Introduction to Arts of Survival: Exploring Arts and Lives in Urban Spaces

In the summer of 2016, with support from a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University Bloomington hosted a three-week summer institute for college and university faculty. With five faculty conveners—Akin Adesokan and Oana Panaïté (Indiana University Bloomington), Grace A. Musila (University of the Witwatersrand), and principal investigators Eileen Julien (Indiana University Bloomington) and James Ogude (University of Pretoria)—"Arts of Survival: Recasting Lives in African Cities" brought together twenty-one faculty members and three advanced graduate students from universities across the United States for discussions of life and art in Accra, Lagos, Nairobi, post-Katrina New Orleans (which we visited), and post-earthquake Port-au-Prince. Sharing African roots, these cities are, of course, distinctive because of the conditions and events that have shaped them: topographies and histories; diverse languages; waves of immigrants from near and far, bringing labor, culture, and creativity; and tragic events—from hurricanes and earthquakes to legacies of slavery and colonialism, political violence, indifference, and neglect.

Through in-depth case studies of each of these cities and their arts and an immersive experience in New Orleans, we sought to grasp, both intellectually and viscerally, the workings of urban spaces in Africa and its Atlantic diaspora. Via music, literature, visual arts, festivals, films, and encounters with individual artists, participants observed how urban identities are cast and recast in each city, particularly in the face of historical and contemporary catastrophe, and how the arts reintroduce and give voice to the human dimension and experience of these cities.

Like all cities, but especially those of the Global South, marked by poverty and inequity, these cities are uneven in their development and are typically described as overpopulated, unruly, unsanitary, dangerous, and as sites of or for immoral behavior. Regardless of such consensus, they are vibrant beehives of creativity, whose products and events travel far, becoming global or world culture, regardless of the limits of these monikers, limits that we also examined.

In undertaking a comparative study of urban arts, we had several specific goals. First, to enable institute conveners and participants to develop a deeper understanding of the lives of individual cities, their challenges and possibilities, and a broad view of the richness, complexity, and diversity of contemporary urban experiences across Africa and Africa's Atlantic diaspora.

In a context where the area-studies model had been critiqued for promoting a static view of Africa, the institute proposed a transnational, transcontinental scholarly engagement with the cultures and arts of African and African diaspora cities, enabling participants to reconsider conventional wisdom on African cities—specifically, claims for their corruption or backwardness—and to develop broad, cross-disciplinary perspectives. Participants were particularly attuned to forms of structural violence and the impact of neoliberal capital, which bound together cities on the continent and in the Americas. Moreover, as such forces claimed neighborhoods and livelihoods that had previously been the province of local communities, they were major impediments to postcrisis survival and regeneration.

Second, we sought to make visible the capacities and innovations of a range of artistic forms and media giving expression to subjectivities and sensibilities arising in the cityscape, such as fashion, film, visual arts, hip hop, dance, stand-up comedy, spoken word, poetry, prose, festivals, foods, blogs, television, radio, rumor, graffiti, comics, and cartoons. While social categorizations—such as class, race, religion, and ethnicity—are typically reinforced spatially in cities, we knew that bounded identities often collapse in the entanglements of cultural and artistic products and events that tend to be fluid, complex, and improvisational.

Thus, our third goal was, at the very least, to ponder a particularly challenging question, quixotic for some, plausible for others: might performance in urban public space, which often breaks taboos and threatens the perception of order (however short-lived), play a distinctive and critical role in reworking social relations, contesting abusive power, and constituting a sense of local, national, and even transnational belonging?

Finally, the institute sought to provide an opportunity to develop a set of conceptual tools and models for studying and teaching...