Beautiful-ugly: African and diaspora aesthetics

Abstract

Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics. Edited by Sarah Nuttal. Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 416. $27.95 paper. Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, edited by Sarah Nuttal, is an ambitious project that attempts to explore the intersection between Western, Diaspora, and African notions of the beautiful and the ugly through a wide range of topics, places, and media for capturing this elusive meeting point. Quite literally, the more than eighteen essays, by African and Africanist scholars like Gikandi, Mbembe, Barnard, Clarke, and Gevisser, among others, attempt to understand that primal point of experience where both the grotesque and the gorgeous merge. In postcolonial African and Diaspora perspectives, this point often occurs when creative expression is able to captivate audiences' imagination in a range of ways that help different publics work together to create zones that move towards the sublime, towards the grotesque, towards the humorous, and even towards fear. Nuttal's Introduction grapples first with the Kantian idea of Africa serving as Europe's Other, which creates the dyadic notion of the beautiful and the ugly, historically and as a philosophy of interpretation in Occidental thought. However, Nuttal quickly moves the reader towards the central tension that holds the essays in this volume together, that is, how to understand postcolonial African forms of aesthetic expression that speak around, against, and even distort this fundamental dyad in Western aesthetics. With an irony and self reference in mind, the ways that the authors in this volume explore African expression illustrate that the aesthetics that matter, that draw fascination and attention from African and Diasporic audiences, comment upon the play between the relationship of the beautiful and the ugly in an international forum. Some mention of key pieces may help to illuminate the gist of the volume further. Simon Gikandi' s opening piece, Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference, gets to the central issue of whose, (European? African?), modernism and affinity can actually be understood by reading Africanisms in Picasso's art. In another context, Achille Mbembe, in exploring sound and symbolism in Congolese music forces us to question the relationship between beauty and pleasure in Variations on the Beautiful in Congolese Worlds of Sound. But, it is perhaps Michelle Gilbert's essay, Things Ugly: Ghanaian Popular Painting, that embodies the uncanny and captivating no-man's land, the imaginary scape that allows for the negotiations between the beautiful and the ugly to take place, for the volume. …