Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England - Review

fresh Haven: Yale University Press, 1994 280 pp; 112 b/w ills. $4500

With a not many exceptions, Africanist art histories have not taken us simultaneously (and to a sufficient depth) into the historical, productional, semantic, and circulatory universes of their particulars to the extent that of that kind universes become easily and coherently imagined. For example, our knowledge is scanty about an African work's reception and travel within its consuming local tillages let alone the way like objects traversed the differentiated terrains of possession and rule through which many objects perished, as others came to survive and repose largely within the museums of the West. African agricultures of course, know and understand themselves.(1) Difficulties arise when, seeking to know, our epistemology (specifically our art historiography) abuts theirs. At similar a conjunction is art history's problem: whether or not the art history of Africa should simply be art ethnography,(2) whether or not Africa is a feasible site for constituting art history. However, the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled itself raises troubling questions. on what account is Africanist art history in ne of ethnological illumination, and not, say, Western art history and its representations? wherefore does anthropology covet the African aestheticized existence so much more than it does greatest in quantity other objects? Is this desire necessarily a reflection of the imago that Africa occupies institutionally, despite challenges to the view that Africa is any more strange than other places (and times)? Or, does like covetousness suggest the hardiness of humanistic studies' foundations in colonialism? Is it not possible that similar a desire also suggests that an anachronistic West European and American academy still have the appearances to savor a rooting of this kind? What character is African art expected to perform within like academies? Should what would pass for African art history in an African academic location necessarily transform itself in the pedagogy of the North American and European adjoining matters into an art anthropology? If with equal reason why do Asianist art historians not have feeling equally obliged to rely upon an anthropological model? Even more pointedly, what is assumed in teaching European art history to American scholars in the absence, relatively speaking, of an anthropological approach? Are they able to grasp, for example, the social relations of British working-class life from which emerg several of its art changes just by reading A History of the British Working Class? Perhaps paradoxically, similar questions are relevant for judging the import of the three works reviewed here.

A more accurate tide for Suzanne Preston Blier's African Vodun would be Fon Vodun since the phenomenon she explores - apparently messy assemblies known variously as bocio and bo - was produc in Fon-speaking West Africa for several centuries and does not exist (nor is it so-named where it does) across all of Africa. These nonfigural constructions (bo) typically in mixed media and repeatedly constituting a sculpted figure (bocio), are utilized for the projection of spiritual power in the service, finally, of self-(or group-)protection. Blier's throw out is, however, a more ambitious individual than it might at first appear. She is intent upon historicizing bocio and in providing an exhaustive interpretation of them. Her approach ranges from research questions framed by dint of Freudian psychoanalytical theory, Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy, and a plentiful use of linguistic evidence to an acute attention to bocio's materiality. In addition, readings of her objects' physicality are made across Fon conceptions of their objects' efficacy, and the centrality of aesthetics to efficacy, including an interest in the proces of the objects' production. African Vodun is also attentive to the local institutionalized settings in which the reality is received and in which it attains its penultimate significance.

Blier does not stop here, however. She toils to translate what might easily appear a far off African penchant for spiritualizing the external world (and for constituting reality into a flowing of resemblances) into schemas that are comprehensible for a non-Fon viewer. The Fon individual's desire to posses a bocio does not become "superstition," on the other hand is instead a matter that is of universally crucial relevance for understanding the nature and functioning of all art.

These aims are alluded to at the book's opening, which must be seen as a provocative, etiological description:

examine to imagine a sculpture of greater visual provocation, single which jars the sensibilities or faces silent spaces, than the individual illustrated here. . . This is clearly not an fact of sublime beauty; its surface is overspreaded over with . . iron beads, straws, bones, leather, rags, earthen ware fur, feathers, blood. In their variated massing upon the surface they emanate qualities of tension, anxiety and danger . . a range of emotions appear to explode from within, the plastic art almost outgrowing itself and transgressing its hold limits (p. 1).