The New African Diaspora

23. Language, Memory, and the Transnational: Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof

23 LANGUAGE, MEMORY, AND THE TRANSNATIONAL: ART OF WOSENE WORKE KOSROF Andrea E. Frohne The first volume, The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, focused largely on the diaspora as a historical view back to the transatlantic slave trade. The current volume illustrates that it is becoming increasingly necessary in this globalized era to differentiate between the African diaspora of the slave trade on the one hand, and the new African diaspora concerning postcolonial migration on the other. In organizing a symposium on the new African diaspora, Isidore Okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu focused on dynamics and experiences shaping the lives of African and African-descendant peoples in the U.S. and Europe. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has equally supported this, suggesting an exploration of links between the two: “it is important to distinguish between dispersal and diaspora and the historic and contemporary diasporas and the connections between them” (Zeleza 261). Ali Mazrui has also called for a recognition of contemporary diasporas by famously coining the term “American African” to refer to first- or second-generation immigrants from Africa to the Americas who are “products of the Diaspora of Colonization” and postcolonial migration.1 This essay considers multidirectional flows and influences of ideas, nations, traditions, memories, spaces, economies, and language in contemporary art by Wosene Worke Kosrof.2 A transnational approach is explored because an exploration of the new African diaspora necessitates a recognition of multifaceted flows and influences between Africa, the United States, and spaces traveled around the world. As an aspect of the new African diaspora, transnationalism allows for such multidirectional relationships between multiple nation-states. Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc conceive of transnationalism as “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement . . . [to] build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders” 459 460 Andrea E. Frohne (Basch et al. 7). Within this context, one simultaneously relates, using both real and imagined processes, to two or more nation-states through actions, decisions, memories, and realities immersed in such networks of relationships (Basch et al. 7). Edward Said offers the rich concept of the contrapuntal in considering overlapping communities and histories of both the metropole and formerly colonized societies (Culture and Imperialism 18). He writes that “habits of life, [and] expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally” (“Reflections on Exile” 366). The notion of the transnational replaces static models of center/ periphery and self/Other (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 27) to allow for interconnections of identities and cultures. Before moving to Wosene Kosrof, a brief consideration of the Alada-Ulm divination tray circa 1650 illustrates the importance of recognizing influences crossing the Atlantic in both directions. Such an approach is quintessential in African art history, and proves more viable than employing a solely unidirectional look back to a culturally bounded homeland. The production and circulation of the divination tray includes a Fon artist, Yoruba divination system, Yoruba and Fon cosmologies, Ewe iconography from present-day Togo and possibly present-day Ghana, European Christianity, Fon royalty (King Tezifon), Spanish royalty (King Felipe IV), German merchants, and the Ulmer Museum in Germany. In considering the Alada-Ulm divination tray in terms of a Yoruba world-system, Olabiyi Yai writes that ìtàn, or history, is conceived as a chronology as well as a geographic dimension of history that includes expansion, so that “Yoruba have always conceived of their history as diaspora” (108).3 To tell a story (pa ìtàn) “is to ‘de-riddle’ history, to shed light on human existence through time and space” (Yai 109; emphasis added). Therefore, an understanding of the Alada-Ulm tray from this perspective is inherently and already transcultural and transnational. Or, consider Yinka Shonibare’s art works with African/Indonesian/Dutch/ Brixton/British/Nigerian textiles because they are batiks based on an Indonesian technique that are manufactured in the Netherlands and Britain and exported to Africa. Complicated colonial networks of economics, culture , and commodification ensure that Shonibare’s pieces categorically refuse to be situated in any one culture, geographic space, or nation.4 Stuart Hall’s consideration of cultural identity is appropriate for such multidirectional flows, “as a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process , and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (222). Just as cultures continue to interpenetrate and interconnect, nations too...