African History and the Thingly Past: A Yoruba Example

Word and image studies focus customarily on the relationship between literature and painting, approached either thematically, as in the classical ut pictura poesis tradition, or as semiotic systems, in the wake of Lessing's seminal study.' Alternatively, they examine the interface between verbal texts and their visual illustrations. However, to date a rich area of inquiry remains insufficiently tapped - the application of theoretical constructs developed in one domain to the creative practices of another. Literary theory, for example, has much to offer to the analysis of certain painterly phenomena; and art theory can shed light on the verbal arts.' This kind of exchange is likely to appear most desirable at times of transition, when a canon expands or undergoes radical changes. My concern here is precisely with such an occurrence within the genre of the representation of self, during the 1970S and 1980s, decades known as postmodern. While my analysis centers on French theory and practice, its potential applications are in no way nationally bound. During the period examined, a variety of oblique 'returns' to premodern artistic practices have taken place - among these being the genres of autobiography and self-portrait - which modernism at its height had devalorized. The tool of choice for theorizing the recent reemergence of self-portraiture in French painting proved - for me - to be literary genre theory (complemented by philosophical reflection on the question of subjectivity). Yet, as we shall see, it was a term taken from painting, the pictorial self-portrait ('autoportait' in French) that provided the French taxonomy of literary autobiography with a name for a new category meant to reflect the expansion of the genre and its theory beyond their earlier canonical boundaries. I in turn borrow this renewed literary taxonomy to shed light on painting, using the literary category now named 'autoportrait' to think through new versions of self-representation in the visual arts. To foreground this reciprocity (and to some extent convergence), I take the liberty of using 'autoportrait' (and its variants) to refer both to verbal and visual art, alongside the Anglo-Saxon 'self-portrait', which refers strictly to visual art. The notion of representation of self, throughout this article and in the title, subsumes all three connotations. The ensuing analysis pursues a dual goal: to document and interpret contemporary French pictorial auto-portraiture; and to stimulate reflection on the nature of interart connections as well as on the workings of theory.

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

This chapter explores the conceptual issues of art, creativity, and philosophy through an examination of African visual and verbal art. Adepoju concludes that some of the greatest African philosophical expression is demonstrated by its verbal arts and in the relationships between its verbal and visual art. Within this context, the chapter attempts to demonstrate the ultimate unity of classical African thought through examples of its verbal and visual creativity, projecting the continuities between the classical and the post-classical achievement. Adepoju also critically explores conceptions of the nature, interrelationships, origin, and direction of humanity, the terrestrial world, and the cosmos in relation to a broad span of classical and post-classical African expressive forms, from the Ifa/Afa/Fa/Afan to Owusu Ankomah’s development of an original cosmic vision.

Reviewed by: Emma & Edvard: Love in the Time of Loneliness by Mieke Bal Jakob Lothe Emma & Edvard: Love in the Time of Loneliness. Curated by Mieke Bal, with assistant curator Ute Kuhlerman. Munch Museum, Oslo. April 4, 2017. The exhibition Emma & Edvard: Love in the Time of Loneliness curated by Mieke Bal at the Munch Museum demanded more than a single visit. Indeed, it proved such compelling viewing that I returned to see it a second time. By juxtaposing the work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and French novelist Gustave Flaubert, Bal invited fresh understandings of the former’s visual art and the latter’s verbal art—not by making either of them less original, but by showing how, in using alternative forms of artistic expression, both explored different aspects of the human experience of loneliness in the modern era. The relevance, urgency, and authenticity of these explorations in the exhibition strongly suggested that, in one important sense at least, this era is still ongoing. The exhibition’s dual focus on the visual and the verbal revealed how strongly visual Flaubert’s writing is in Madame Bovary, thus making me more appreciative of the thematic effects of verbal visualization; it also revealed how remarkably readable Munch’s visual art is. The exhibition convinced me that the narrative elements of Munch’s visual art bear a significant relation to the distinctive aspects of Flaubert’s verbal narrative, in fact. Of course, when I write “Flaubert” here, I am actually referring to Bal’s video installations from Madame B. While studying Munch’s art I was also looking at installations in which actors presented or performed different phases of the lives of Emma and her husband Charles, the protagonists in Flaubert’s novel. The performativity of the act of looking was striking in several of the video scenes and was created in large part by Bal’s innovative use of perspective and variations of spatial and temporal distance. As modulations of perspective and distance are constituent elements of Munch’s visual art as well as of Flaubert’s verbal art, Bal’s filmic art added a third dimension to the exhibition’s presentations of loneliness. This third dimension increased the relevance of the exhibition for those visitors who perhaps were not primarily interested in Munch or Flaubert, but rather in art forms like film and theatre. These presentations primarily relied upon and were achieved through a combination of fictions, figures, and creations. Despite prominently featuring the names Edvard and Emma in the title, Bal was not interested in Munch’s and Flaubert’s biographies; instead, she staged a series of encounters between Munch’s figure, “Edvard,” and Flaubert’s creation, “Emma.” In the thoughtful book published to accompany the exhibition, Emma & Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic, Bal renders Munch’s Edvard as a character-narrator who becomes a kind of protagonist of his own self-presentations; she also renders him as a “focalizer”—that is, as the possessor and manipulator of the perspective through which we, as viewers, could gain access to the vision of the world observable in the visual images. Created and presented verbally in a way that Munch’s Edvard is not, Flaubert’s Emma is the focalizer-character of a work of fiction. There was a strong sense that both of these fictional figures represented, or enabled Munch and Flaubert to present, a pervasive loneliness characterized by a strong tendency to look at the world sideways, failing to engage in visual or verbal dialogue with others. Click for larger view View full resolution Emma & Edvard: Love in the Time of Loneliness, curated by Mieke Bal, at the Munch Museum, Oslo. (Photo: Courtesy of the Munch Museum.) [End Page 594] Click for larger view View full resolution Edvard Munch, The Voice / Summer Night (1896; Woll 394). (Courtesy of the Munch Museum, Oslo.) Of the works presented in room 3 of the exhibition, which explored the theme “Fantasies,” I was particularly struck by the ways that Munch’s painting, The Voice / Summer Night (1896), was linked to a video installation that showed Charles and Emma seeing each other for the first time. The installation consisted of two screens...

In our broad use of the term to characterize contempo? rary African culture, there is an implicit understanding that the colonial experience played a critical role in shaping the identity of societies that emerged from extensive periods of European rule. We can trace such an impact directly through a great variety of written African documents pro? duced under colonialism as well as through various reflections on this expe? rience by African historians and other thinkers after the attainment of independence. However, among the fictional works that have entered into the canon of modern African literature, the topic of colonialism is conspicuous for its relative absence. This hiatus can be explained in part by the chronology of colonial rule, which did not last long enough for the first generation of major writers in English and French to reach their full powers much before its demise.2 Some of these early figures?most notably Chinua Achebe, Mongo Beti, and Ferdinand Oyono?have written on colonial themes. Others, like Camara Laye, describe situations in the colonial era with virtually no refer? ence to European rule. More commonly, the focus of African writing is upon decolonization and its postcolonial aftermath, since these are the experiences the authors know at first hand. Amadou Hampate Ba stands out in this context, first of all because he is older than even such senior francophone figures as Leopold Sedar Senghor and Birago Diop (who also grew up in the far more established colonial confines of the Senegal coast) and is considerably older than the Nigerian literary pioneers, Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi. Yet it is Hampate Ba, with his rather limited formal French education, who pro? duced probably the richest literary account of colonialism in L'etrange des? tin de Wangrin (discussed elsewhere in this issue). In the memoir of his own childhood, Amkoulkl, Hampate Ba provides us with not only another classic account of the lived colonial experience, but also an insight into the process by which an African scholar and verbal artist could find a voice: first as a contributor to the colonial project of recording (and even creating) tradition and then to the rendition of his own life through a particularly effective form of European-language literature. The title of this book comes from a nickname that Hampate Ba acquired in his childhood and continued to use later in life.3 It translates as

The rise of China as a key actor on the African continent not only challenges the Western dominance in economic and political terms, Beijing is increasingly also offering a challenge on a different level, by contesting the Eurocentric history that has underpinned the West’s policies towards African countries throughout the modern era. In order to bolster the Sino-African relationship, this article argues that Beijing is propagating towards African publics a range of historical narratives about African history and the Sino-African relationship. Developing and testing a theoretical framework for analysing these historical narratives, the research finds that this Chinese history of Africa represents China’s recent actions on the African continent as incarnations of a long historical tradition of friendship and anti-colonial support, thus serving the role of legitimizing Chinese policies as well as delegitimizing Western powers’ economic and political strategies.

In recent years, the fine arts, architecture, music and literature have increasingly been examined from the vantage point of human ethology and evolutionary psychology. In 2011 the authors formed the research group 'Ethology of the Arts' concentrating on the evolution and biology of perception and behaviour. These novel approaches aim at a better understanding of the various facets represented by the arts by taking into focus possible phylogenetic adaptations, which have shaped the artistic capacities of our ancestors. Rather than culture specificity, which is stressed e.g. by cultural anthropology and numerous other disciplines, universal human tendencies to perceive, feel, think and behave are postulated. Artistic expressive behaviour is understood as an integral part of the human condition, whether expressed in ritual, visual, verbal or musical art. The Ethology of the Arts-group's research focuses on visual and verbal art, music and built environment/architecture and is designed to contribute to the incipient interdisciplinarity in the field of evolutionary art research.

28 What motivates middle grades students? What consumes much of their time when they are not in the classroom? What do they study most passionately, most intensely, most devotedly? Those who know and teach in middle schools would agree that the culture which captures the minds and hearts of young people revolves around music and the visual arts. Young adolescents are veritable experts on their brand of the arts, as exhibited by their knowledge of the most popular compact disc or recently released video for TV. There may be a message in this phenomenon for classroom teachers and curriculum developers. Middle grades students can be motivated and educated more fully by consciously moving the arts out of the ivory tower, over the drawbridge, and into the world of the young. The National Endowment for the Arts (1988) suggests four purposes for including arts in the school curriculum: (a) to give our young people a sense of civilization, (b) to foster creativity, (c) to teach communication, and (d) to provide tools for critical assessment of what one reads, sees, and hears. All of these goals are compatible with the educational goals of science, math, social studies, and language arts. Furthermore, the middle school is a place where links subject areas should be explored. Interdisciplinary integrative activities enable young adolescents to construct meaning and make connections and the world. The arts give coherence, depth, and resonance to other academic subjects according to William Bennett (1988, p. 4). Language arts teachers, for example, are beginning to explore connections between the visual and verbal arts, seeing and responding, envisioning and composing (National Council of Teachers of English, 1989, p. 13). Although classroom teachers are not arts specialists, nor should they be considered such, they do have the opportunity to enhance their own subject areas and arts education in general by sharing knowledge and appreciation of art with young people. Arts specialists in middle schools can be valuable resources for classroom

Space, like body, is one of those too-large terms that defies precise categorization: it is nothing and everything at once. And yet, space, like body has concrete and strategic meanings. Through ekphrasis, it extends farther, reveals itself conceptually larger and more elastic than the confines of an aesthetic conception limited to the material arts allow. The space of the mystical-vision text, for instance, unfurls territories that in our current ideological milieu cannot be mapped cleanly, for reasons pertaining to authenticity claims discussed in the previous chapter. But the spatiality of the mystical vision text ensures expansion into compositions not certain, not defined, a composition that hazily shifts, and unsolid itself, represents unsolid bodies. The space the mystical vision occupies is then confusing to the theorist of ekphrasis because a large part of the long theoretical conversation about ekphrasis has dedicated itself firmly to the respective ideological relationships of the visual and verbal arts to dimensions of space and time. Renaissance and Enlightenment thought about the arts attributed the dimension of space to the qualities with which visual art is concerned, whereas the relationship of the verbal arts to their represented action was thought to be governed by time. Again, this formulation begins with da Vinci’s paragone and becomes even more cemented in Western aesthetic critical tradition with Lessing’s Laocoon, in which he aligns the visual arts with the extension of bodies in space and the verbal arts with actions in time, stating that one or the other art can only enter into “suitable relation” with its respective dimension.1

Ekphrastic poetry – that is, poetry inspired by visual artworks – often rests on the unspoken assumption that visual and verbal art are, if not interchangeable, at least compatible. The premise of this chapter is that the use of ekphrasis in poetry often reveals the limitations of this foundational analogy, thereby confirming a distinction established in the eighteenth century in G.E. Lessing’s seminal essay “Laokoӧn”. My examples, Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Swinburne’s “Before the Mirror”, illustrate that the visual arts and poetry are discrete aesthetic forms relying on fundamentally different representational procedures, the former representing objects, the other actions.

Winckelmann's aesthetic of edie Einfalt and stille Grosse1 may be said to have provoked two especially vigorous polemic responses in German literature:2 Lessing's Laokoon and Nietzsche's Geburt der Tragodie.3 In 1766, with his debut in the field of antiquarian studies, Lessing asserts in his essay that the seeming tranquility of the Laocoon sculpture reflects the specific requirements of its medium rather than a general ideal equally applicable to the visual and verbal arts, which is to say between the arts whose signs [Zeichen] are arranged adjacently in space and those whose signs are arranged sequentially in time. A century later, the classical philologist Nietzsche publishes his own first major study in aesthetics, arguing that the much admired equilibrium of Greek art works is the result of a battle between two opposing forces: the Apollonian, a principle of visual and plastic harmony that upholds the integrity of the individual self (Schopenhauer's principium individuationis) against a contrary, principle of melodic flux (die erschfitternde Gewalt des Tones; KGA 3:1:29) that threatens the self with dissolution. The Apollonian and the Dionysian are not exclusively allied to particular art forms (for instance, Nietzsche speaks of a type of primarily rhythmic and architectonic music that is thus also Apollonian [KGA 3:1:29]). Like Lessing, however, Nietzsche rejects a Winckelmannian, unitary categorization of the Greek arts-and Greek culture in general-in favor of an agonistic polarity between an aesthetics of space and an aesthetics of time. Yet even as they explicitly or implicitly reject his conclusions, both Lessing and Nietzsche stand within a tradition of thinking for which Winckelmann is largely responsible. This tradition assumes that any serious discussion of aesthetics must begin with Greek art as its point of departure, and that an examination of Greece must lend the basis for a critical analysis of modern German culture. Winckelmann, of course, provides an important model for the writing of both art history and cultural history. Moreover, Winckelmann establishes for German thought the overriding importance of the human body as a reference point for such analysis: both as an object of artistic representation and as a metaphor for an entire culture's aesthetic and moral integrity. This article focuses on the human body as a problem of historiography that connects Lessing's Laokoon and a text that closely follows Die Geburt der Tragodie, both chronologically and thematically: Nietzsche's essay Vom Nutzen and Nachteil der Historie fur das Leben. I will argue that the two works-Laokoon and Nietzsche's essay on history-pursue a similar logic in adopting images of the convulsed human body to represent a moment of cultural crisis in which historiography and aesthetics are equally involved. By examining the role of the body in these two essays, I also propose to show the degree to which Nietzsche's early philosophy of culture is indebted to an 18t-century, neoclassical debate over the distinctions separating the arts. According to Lessing, it will be remembered, the proper objects of the verbal arts (which is to say verbal narrative arts) are actions, while the visual arts more appropriately restrict themselves to representations of bodies in space, or Korper. In the Winckelmannian tradition, Lessing begins by focusing on harmonious represents. tions of the unclothed human body ([der] organisiert[e] Korper; L 58). The borders or Grenzen indicated in Lessing's subtitle are not only those dividing one art form from another, but also those bodily contours whose integrity comes into question at the very moment in which a visual representation transgresses its proper boundaries. Though Lessing first introduces the word Korper as a general term signifying things in space, his text remains consistently preoccupied with the fate of the human body, which in turn serves as a metaphor for a more or less successfully integrated sense of individual or cultural identity. …

The article is devoted to the study of peculiarities of intermedial relationships in biographical works about artists. Based on V. Domontovych’s fictionalized biography «A Lonesome Traveller Walking along a Lonesome Road» and Ralph Dutli’s novel «Soutine’s Last Journey» («Soutines letzte Fahrt»), it analyses the inter-artistic interaction of literature and painting, traces how the translation is done from the language of visual art into the language of literary work, and how the artist’s creative heritage and especially the peculiarities of his artistic technique influence the poetics of the biographical novel. Applying the methodology of intermedial analysis, it explores the ways in which art manifests itself on compositional, poetical, linguistic and stylistic levels in the novels about artists. The interaction of the verbal and fine arts is analysed at the level of thematization, construction of the artist’s image and description of the creative process. The intermediality of biographical novels about Vincent van Gogh and Chaim Soutine is considered through the transfer of features of a work of fine art into verbal art, through the employment of the main means of image creation in painting, such as colour, line, composition, etc. Based on the artistic practices of avant-garde art, the artists under analysis worked within, particular attention is paid to the identification of the poetical principles of artistic trends in the style of a literary work, that is, naturalistic and impressionist elements in Van Gogh’s biography and expressionist and surrealist elements in the novel about Soutine. In addition, the role of a pictorial quotation in the biographical fiction about the artist is worked out. A significant attention in biographical novels about artists is given to artistic detail and ekphrasis. Novels about artists provide rich material for the research of the dialogue between literature and fine arts not only for literary scholars but also for art critics.

EXILE, NARRATIVE, AND MIGRATION IN AFRICAN HISTORY - Africans in Exile: Mobility, Law and Identity. Edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance and Nathan Riley Carpenter. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018. Pp. 384. 85.00, hardcover (ISBN: 9780253038074). - Volume 62 Issue 1

In this research about the comparative studies of the Natural environment and the cities, the author intends to focus on different kinds of literary genres and texts through which the relation between the concept of Nature and different cities would be studied and examined. The author uses various perspectives of seeing different works - especially visual arts and verbal arts – in terms of culture and humanity. By doing so, the author hopes to bring a better understanding towards the true meaning of these selected literary forms and texts. These literary genres and texts were selected and were aimed to observe the relation between Nature and culture, between Nature and the cities, and most importantly, between the animals and the human beings. It is significant to read the relations among the human beings and the natural environment and the animals, because in a way, the human beings would be able to find balance in which the human beings would even be able to find the true meaning of freedom and the true meaning of life through the inspiration of the things around them. In the similar fashion, when the human beings are aware of the conditions in which they are situated in, somehow, they are also able to express humanity through artistic forms and narratives, particularly visually and verbally. Works of painting and works of photography in literary forms – such as in the novels, the poems, the short stories and the dramatic plays – will be appreciated and will be analysed as aesthetic narratives.

The Theology of Painting:Picturing Philosophy in Velázquez's Las Meninas Matthew Ancell Theory has often been regarded in early modern studies as an irresponsible guest at best, and, at worst, an unwelcome intruder. While early modern cultural production has served theorists well as they explore their own projects, theory is sometimes ungrounded in historical specificity. Though early modern art history has been especially resistant to theory, strong theoretical voices have emerged, including Svetlana Alpers, Mieke Bal, Michael Fried, Hanneke Grootenboer, Maria Loh, Lyle Massey, and Itay Sapir. Not all of them employ theory explicitly, but their approaches indicate a strong theoretical subculture in art history that successfully navigates the terrain between history and theory. These critics show that the best theory is historically grounded, and can tell us much about how works are inherently theoretical, philosophical, theological, or theo-philosophical in their historical context. Part of what I hope to demonstrate in this essay is that traditional art history and more theoretical approaches are complementary, despite the obvious antagonism between them. Just as traditional art historical concerns (such as provenance, patronage, and influence) are essential to a responsible theoretical interpretation of an image, theory—even "high" or French theory, particularly reviled by traditionalists—can illuminate aspects (such as philosophical ones, as I will argue here) that traditional methodologies might ignore. James Elkins has articulated the divide between art history and aesthetics, concluding that art history ultimately does not ask the same questions as aesthetics does, nor does it even see the same issues as questions (48). Similarly, Jorge J. E. Gracia argues that "[o]ne of the greatest sources of misunderstanding concerning interpretation is the belief that all interpretations have, or should have, the same aim" (158). The problem goes even further than that, since the questions and approaches are often not as purely parsed as the different disciplines maintain. Gracia explains that not only do interpreters rarely only pursue one kind of interpretation but they are often also vague about what their aims are. Some interpretations seek the "meaning" of an object, which could be conceived variously: significance, reference, intention, ideas, and use. Other interpretations are "relational" in that their goal is to understand the relation of an object, or its meaning, to something [End Page 156] else (165). In the antagonism between art historical and philosophical interpretations, I maintain that we can find some common ground in acknowledging that: (1) both camps engage in relational as well as meaning interpretations; (2) what constitutes a relation or how meaning is defined often differ; and (3) these differences of approach do not invalidate each one or make combination unproductive, but the contrary. The question that I wish to address in this essay, then, is how a philosophically-driven, theoretical methodology, such as that employed by Michel Foucault, might attune us to ways in which art enacts philosophy as part of its meaning—not anachronistically, but in a manner consonant with its historical moment in relation to contemporary discourses. As W. J. T. Mitchell argues in his book Picture Theory, "there are no 'purely' visual or verbal arts"; "all media are 'mixed media'" (5). Mitchell's goal is not to develop a "'picture theory' (much less a theory of pictures), but to picture theory as a practical activity in the formation of representations" (6). Mieke Bal proposes that if "visual art makes any sense at all beyond the narrow domain of beauty and the affective domain of pleasure, it is because art, too, thinks; it is thought. Not the thought about it, or the thought expressed in it, but visual thought, the thought embodied in form" (117). I would like to ask what it might mean to picture philosophy or theology by looking at the case of Diego Velázquez and the reception of his most famous work, Las Meninas (1656). Perhaps no more ink needs to be spilt on Las Meninas, but much of what has been written about it in the last thirty-five years dramatizes the issue at hand and provides an interesting case study. If art can picture theory and embody thought, then it certainly can perform the operations of theory, philosophy, and theology. When...