African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum: Sights/Sites of Creativity and Conflict (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum: Sights/Sites of Creativity and Conflict Leora Maltz African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum: Sights/Sites of Creativity and Conflict Ed. Tobias Döring Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. A special edition of Matatu, the journal of African literary and cultural studies, African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum extends the interdisciplinary scope of the journal to address the topic of contemporary African art. Editor Tobias Döring describes the volume as intended to coincide with, and to complement, Documenta XI, "to map out sites/ sights of creativity and conflict when facing contemporary arts form Africa" (3). Strengths of the book thus include the geographic and academic range of the nineteen contributors, among them scholars based in Africa, as well as lesser-known voices in the field, including literary specialists who ponder the arts as insightful nonprofessionals. The editor has also made an exemplary effort to expand the geographic purview of the book beyond the usual suspects of Nigeria and South Africa, to include research on Eritrea, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Christine Matzke begins the volume on a strong note, with an historically grounded article on Eritrean art that offers a much-needed contribution to this neglected area of study, as does Sunanda Sanyal's illuminating piece on Ugandan artist Rose Kirumira. Both of these articles—of women writing about female artists—indicate the laudable gender parity maintained throughout the volume. [End Page 187] Arranged in a loosely geographic fashion, with groups of articles linked by place strung together, this anthology lacks organizational clarity, however. Instead of thematic, chronological, or even geographic subsections, the editor has employed the journal's usual structure, segmenting the book by literary genre (a long list of articles, an interview with South African artist Sue Williamson, a couple of reviews). For a book, unlike a journal, this structure is not particularly effective. The table of contents, likewise arranged by genre, adds another layer of confusion by failing to list the book's contents in sequential order. It also seemed as if the volume had been expanded from an original, tighter focus on contemporary African art to the more amorphous subject of "African Culture" signaled by the book's rather noncommittal title: African Cultures, Visual Arts and the Museum. This all-encompassing purview jars with the stated editorial conception of producing a volume devoted to visual art: for example, all three contributions to the "Marketplace" section (by Omar Sougou, Alex Asigbo, and Tracie Chima Utoh) not only seem unrelated to the market (discussing literature and theater as they do), but also bear only the most tangential relationship to the ostensible subject of the volume, contemporary African art. Nonetheless, other contributors engage directly with the subject at hand and this book is certainly well worth reading for anyone interested in contemporary African art. Moreover, several contributors respond to Tobias Döring's seminal question—"whether the Museum, as an institutional site, can ever be decolonized" (7). In this context, several German commentators provide frank, often critical, reviews of local African art exhibitions. Their insights convey a refreshing perspective, especially since this type of localized discourse usually appears in ephemeral publications with limited circulation, often written in German, and thus largely inaccessible to American readers on several counts. Dirk Naguschewski engages with the institutionalized neocolonialism still operative in several Parisian exhibitions of African art, while Robert Stockhammer queries the nationalistic assumption behind The Short Century's celebration of African independence in an era of supposed postnationalisms. But perhaps the most relevant and creative response to Döring's challenging museological conundrum is the article by Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen Roberts, a nuanced and well-argued piece on the phenomenon of unofficial museums in Dakar, Senegal. They discuss an extensive mural by local artist Pape Samb ("Papisto") featuring a sufi saint, Amadou Bamba, as a means of expanding the concept of what constitutes a museum. Given the tangled histories of colonialism and the museum, the emergence of this kind of informal, nontraditional space for recording local histories poses a powerful alternative to the hegemony of the colonial museum. The authors propose that Papisto's mural be considered an "informal 'museum'" created...