within these frames. And the sense ofshared histories as well as the temporal shear between North American and African 'post'colonialisms is caught by this question: when will a Native American/Canadian equivalent of Nelson Mandela be President/Prime Minister? A suitable point of departure is V. Y. Mudimbe's definition of IIll:lml!IJournal of Contemporary African Art· Spring 1996 colonialism in The Invention ofAfrica. This delineates the large-scale spatial manifestations (such as national and regional borders) ofcolonialism within which independentAfrican and North American states remain landlocked, and acrosswhichwe negotiate culturalpossession. A relatively easy shift of focus to the treatment of visual art 'itself' is facilitated by Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay "The Postmodern and the Postcolonial:' Appiah picks apart a (botched) American scheme for curating a show of contemporaryAfrican art in order to meditate, inter alia, on African intersections of the terms postcolonial, postmodem , and neotraditional. His astute observations on the theorizing of 'contemporary African visual art' can, however, be eruiched through being recast in a cultural studies framework. Here I draw from the general approach of John Tagg in The Burden of Representation, Grounds ofDispute, and elsewhere. While Tagg does not address colonialism in Africa specifically, he does provide cogent and sustained inquiries into a wide spectrum of visual practices and their institutional stabilizations. Aspects ofcontemporaryZimbabweanvisual production are then sketched, but not in the traditional form of a survey. Rather, 1want to ask: how do various sites generate differenced visions ofcultural identity? With what local and export commodity status? And with what relevance for a postcoloniality in North America? The task, then, is not primarily to show 'contemporary art from X' for museum and magazine recognition (although that is no bad thing in itself). Rather, I want to bring together - orchestrate - a range of visual (spatial) practices that aren't necessarily individualized art products to suggest how such combined visions might relate to North American futures. Colonial Designs Mudimbe illuminates the spatial configurations of colonialism by recollecting its linguistic genesis: colonialism and colonization ... derive from the latin word colere, meaning to cultivate or to design.... the colonists (those settling a region) as well as the colonialists (those exploiting a territory by dominating a local majority) have all tended to organize and transform non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs." And there is an echo of this approach in John Noyes's outline of the colonial texting of space. Noyes treats this texting as a set of three instructions for looking, moving, writing: "how to look upon the world and see only colonial space; how to move through the landscape and cross only colonial space; how to write about the world and mean only colonial space;' These statements by Mudimbe and Noyes may have been developed during work on Africa, but are by no means restricted to that continental site. In particular , they facilitate comparisons to be drawn between the European colonial spacings that marked out Africa and those that made America. First, Africa. From around 1880, European powers scrambled with brutal swiftness to "geo-graph" the continent, expanding immeasurably on previous treatments imposed from outside. Geometric boundaries oriented to European national power configurations were mapped onto an Africa still largely unknown to the powers-that-be. The blindness of the procedure was tellingly summarized by Lord Salisbury: We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white...