BEYOND THE TRADITION/MODERNITY DIALECTIC

Abstract

In this essay I explore the ambivalent subject positions manifest in South African black middle class visual culture of the early twentieth century. I contend that the way moderate assimilationism was articulated in public discourse (and particularly the black press), differed substantially from the way it was employed in individual black artists’ oeuvres. While advertisements in the black press advocated moderate assimilationism by appealing to the material and political aspirations of the upwardly mobile black working and middle classes; individual artists, in the more private and contemplative sphere of fine art, had the opportunity to articulate the full range of conflicting subjective modalities involved in being both bourgeois and black in the Union of South Africa. I propose that the modernity/tradition dialectic, which is strongly implicated in assimilation as strategy, is mobilized as a crude binary in the press, while it articulates a profoundly conflicted and ambivalent subjectivity in the art of black painters such as Milwa Pemba. In this regard, I explore some of the aporias that flow from the fact that the task of black national self-representation should ironically have befallen a literate minority of missionary-trained Africans, who, by the very nature of their education, were economically and culturally alienated from the oppressed majority they were representing. I demonstrate how one of the most essential mechanisms of national construction – the mobilization of naturalized myths of racial or cultural origin – constituted a fraught and problematic modality for the middle-class black artists, whose approach to tradition was characterized by a profoundly ambivalent blend of pride, nostalgia and shame. I also demonstrate, briefly, how different and overlapping African nationalist strategies in Pemba's art correspond to stages identified by Franz Fanon in the unfolding of African nationalism.