New Masks, New Meanings: Covid Perspectives on African Art History: Part 1: Behind The Mask: African Art History in a Pandemic Era

Abstract

This two-part First Word offers perspectives on the world we find ourselves in as Africanist art historians, as we continue to move through an extraordinarily unsettling, unpredictable period. Our shared academic discipline encourages us to think about masks as essential cultural expressions. Do art historical insights into masks and masquerades help us to think about masks of other varieties in a pandemic world? How has our pandemic world shed light on the challenges of conducting research abroad? In what follows, two members of the UNC Editorial Board contemplate these questions. Part 1 was contributed by Victoria L. Rovine, part 2 by Lisa Homann.As I write this First Word, in the midst of yet another twist in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, masks have been on my mind. As mask mandates are lifted, reimposed, and debated, one yearns for an end to the disease, the discord, and the glaring inequities this pandemic has thrown into high relief. Along with Omicron-fueled attention to N95 and KN95 varieties, I have the pleasure of thinking about many of my colleagues’ research on other types of masks and masquerades—all African, and many contemporary—as I am teaching a summer course on the topic. Indeed, masks are the visual expression par excellence of the pandemic. Immersed in masks, both as expressive African art forms at the center of multimedia performances and as aesthetically unremarkable accessories, I find myself imagining their power in new ways, admiring their ability to safeguard prosperity, protect communities, provide a sense of belonging, an occasion for celebration (Fig. 1).N95 masks have none of the panache of a fine masquerade performance, but they have gained the cultural force of a powerful masquerade society, drawing authority from spiritual and political sanction, undergirded by emotional appeal. While one might expect that empirical science—experimentation and evidence—would sustain the practice of pandemic masking, it seems to depend as much on faith as on science. While my aim is not to draw direct comparisons between these two realms of masking, the transformational power of masquerade may prove “good to think” about other face coverings that are imbued with the power to protect people and communities.As readers of this journal well know, masks have long been—and continue to be—emblematic of African visual art, particularly the “Classical” sculptural forms that populate museums and private collections. Attention to masks abounds across the historiography of our field, from the nineteenth century to the present. Frobenius's 1898, African Masks and Secret Societies assembled images of masks in its numerous plates, providing a catalogue of forms that offered very little visual information about the masks as they were worn. Today, the continued currency of masquerade practices and masquerade study is evident in the wealth of recent scholarship on individual masquerade artists, masquerade innovations, urbanity, and economics. Jordan Fenton's Masquerade and Money in Urban Nigeria: The Case of Calabar (2022) represents this rich vein of research, which documents the relevance of masks and masquerades to contemporary African lives (Carlson 2019, Gagliardi 2018, Homann 2018, Uwaegbute 2021, Maples 2018, McNaughton 2008, Reed 2018, Kart 2020, Willis 2018, Rea 2022, Israel 2014). Studio artists from Africa extend that relevance—Hervé Youmbi (Forni 2016), Zina Saro-Wiwa, Sokari Douglas Camp, and Romuald Hazoumé, among others, have drawn on the resonance of masquerade.African masks may also exemplify dissonance and dislocation—a longstanding pandemic of a different sort—severed from their costumes and contexts to serve new meanings, new markets. African masks float isolated in museum cases, perched atop thin rods, a universe away from the moving bodies of wearers, the audiences, music, costumes, and histories. Despite the longstanding recognition of this amputation of form from intention, institutions struggle to restore these contexts through technologies of museum display. As Savage described in a 2008 article in this journal: “Masks pose vexing questions for museum curators, not only as an uncomfortable legacy of colonial collecting practices, but because they inevitably suggest an absence” (2008: 74). McClusky, in Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, characterized the exhibition of masks alone as “the heads of missing bodies” (2015: 78).As Africanist art historians, we understand masks and masquerades as expressions of artistic, spiritual, political, economic, and very broadly cultural practices. Their expressive capacities shift and change, drawing on the needs, inspirations, and expectations of audiences, markets, artists. When their intentions are disregarded or erased, they signify lack, absence, dislocation. Can these rich masking practices find relevance as we consider the cultures of COVID masking?In his meditation on the continuities between Africa's “two major pandemics,” COVID-19 and and coloniality, archaeologist Ibrahima Thiaw (2020) points to the success of a distinctively African approach to the virus, one in which I see a culture of community that resembles the practice of masquerade. First, Thiaw addresses the early pandemic discourse on Africa, in which global health experts predicted millions of deaths, governmental failures on apocalyptic scale—expectations “informed by colonial fantasy and fetishization” (Thiaw 2020: 477). These visions of Africa reveal more about the observers than their ostensible subjects, like masks torn from their social contexts. These predications have thus far proven unfounded—Africa appears in US press coverage as a COVID mystery, and as largely a success story, particularly when measured against the United States’ own catastrophic numbers. Going further, Thiaw credits a Senegalese cultural value, or in his phrase, a Senegalese aesthetic: teranga. Thiaw defines this concept as a means of “living together by creating a space where solidarity and mutual aid, exchanges and donations, gender bonding, communal sovereignty, political and religious alliances, sharing and circulation of information, and much more are deployed.” This, for me, evokes the intentions of much masquerade; these are the values that maintain masquerade's contemporary relevance, and that make its forms evocative sources for the work of contemporary studio artists. Were we all to adopt teranga culture, our medical masks might take on a different meaning, even a new aesthetic: solidarity, alliance, community, all marked by the mask.