From the Editor

FROM THE EDITOR Salah Hassan O ne has to acknowledge the organizers of DAK'ART for their support and for ensuring its survival for the last ten years. Known as the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, DAK'ART has proven itself as a major Pan-African platform for artists from Africa and the African Diaspora. Since its inauguration in 1992, the Biennale functions under the patronage of Senegal's Ministry of Culture, and is organized by the Secretariat General de la Biennale de Dakar, supported by a government-appointed council known as Conseil Scientifique, presumably made up of independent art specialists. Such official support stands in contrast to what has happened to many artistic forums on the continent since the independence era, and the destiny of the now defunct Johannesburg Biennale stands as a stark example. Moreover, compared to often divisive western ideas of Africa, DAK'ART offers a unified and anti-essentialist vision, hence artists from the northern and southern nations of the continent have been regularly represented. Envisioned as a Pan-African Biennale, it also extends itself to artists of African descent in the Diaspora, and hence brings to the fore Africa as a global and historical presence rather than a mere geographic entity. As I have argued elsewhere, African modernity and contemporaneity exist in those intersections of north and south and their diasporic manifestations , and are hardly bound by nationalistic, geographic, or racial boundaries. In this regard, DAK'ART is hardly an anomaLy on a continent that remains plagued by political and economic crises, but a natural product of a rich legacy of interest in and promotion of the arts and culture in Senegal. Senegal has continued to play a major role in shaping the cultural production and artistic life of postcolonial Africa. Time and again, this has been re-affirmed by the intellectual legacy where many Senegalese intellectuals have contributed to the struggle of African people for self-definition. It is enough to mention the rich contribution of severaL Senegalese to the Legacy of Pan-Africanism as an intellectual and political project. The pioneering studies of Cheikh Anta Diop have contributed a great deal to the redemption of the legacy of ancient Egyptian civilization and its restoration within the larger narrative of African cultural history . The writings of Leopold Sedar Senghor and the evolution of Negritude as an important philosophical current within Pan African literary movements evidence another facet of this legacy. Allione Diop's pioneering journal Presence Africaine, has chronicled the thoughts and legacy of Pan African writers and intellectuals since the late 1940s. Lastly, the First World Festival of Negro Arts organized in Dakar in 1966 remains an inspiration to a generation of artists and writers from Africa and the Diaspora and is a landmark in Africa's postcolonial cultural life. Nevertheless, the DAK'ART's survival, albeit the dim political and economic realities of Africa, should not be a justification for mediocrity, and certainly not for the Lack of organization, absence of curatorial vision, and the evident unevenness of artistic quality that plagued its most recent exhibitions. Of course, it is true that shrinking governmental resources made the dependence on foreign funding-mostly French and lately Belgian-inevitable. And as we all know, foreign funding comes with all kinds of strings attached. It is also true that structural adjustment and other neo-liberal economic policies adopted by many African nations since the 1980s have had disastrous implications on cultural and educational arenas, and in this regard artistic production is no exception. Yet, it is an undisputed fact that artists from Africa and the African Diaspora continue to be at the forefront of global artistic production. The quality of their work rivals those of their contemporaries elsewhere in the West. Ironically, this paradox constitutes what Hudita Mustafa has once characterized as a paradigm of "creativity in context of crisis." Such a paradox poses a challenge to all of us, and begs a few questions: How do we ensure quality in presentation of works by African and Diaspora artists? How do we transcend obstacles such as lack of funding and the will to support such endeavors, and at the same time confront the Legacy of...