Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2001)

ISSN: 1525-447X

READ ON, AND BE CHALLENGED!

Ikem Stanley Okoye

This issue of IJELE (but should one really write ‘issue,’ as opposed say to ‘release’ when one is speaking of electronic media?) expands further IJELE’s commitment to make available a comparatively cost-free forum for both the presentation of a variety of new art (including architecture and performance for example), and for the publication of new, serious, rigorous critiques and scholarship on arts that are connected in some way to cultures out of/in Africa. The essays in this release range from Irbouh’s historicization and critique of art education in colonial-era Morocco, to Carol Boyce Davies’s recentering of women as critical (and often unaccounted) producers of Carnival in Bahia (Brazil). In between them (thematically) lie articles such as Nkiru Nzegwu’s on the representational spatialities of an important oeuvre of Africa’s modern art (an essay that does also pay attention in part to dance), Sabine Marschall’s insightful history of mural art in 20th century and new millennium South Africa, and Charles Peterson’s original engagement with the textuality of American Blues. As with the first release of IJELE, we include a collaborative visual art/essay project by Lee Jack Morton of the Council of Federated Organizations Mississippi Literacy Project and Eric Morton of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (no relations whatsoever).

With this assembly of essays then, readers will once again understand the ambition the journal means to realize. Even more clear will such an agenda be, given this release’s presentation again (but here even more extensively) of the work of a number of contemporary artists. The exhibition section presents two types of creative production--art works and photography. We showcase the contemporary work of artists such as Kampala based Stephen Kasumba, Washingtonian artist Victor Ekpuk, Lagos- based artists--Nike (Davies) Okundaye, Chinwe Uwatse and Kelechi Amadi-Obi; Jos-based Uche Edochie, and Enugu-based Ozioma Onuzulike. In the photo gallery, we present the research photographs of Carole Boyce Davies, here in a guise that is different from that of the contributing scholar. Her photographs’ representational style, closeness of observations, and acute sense of a less easily consumed reality (missed by the western mainstream) capture male performers at Bahian carnival. Pleased with this pre- million man march male representations against which female groups then measured, she rejects the typical western gaze of American and European photography by not being about bodies (and their popular consumption by carnival-tourists).

For the editors of IJELE, then, it is far from easy to choose from amongst the range of works increasingly submitted for our consideration, so much so that we can already indicate what several forthcoming releases of the e-journal are to consist of. For example, the release following the present one (out in September) will see Simon Ottenberg respond to Nkiru Nzegwu’s now controversial essay. In addition, it will see a young scholar take on the persistence of a racialized dichotomy in the operationalities/ (op)e(rational)ities of curators and theorists constructing our image of the contemporary (in Africa’s art, and specifically South Africa’s). Another scholar begins with and extends the critique begun by the late Cuban artist, Juan Bozo, of Wilfredo Lam’s appropriation of Òrìsà comogony in his later art. To create a sumptuous fare, the release will include my own essay that forces back to the surface the vexed question of ‘quality,’ and of ‘judgment, ’ and which for both critical terms does so through what is in part a re-evaluation of the work of German modern Enlightenment aesthete Immanuel Kant and his now overlooked rival Johannes Herder, in the context of recent essays by Kenyan philosopher Odera Oruka and Senegalese Boubacar Diagne. It will also include a second and more ‘brass tacks’ essay by me, (this is only because I owe my editorial board for not having contributed anything up till this moment) that will explore the 1930s work of Michael Nguko, an Igbo-Nigerian builder-designer. who operated before architecture’s bureaucratization and professionalization as such. (I hyphenate my Igbo, for as is true for all other ethnicities on the continent from Berber to Yoruba, there are of course supra diasporic Igbo within and without the continent, including for example the Igbo-Cote D‘Ivoirien, a product of the Nigerian Civil War, and Igbo-Russians, created out of the history of Socialism and Soviet era internationalist unionism). Through the figure Nguko cuts, I will mount a challenge to Donald Cosentino’s disquieting architectural history--even if perhaps that history might have been intended for rapid relegation by its author.

The subsequent volume of IJELE (by which time we are speaking early year 2002!) will in addition to the continued presentation of the work of contemporary artists, also put on view the work of several young architects, the majority women, working from locations as diverse as Auckland (New Zealand), Boston (USA), Lilongwe (Malawi), and London (England), and some of who work radical redefinitions of the very idea architecture even as they produce innovative interpretations of spatiality and form (based sometimes, but hardly necessarily always, on imaginative readings of historic, continental, African art and architecture). That forthcoming moment will also introduce a couple of new departments and sections, one of which is to be specifically dedicated to art history and art theory, and which will therefore allow contemporary scholarship that may nevertheless be focused, for example, on artwork produced in the 14th century, or on that produced just before the Napoleonic French (re)presence in Egypt (18th century). The ‘contemporary’ in this new department will therefore apply to the original modes of scholarly practice brought to a range of artworks, rather necessarily than of the period in which the objects or representations may have been produced. The first installment in this section is, at the moment, imagined as one that will focus on (post)graduate-level art historical pedagogy in the context of the Western academy. It will present the results of this pedagogy’s organization (and/ or reality) for African art history—so for example, we might encounter, and hopefully be pleasantly challenged by the kind of art history of Africa produced when non-Africanists are ‘forced’ to engage its subject (and to bring to those things with which we might have become far too familiar, the very different apprehension of a European medievalist, or of a specialist of 19th century French art, or of a Roman Classicist).

But I tantalize too much—and do not mean on the other hand to discourage submissions for review and possible publication. Let me then return my focus to the present release.

I cannot overemphasize my consciousness of how quickly time, as they say, does fly. We are already into the third offering of IJELE, and it is therefore fair to say that the journal is here to stay. The Internet allows access that is just not possible in the medium of print. We are linked to over ninety-five universities and colleges worldwide, and trails of readers are from eighty-five countries (http://www.africaresource.com/stat.htm). Quite suddenly, we the editors of Ijele have found ourselves receiving submissions and responses from around the world that, for a journal in its infancy, this would have been quite unimaginable before the World Wide Web. Avoiding much of the delay related to cumbersome print technologies and to its heavy ‘point of sale’ cost of delivery (typically out of the reach of the peoples in for example Ethiopia, Brazil, Haiti or Egypt), we find to our pleasant surprise that we happened to have opened a forum of true accessibility. It is one to which an artist, historian or student at McGill University in Montreal (Canada), University of Auckland (New Zealand), Università di Napoli Federico II (Naples,Italy) or Universität Bremen(Germany) has access that is barely quicker than does her/his peers at the College of Education at Nsugbe (Nigeria), University of Natal, South Africa, or Nagoya University, Japan. The neoglobal archive that IJELE will undoubtedly consist as it ages, will surely produce a voice and representation in speaking, thinking, debating, imagining, and proposing the realms of creativity in the Diaspora and on the African continent that will be both unprecedented and new. There is absolutely no doubt that it is this, and not merely the presence of people of African descent in the Western, so-called metropolitan academy (but was London ever more metropolitan than Cairo?), that will produce a new art, its critique and its histories; and this truth will be negotiated outside the distortive seduction of sleek, financially well backed, book-form ‘objects’ out of the Western, now dollar-signed academic press. (And, should we now not therefore put quote marks around the academic of academic press?)

Read on, and be challenged!

Citation Format

Okoye, Ikem Stanley (2001). READ ON, AND BE CHALLENGED!. Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: 2, 1.