Abstract
The question of aesthetics, memory, and changes in Africa are raised from several perspectives. A few European scholars alleged Africa did not have a past and could not produce aesthetics, material or immaterial resources to share with the world, for its past was empty, and a-historical. Unfortunately, these scholars’ arguments influenced history, justified colonization, slavery, and their multidimensional violence. This paper gives a quick survey of these moments and underlines false accusations against Africa. The question of aesthetics, memory, and changes in Africa are raised from several perspectives. A few European scholars alleged Africa did not have a past and could not produce aesthetics, material or immaterial resources to share with the world, for its past was empty, and a-historical. Unfortunately, these scholars’ arguments influenced history, justified colonization, slavery, and their multidimensional violence. This paper gives a quick survey of these moments and underlines false accusations against Africa. Contributions from scholars from the South such as Mudimbe, Mbembe, Bhabha, and Appadurai attested spectacular results combining findings from archaeologists, historians, art historians, anthropologists, linguists, culturalists, musicologists, and philosophers in interdisciplinary studies. Africa has always been a vibrant cultural continent that colonization and slavery defiled. Borrowing Apter’s question about “what should be done” concerning all findings on African aesthetics and history, the text invites scholars to push ahead in their quest of communications, comparisons, originalities drawn from the distant African past, adapted to local, global, Diaspora’s dynamics, and glocal perspectives. It is time to stop accusations and complaints on the past for turning to documented global visibility.
Highlights
It is quite challenging to get a coherent and continuous thought narrative line when writing about a topic that turns around “continuity and discontinuity” as human thoughts develop continuously from one departure point (APPIAH, 2013)
Let us consider that a good pretext for getting into the material discussed in this paper should be found in the development of argumentation based on the stuff that is all around people in Africa, and its contribution to the actualization, continuity, discontinuity, orinvention of aesthetics
Ayotunde Isola Bewaji (2015), Ranta (2015), Kapchan (2007), Touré (2018), and Ododo (2001) insist on African aesthetics and its myriad multiform expressionism that shows the multiplicity of beauty in opposing the Sacred and the Profane
Summary
It is quite challenging to get a coherent and continuous thought narrative line when writing about a topic that turns around “continuity and discontinuity” as human thoughts develop continuously from one departure point (APPIAH, 2013). The narrator and his audience or the writer and his readers are called to keep in mind the main features that characterize the linear progress interrupted from place to place in what is labeled discontinuity. The main exercise to undertake will have to reveal details that prove the contrary to the statements that claim the inexistence of aesthetics, and the historical growth of African communities
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