Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2002)

ISSN: 1525-447X

WHATEVER HAPPENED?: ON MODERNITY AND ALL THAT

Nkiru Nzegwu

To hear some tell it, Ijele is dead! Some received the news with regret, and others with relish. Those for whom Ijele was a valuable educational resource hoped that it would make a comeback. We regret the halt in publication. Our small production staff and our equally small editorial team went through some tough professional and personal challenges. Fortunately we all pulled though. We are now back to work, and in the next few issues, you will notice some changes that we decided upon while we were unavoidably absent.

It is good to be back! We received with pleasure the email messages demanding when the upcoming issue will be out. We were especially tickled by the one that impatiently reminded us that August was fast drawing to a close and that there were articles she or he wanted to read. In very definite ways, those email messages reminded us again of why we had undertaken the weighty responsibility of producing an art history journal. More than anything else, it reassured us of Ijele's relevance. We look forward to bringing you, in this issue and others to come, an impressive array of critical, thoughtful, provocative, stimulating, and cutting-edge essays. We will definitely try to ensure that they are accompanied by equally stunning and colorful visuals. For the exhibition section, we are exploring the use of new media technologies to curate the works of selected artists (see Sam Gilliam's exhibition), and we are expanding the range of artists whose work we will feature.

The major theme of this issue is modernity. Thinking historically, the word 'modernity' describes the social transformation that follows the emergence of the rule of capital. In Europe, this began at the end of the medieval period and continued till the second half of the twentieth century. In the arts, modernity is known as modernism, the ideology of the modern in art, architecture, religion, philosophy, drama, music, orature and literature. Because of the ways 'modernity' and 'modernism' have been used in scholarship to signify Europeanization and Westernization, these terms have become ideologically loaded. They are used negatively to devalue the work of African and Third World artists, and to offer implausible interpretations about these works. Mainstream art historians in the United States, for example, loftily dismiss modern African art and architecture as derivations of European modernist products, by holding up modernism as the barometer of what "authentic" African art should not aspire to be. One gets the impression that these dismissals are primarily motivated to relegate Africa and its art outside of the historical frame of time. The question this raises for art historical scholarship is, why is it assumed that Africa's modernity must be identical to Europe's or that Europe's modernity applies completely to Africa? What warrants the supposition that if there are differences between the two modernities, then Africa's own is not modernity?

There is no question that Africa's history, including global history, is different from Europe's history and its views of global history. So, why should the experience of the two be the same? With that in mind, to accept Europe's definition of its own modernity as the sole model of modernity is to deny other regions of the world their own experiences of modernity. In fact, this denial dismisses without warrant the relevance of Africa's own history and the agency of Africans in fashioning their own modernity. This situation is reminiscent of French colonialists insistence that the concept 'ancestor' meant the Gauls, and their use of it to teach African children a false history of their ancestors. The suitable Africans response to this colonial miseducation was to evacuate the Gaelic tradition from the concept of ancestor and to fill in the correct ancestors of the children. Words and concepts at the level of generality function as placeholders. Just as Senegalese and Malians did not have to throw out 'ancestor' from their vocabulary, we do not have to throw out the word 'modern' or 'modernity' simply because of the ideological uses to which they have been put. All we need to do is fill the word with our own historical and experiential content.

Modern or modernity is a spatio-temporally-based concept. It is not a product to which Africans did not participate in making or in creating their own. Although some definitions treat it as if it were a product, constituted by fixed sociohistorical traits and attributes, such definitions are conflating the genus with an instance of its species. Michael J. Echeruo makes the point that modernity is fashioned in a contested space of human decisions and actions, bedeviled by conflicting motives, aspirations, goals and aims, and in which ideas are presented, critiqued and revised (Victorian Lagos: Aspects of Nineteenth Century Lagos Life, 1977). As agents, people in different societies interacted with themselves, their ideas, their neighbors, and social institutions in relation to the changing conditions of their lives. They also exchanged ideas and cultural forms with peoples from other parts of the world. In the process they formed ideas about what they take to be the modern aspects of their existence and their modern sociocultural expectations.

The idea that Africans as well as people in different regions of the world shaped a modernity that is not identical with Europe's tell us that there are varieties of modernism. Harry Harootunian calls this notion "coeval modernity," since it "calls attention to the experience of [all modernities] sharing the same temporality (Overcome by Modernity : History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000, xvii). Africa's experiences of its modern period (however that period is defined) demands engagement by Africanist scholars, art historians and literary writers. Africans cannot be saddled with a conception of the modern that does not address their experiences because Western art historians and critics want to exclude them from that notion. It is imperative that we bring epistemological insight to bear on the notion of the modern and the meaning of modernity. No doubt, this will require that we rethink received ideas about modernism that are not necessarily relevant to Africa's historical experiences. But that is the subject-matter of a book in progress.

For the moment, we should begin by reexamining the philosophical roots of modernism in Europe to better understand how Europeans fashioned their concept of modernity and how they chose what to privilege and why. Nicholas Veroli provides an excellent analytical review that subjects the European project of modernity, its history and intellectual tradition to critical engagement. Drawing from a wide range of sources-history, philosophy, political science, linguistics, and feminist studies-he interrogates Descartes' four theses on the cogito and its impact on imagination and the trajectory of European modernity. He notes the way in which Descartes created an expressive pathway for a certain turn of mind, a certain way of thinking, and certain forms of practice that led to capitalist modernity. Veroli argues that Descartes' constitution of the subject is based on a conflictual relationship of reason and imagination, leading eventually to the undervaluing of imagination, particularly its impact on reason. His analysis explains why creativity and inspiration are treated as second-rate to reason in the Western intellectual scheme, why inspiration and artistic insight are represented as noncognitive, and which is why artistic genius is represented as intuitive and nonrational.

Euromodernism sometimes meets Afromodernism, as they did on a particular southern Nigerian architecture of the 1920s and the early 1930s. On such an occasion, the interpretation offered by scholars with a Euromodernist framework runs aground. Ikem Stanley Okoye explores the sorts of historiographical difficulties that arise when a scholar, whose interpretive historical scheme lies elsewhere, ignores local politics and histories. In the studied cases, the buildings impeded the act of knowing. A United States-based Africanist scholar generated false architectural histories because his explanatory scheme did not connect with the relevant history that contained the rationale of the buildings. The import of Okoye's analysis is that construing modernity with an inflexible Westernizing lens transforms all talks about modernity, in any geographical region of the world, into a simple-minded striving towards Europeanization and its cultural precepts. Using architecture, Okoye demonstrates how inapplicable reference frames circumscribe knowledge such that buildings become subversive and resistant to historical interpretation.

In the postcolonial context, Rekha Menon proclaims that translation is interpretation and is a site that creates a mode of self-interpretation in favor of the logic of globalization. She sees globalization as comprising a process that abolishes all that is local, traditional, and imposes homogeneity. It compels citizens of the Third World to acquire a new subjectivity, with a uniform, global look in place of our old selves. She argues that this new self is something we must construct bodily on top of our traditional self: it must be exercised, painted, behaviorally proper, and uniformly predictable. For this to occur, all other forms of being a Third World subject-the local-are to be relegated to the bin of primitivism, exoticism, inadequacy, and out of historical flow. Menon also examines aspects of the modernity/tradition dichotomy underlying the contemporary dichotomy of Other and Otherness. She contends that some aspects of African art that was termed "primitive" by the West and located in the local historical space, escape from that location and migrates into the Western space. There, they catch up with other similar art forms and practices from the Third World, that gleefully reshape the aesthetics of Western bodies and sensibilities.

The global circulation of African art and aesthetics is the other side and the untold story of European modernity. As Europe's project of modernity criss-crossed the globe in search of resources for its own growth, it triggered the mass movement of peoples from one geographical zone to another. Africans were involuntarily transported to the Americas, where African art and cultural forms flourished among the oppressed population. Although European artistic values were promoted by the dominant White elite in Latin America, the dynamism of African artistic ideals increasingly percolated upwards to redefine the character and soul of white aesthetics. This was especially true in Cuba. Patrick Kane enters this arena of intermingling aesthetic values to examine Juan Boza's critique of Wilfredo Lam. Boza had critiqued Lam's distant gaze and detached artistic engagement towards the orishas and Afro-Cuban social life. The emergence of the once devalued African aesthetics, and the struggle in post-revolutionary Cuba for its African soul constitutes the background against which Kane examined Boza's critique of Lam. Since the end of the Cuban revolution, Afro-Cuban artists have continued to overturn the older Eurocentric domination of the arts by the white Cuban elite. He states that the revolution had broken down that dominance, and in removing racial privilege, opened the art academies to Afro-Cuban artists and aesthetics. This opening is gradually pushing into greater prominence the public arts of dance, music, song, and theatre of Afro-Cuban religious arts. Underscores the legitimacy of Boza's critique, Kane questions how Lam could really be representing the essence of African orishas if he cloaks them in Euromodernist artistic garb.

How then do we talk about African art and its modernist transformations in art if modernism is conceived as indelibly Western and riddled with Eurocentric assumptions? Fadhili Mshana's study indirectly engages this issue as he resolves this tradition/modernity split for Tanzania by exposing the ways in which traditional art forms have entered a new lease of life in modern political settings. Mshana examines the shifting meaning of kifimbo staffs in a modern Tanzania, where they function as part of modern dress codes as well as modern prestige symbols of political authority. In their new environment, in contexts of changing cultural traditions and political power, people who own staffs continually recreate, reposition, and manipulate the staff to suit their needs. Although Mshana's focus is on staffs in political institutions, he makes general reference to staffs that lie outside of these areas of social life. This strategy helps bridge the temporal gap between old and new and allows us to see patterns of continuity and patterns of difference in Tanzania's project of modernity.

Lastly, Stephen Folárànmí continues with the resolution of the tradition/modernity split in his exploration of the cognomen (oríkì) of selected òrìsà and Obas. Oríkì is an attributive name, expressing what the child is, or what he or she hopes to become. It is an endearment or praise intended to have a stimulating effect on self-esteem and social importance of a person. Folárànmí argues that recent studies have revealed that some of the concepts and images represented on wall murals in palaces are derived from the oríkì (cognomen) of an òrìsà or Oba. Iconographic analyses of murals and the influence and impact of oríkì in the execution of such murals sheds light on the significance of these murals in Yorùbá art and culture. With iconography dependent on a culture's naming system, the stimulus of change in art lies in modern Yorùbá experiences, in the sorts of names modern Yorùbá's choose to give their children in a rapidly globalizing world.

But contemporary theorists have argued that modernity is dead; all is now postcolonial! The appropriate response is, "Which modernity and whose postcolonial?"