In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 Jeanne Garane Elizabeth Harney . In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. xxv + 316 pp. In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995 examines the relationship between the visual arts and government patronage in Senegal from the beginnings of this patronage in the early 1960s under the leadership of Senegal's first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, to the development in the late 1970s of an anti-Negritude "avant-garde" that distanced itself from the so-called Ecole de Dakar, the school "mainly associated with the teaching mechanisms and visual productions of the government-endowed art academy and textile center"(10). In this study, Elizabeth Harney thoroughly examines the ways in which Senghor, the co-founder, practitioner, and theorist of Négritude, used his understanding of a philosophy that he famously defined as "the assembly of the values of black civilization" (qtd. in Harney 21) as the basis for a national arts patronage system in Senegal that was intimately tied to a nationalist canonization of his vision of "Africanité," or "authentic African essence." In reference to the title of this valuable study, Harney demonstrates that Senghor's legacy casts "a long shadow over debates about the role of the artist, the structure of the art market, and the relationship between formations of identity and artistic practice" in contemporary Senegal (5). In order to trace the impact of Senghor's philosophy of Négritude on the contemporary Senegalese "art world" (using the work of Arthur Danto and Pierre Bourdieu, the author defines this term as a space where agents such as producers, consumers, patrons, critics, collectors, dealers, curators and art historians use symbolic, cultural, and economic capital to compete for resources and interests, [54-5]), Harney carefully and meticulously retraces the history of Negritude, from its beginnings in Paris as a literary movement and its connection to writers of the Harlem Renaissance, to Senghor's elaboration of his particular brand of Négritude as a philosophy of "universal humanism" (versus, for [End Page 352] instance, Martinican co-founder Aimé Césaire's own understanding and use of the term as a coming to consciousness and acceptance of the legacy of slavery in the French West Indies). She explains that in Senghor's view, the arts were to serve as a tool for advancing his cultural, political, and economic development plans, with "the artist as representative of and advocate for a new nation"(5). In addition, and most helpfully, Harney also reminds the reader of Senegal's historic ties to France and the history of Senegal's four communes (Dakar, Saint Louis, Rufisque, and Gorée), whose inhabitants held French citizenship rights. So doing, she lays the groundwork for explaining the contentious relationship between the French colonial policy of assimilation, Senghorian Négritude, and European modernism in her investigation of artistic practices in the Dakarois art world. Even as Harney investigates the role of Senghor's nationalistic Négritude policies in the production of modernist Senegalese art (defined as co-terminous with the art produced in Dakar after independence in 1960 and as a term that complements the word "contemporary" to refer to arts produced in the same period [17]), she also reassesses European and North American formulations of modernism in this study of so-called "parallel" or "alternative" modernities (5). She writes, "new ways of thinking about authenticity, cosmopolitanism, and hybridity move beyond . . . exoticized provincialism to consider . . . the contemporary cultural productions of non-Western artists under a more nuanced rubric of criticism"(8). Indeed, Harney critiques Western discourse on the visual arts that has "aesthetic modernism as the sole property of Western artists . . . artists living within the former third world have never been afforded the status either of contributing members to the modernist canon or of participants in a global modern matrix"(17). Harney shows that even after Senghor's resignation in 1980 and dwindling state support for the arts resulted in a shift from state-sponsored art to independent production, the international marketplace continues to evaluate...