Beyond Single Stories: Addressing Dynamism, Specificity, and Agency in Arts of Africa

In Amalgam, the spring 2019 exhibition Theaster Gates created for Paris's Palais de Tokyo, the artist focuses on the 1912 evacuation of interracial individuals from the island of Malaga, southeast of Brunswick, Maine. Casts of face masks—including ones in styles recognizable as Bamana, Baule, and Songye, as well as ones that merge features of different genres—appear throughout the exhibition as markers of the African ancestry of Malaga's early-twentieth-century residents. The installation Island Modernity Institute and Department of Tourism shows face masks displayed in cases as well as in and around a cabinet. A neon sign in the cabinet announces, "In the end nothing is pure" (Fig. 1). Gates's statement highlights the absurdity of wanting to assure racial purity on Malaga or anywhere. Placed in proximity to the casts of face masks, it also serves as a reminder that the use of cultural or ethnic group names to label arts of Africa has hinged on colonial concepts of race and purity.

1.

Detail of Theaster Gates's Island Modernity Institute and Department of Tourism (2019) at Paris's Palais de Tokyo, March 20, 2019.

Photo: Yaëlle Biro

Scholars have long been aware that their categories for so-called traditional, historical, or classical arts of Africa are imperfect, in part because these labels reflect erroneous colonial assumptions.¹ But we have not yet arrived at a consensus for how to address the imperfection of our categories.² For example, on the basis of form and outdated anthropological classifications rather than on specific information about a particular work, its original maker, patron, audience, or context of production, an encyclopedic or a university museum attributes a sculpture to the culture of the Senufo peoples, designates an object's maker as Senufo, or otherwise asserts the Senufo authorship of a work. Alternatively and seemingly interchangeably, a museum may identify an object with Senufo populations or locate it in a Senufo region. The term Senufo is used to designate different things following the purposes of different persons.

When art experts and enthusiasts attribute an object to a whole group of people or a geographic area ascribed to a population, they often buttress the attribution with a single, timeless story about the group and the types of objects the group makes. Repeated again and again in museums, classrooms, and publications, the stories suggest that art, culture, geography, language, religion, and social organization overlap neatly. They reinforce the concept of tribe even if Africanist scholars have abandoned the term tribe from their vocabularies. The accounts also sideline historical specificity and individual agency.

The single stories experts and enthusiasts tell are not neutral. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observes, "To create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become." Adichie warns listeners that the single story is dangerous because it is partial and incomplete. She also addresses power implicit in storytelling, observing that "power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person" (Adichie 2009).

Our concern with the perpetuation of single stories for historical arts of Africa in disparate spheres prompted us to organize sessions for the 2016 African Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting in Washington DC and the 2017 Arts Council of the African Studies (ACASA) triennial conference in Accra, Ghana. We brought together anthropologists, art historians, and historians who work in museums or academia to investigate longstanding challenges in and fresh possibilities for the labeling and presentation of art in museums, universities, and publications.³

Following the two sessions and ongoing conversations, we have determined that African art scholars and other enthusiasts must more directly confront historical roots of the problem. We have also identified three core issues. The first lies in the limits of categories and language applied to African arts that European and Euro-American art enthusiasts have used to describe the arts and organize knowledge. The second...