Afrique-Asie: Arts, espaces, pratiques ed. by Dominique Malaquais and Nicole Khouri (review)

Afrique-Asie: Arts, espaces, pratiques is the second volume in the series “Art dans la mondialisation,” an initiative of sociologist Myriam-Odile Blin. Under the editorship of Dominique Malaquais and Nicole Khouri, senior researcher and associate researcher respectively at Institut des Mondes Africains (CNRS), the volume brings together scholars writing in French and English. It is divided into two intentionally permeable parts. The first, “Flux et reflux” (“Ebb and Flow”), presents essays describing centuries-old cultural exchanges between Africa and Asia: movements of people, things, ideas and practices linking the two continents over the long term. The second, “Trajectoires,” consists of essays that highlight the forward path of changing Africa-Asia relations in light of shifting global configurations and increasingly fractured landscapes of power on the world stage. These two parts are made up of articles that explore what the editors, referencing Arjun Appadurai, call “scapes”—fluid spaces of interaction connecting the physical world, the spirit realm, and the imagination. Such scapes, Malaquais and Khouri argue, are rarely well served by established fields of study. They require more flexible and open-ended approaches to knowledge production. With this in mind, the editors eschew disciplinary boundaries, geographical categories, and chronological order, thereby opening up novel ways of addressing events, objects and concepts.

The wealth of topics that are covered and the cross-disciplinary models that are called upon in Afrique-Asie make for an original compendium. Literary criticism rubs shoulders with urbanism, tourism studies, art history, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. The result is a thought-provoking addition to an area of research—Africa-Asia relations—otherwise dominated by the fields of political science and economics.

EBB AND FLOW

“Flux et reflux” opens with a discussion of new perspectives on global space. Lindsay Bremner’s “Filter/Funnel” considers continental geographies from the perspective of the sea. This approach reveals overlooked vantage points from which to view a shifting world order over the long term (in a historical perspective spanning several centuries) and looking forward. Bremner presents the Indian Ocean as a vast, ever-in-flux region that functions as both a filter and a funnel for people, ideas, and goods transiting between Africa and Asia. Two notions structure her analysis: that of the Slow Ocean (a porous space cyclically tied to the monsoon cycle) and that of the Fast Ocean (a space operating through power relations). Untethered from land, these “decentered” vantage points, she argues, allow us to set aside predetermined judgements based on teleological readings of space and place.

Concerned as well with acts of decentering, Katherine Isobel Baxter’s essay “La nouvelle fiction noire d’Asie de l’Est” focuses on African characters operating on the margins of Asian society. Avoiding traditional, Eurocentric analytical categories allows the author to highlight ambiguous or little-known aspects of Africa-Asia intercultural exchange. She calls on figures and notions that are rarely used in Western literary criticism. Thus, Eshu (the Yoruba trickster) is brought into play to explore novelist Biyi Bandele’s writing on his experiences fighting the Japanese in Burma during World War II, on the fringes of the Pacific Theater of War. The Chinese term鬼 (guĭ)—“ghost” or “spirit,” also a derogatory term for foreigners—is deployed as a means for exploring Ken Kamoche’s works on the lives of Africans living on the fringes of contemporary Chinese society.

Margins and decentering are a focus too in Mary Nooter Roberts’ and Allen F. Roberts’ “Spiritscapes of the Indian Ocean World.” In this study of intersections between geographical and spiritual space, the authors show that culture is not by any means limited to territory, but moves, rather, in the limen of “edges and in-betweens” (p. 63). Reminding us that, and showing us how, “spirits are always restless, always recombinant and always on the move” (p. 55), they consider ways in which images of the Indian saint Shirdi Sai Baba, celebrated...