“Relations Between Thoughts and Hands”: Expressive Themes of African Arts

After fifty years of uninterrupted publication, African Arts is venerable by any measure. Given how sadly shorter-lived most humanities journals have proven, that African Arts remains relevant to sharp-edged creativity across and about the continent is all the more remarkable. An argument can be made that African Arts has been progressive from its inception, insofar as Eurocentric notions of what constitutes “art” have been challenged through in-depth, archival, and feet-on-the-ground research of local aesthetics (e.g. Thompson 1973, Abiodun 1994), bringing voices and choices of African interlocutors to the fore. Even the “s” of African Arts—the plural, that is—is provocative, for it challenges any sense that African “art” as a collective noun is to be understood of a piece, or that artworks are only “high” and thus worthy of consideration if confined to the sculptures that first caught European eyes, influenced early European Modernists so famously, and currently sell at auction for astronomical sums. Instead, as Herbert Cole (1969) presciently encouraged us to consider in an early issue of African Arts, if art is understood as a verb as well as a noun, emphasis may be placed upon processes rather than solely given to final forms, helping us to grasp the ever-changing reasons why and how artists create what they do (Fig. 1). In other words, we may consider philosophies and methods of making, rather than admiring formal qualities of art objects as the end-all of scholarship.² The “s” of “Arts” further recognizes the astonishing multiplicity of perspectives across the continent’s fifty-five states (including the disputed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic); its more than 2000 ethnicities, languages, and religions; its long and shorter histories, including those of various colonial moments; and its profusion of intellectual and artistic achievements over the millennia and up to this very second.

Many expressive themes have been addressed in African Arts, from “traditional” ritual arts to “contemporary” theatrical performances.³ Before considering some of these, let us ponder the quotation marks of this last sentence, for among the theoretical and ideological issues long debated in the journal’s pages, distinct issue has been taken with spurious notions of stasis all too readily associated with “tradition,” as though African peoples are somehow timeless and without long and complex exchanges of ideas and practices within the continent and across the waters.⁴ Similarly, from the very first issue of African Arts, the question has been raised as to whether expression can ever be anything but “contemporary.” What points of reference are appropriately considered with regard to this latter term of such evident temporal relativity? Surely not Europe alone or even primarily, even though sub-Saharan African histories have been closely bound to those of Europe for well over 500 years now, and those of northern Africa and the Horn for far longer than that. Just as surely, “contemporary” must refer to senses of self and circumstance held and most probably debated by all human communities and their various members at every moment of time. The point to be made here is that positions of “conventional wisdom” about African peoples and their arts have been questioned from the journal’s beginnings.

The first issues of African Arts present the panoply of expressive themes that have characterized the journal for the last half century. Reflective yet theoretically stimulating pieces by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Albert Memmi (both 1967) introduced African Arts to the world. President Senghor’s important contribution is published in English for the first time in the present issue of African Arts, introduced and translated by Brian Quinn. Albert Memmi offered an allegorical prose poem about the great ambivalences of his own existence as an “Arab Jew” of Tunisia, thus positing mimetic perplexities similar to those developed in his landmark polemic The Colonizer and the Colonized (1965).⁵ The gauntlet was thrown: Difficult questions about life in early postcolonial Africa would not be ignored in the journal’s pages, and instead, they would be among the publication’s primary raisons d’être, as they remain...