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249 pages

English

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Explores African art and artistic production in a volatile global marketplace

Focusing on the theme of warriorhood, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir weaves a complex history of how colonial influence forever changed artistic practice, objects, and their meaning. Looking at two widely diverse cultures, the Idoma in Nigeria and the Samburu in Kenya, Kasfir makes a bold statement about the links between colonialism, the Europeans' image of Africans, Africans' changing self representation, and the impact of global trade on cultural artifacts and the making of art. This intriguing history of the interaction between peoples, aesthetics, morals, artistic objects and practices, and the global trade in African art challenges current ideas about artistic production and representation.

Preface
Introduction: Colonial Power and Aesthetic Practice
Part 1. Warriors
1. Maa Warriorhood and British Colonial Discourse
2. Idoma Warriorhood and the Pax Britannica
Part 2. Sculptors and Smiths
3. Colonial Rupture and Innovation
4. Samburu Smiths, Idoma Maskmakers: Power at a Distance
Part 3. Masks, Spears, the Body
5. Mask and Spear: Art, Thing, Commodity
6. Warrior Theatre and the Ritualized Body
Part 4. Commodities
7. Idoma Sculpture: Colonialism and the Market for African Art
8. Samburu Encounters with Modernity: Spears as Tourist Souvenirs
9. Samburu Warriors in Hollywood Films: Cinematic Commodities
Reprise: The Three C's: Colonialism, Commodities, and Complex Representations
Coda: From Spears to Guns in the North Rift
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

African Studies

African

HISTORY

África

History of art

African people

General officer

History of Africa

Art

General

Africa

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	24 octobre 2007
Nombre de lectures	3
EAN13	9780253022653
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Extrait

African Art and the Colonial Encounter
African Expressive Cultures
Patrick McNaughton, editor
Associate editors
Catherine M. Cole
Barbara G. Hoffman
Eileen Julien
Kassim Kon
D. A. Masolo
Elisha Renne
Zo Strother
African Art AND THE Colonial Encounter
Inventing a Global Commodity
S IDNEY L ITTLEFIELD K ASFIR
Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis
Publication of this book is made possible in part with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency that supports research, education, and public programming in the humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail iuporder@indiana.edu
2007 by Sidney L. Kasfir
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield.
African art and the colonial encounter : inventing a global commodity / Sidney Littlefield Kasfir.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-34892-0 (cloth : alk. paper)-ISBN 978-0-253-21922-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Samburu (African people)-Material culture. 2. Idoma (African people)-Material culture. 3. Art, African-Western influences. 4. Great Britain-Colonies-Africa. 5. Spears-Kenya. 6. Colonies in art. 7. Exoticism in art. 8. Art and globalization. I. Title.
DT433.545.S26K37 2007
305.896 33-dc22
2007007408
1 2 3 4 5 12 11 10 09 08 07
For Melania (Aduke) and Elisabetta (Omolabake), who grew up with masquerades and lmugit
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
I NTRODUCTION : Colonial Power and Aesthetic Practice
P ART 1. Warriors
1. Maa Warriorhood and British Colonial Discourse
2. Idoma Warriorhood and the Pax Britannica
P ART 2. Sculptors and Smiths
3. Colonial Rupture and Innovation: The Colonizer as Inadvertent Patron
4. Samburu Smiths, Idoma Maskmakers: Power at a Distance
P ART 3. Masks, Spears, the Body
5. Mask and Spear: Art, Thing, Commodity
6. Warrior Theatre and the Ritualized Body
P ART 4. Commodities
7. Idoma Sculpture: Colonialism and the Market for African Art
8. Samburu Encounters with Modernity: Spears as Tourist Souvenirs
9. Samburu Warriors in Hollywood Films: Cinematic Commodities
R EPRISE: The Three C s: Colonialism, Commodities, and Complex Representations
C ODA: From Spears to Guns in the North Rift
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
Books have their own stories quite apart from their published contents. When I first began putting together the ideas for this one in 1994, I wanted to address some of the big questions in African art that had surfaced since my graduate school days. The dominant ideas from the 1960s and 70s were about theories of style and genre (Fagg 1965, 1970; Sieber 1961, 1966; Sieber and Rubin 1968; Fraser and Cole 1972; Picton 1974; and Bravmann 1973), aesthetics (Thompson 1973; later Abiodun 1983 and Hallen 2000), performance (Thompson s paradigm-shifting African Art in Motion , 1974), and artistic process (Cole s 1969 series of articles on Art as a Verb in Igboland ). All of these except the minefield of style were derived wholly from on-the-ground evidence from Africa and couched in functionalist assumptions (e.g., the internal coherence of traditional communities and their symbolic practices). My academic generation began in the 80s to expand upon (and, in the case of style and notions of the traditional, to question) these ideas in detailed field studies of particular art and ritual genres (Cole and Aniakor 1984; Drewal and Drewal 1983; Nunley 1987; Lawal 1996; Ross 1998; Strother 2000). By then these studies were also enriched by 70s feminist anthropology and occasional departures into structuralism, especially in architectural studies (Blier 1987) and masking (Jedrej 1980).
There is a telling disjuncture between art history and anthropology in how generational influences have played out in the study of African art in the United States. In Europe, the academic study of African art usually resides in anthropology departments, but in the United States and in Africa itself, it is typically found under the disciplinary umbrella of art history or in art schools connected to universities. During the 1970s, a senior group of Africanist art historians at Yale University, Columbia University, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, UCLA, the University of London s School of Oriental and African Studies, and UC-Santa Barbara trained a cohort of students who have now taken their places.
But an equally influential triumvirate of Africanist cultural anthropologists-James Fernandez in Gabon (1966, 1973), Simon Ottenberg in Nigeria (1975, 2006), and Warren D Azevedo in Liberia (1973, 1980)-all students of Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University, although they trained few successors in the African art field, nonetheless provided the structural-functionalist template for in-depth village-based African fieldwork for almost all of us. Their more recent counterparts in urban art and popular culture have been Johannes Fabian (1996) and Bogumil Jewsiewicki (1991), anthropologist and historian respectively, who have been working in Lubumbashi since the 70s. The shift in theoretical model has been beneath the surface but has been emblematic of the shift in interest among the emerging scholar generation from an ethnically defined and mainly rural to a class-defined, primarily urban subject-world, not only in African art history but in African anthropology as well.
At the same time that members of my academic generation began to publish their first work, the broader fields of art history and cultural anthropology began to be strongly affected by what was happening in literary theory and by the intrusion of cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Levi-Strauss, the intellectual cult figure of our student generation, was dethroned by other French theorists, most notably Bourdieu, Derrida, and Foucault. Reflexivity created a crisis around the idea of fieldwork itself, so much so that by the 90s, most of my own graduate students had abandoned village-based artists for their urban counterparts and the rural mud compounds with their resident lineages for the heterogeneity of the African city. The shift also embraced the study of postcolonial genres, leaving behind the diviners, masqueraders, and sacred kings in their symbolic spaces for the study of postcolonial urbanites and their hybrid arts and spectacles, some high, others low, and many of them migratory.
The high-art category has been theorized and brought to center stage by a group of mainly African transnational artists and intellectuals, foremost among them Salah Hassan (1995, 2001), Okwui Enwezor (2001), Ikem Okoye (1996), Sylvester Ogbechie (forthcoming), Olu Oguibe (1996), and Chika Okeke (1995). Like William Fagg, Roy Sieber, Robert Farris Thompson, and Herbert Cole a generation before, all but Okoye and Ogbechie have used exhibitions and their catalogue essays in preference to books to establish their most important claims. Foremost among these is Enwezor s contention, made in the blockbuster Short Century exhibition, that African modernisms developed along with anticolonial political movements, not through grateful art students in some donor-recipient model of progress. Implicit in this is a powerful critique of current, mainly European, collecting and exhibition practices that assume that only popular art (art based outside the academy) can be the legitimate heir to the art of the premodern African past and that the productions of formally trained artists are little more than an ahistorical mimicry of Western modernism. This position was largely demolished by 1995 with the Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa show at Whitechapel Gallery in London, but until the Short Century exhibit at p. 5. 1, the Museum of Modern Art s Queens, New York, affiliate in 2001, no persuasive model of African modernism had been put in its place.
Modernism, the posts (postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism), and now transnationalism and globalization-the new modernization -have become the intellectual horizon upon which new work in African art is largely situated. The New York-, London-, and Paris-based museum/dealer/collector art-world of traditional genres has been left to the older generation to continue to study and analyze. For collectors, this is a slowly shrinking inventory of work by anonymous dead artists (Morphy 1995). Nonetheless these older genres are still widely accepted, both by the museum-going public and by the institutions that own and display them as the paradigmatic African art, even if fewer people are actively engaged in their study. Some (I include myself) are dismayed by