Rethinking Defintions of African Traditional and Popular Arts

Abstract

Karin Barber's thoughtful and substantial overview of popular arts in Africa comes at a critical juncture in the development of this field of study. Only in the past decade has a dialogue been initiated among scholars in the various disciplines who study popular arts. Barber's essay stands as an important contribution to this dialogue. Her commentary reflects the richness and complexity of this potential field of study whose purview includes visual, literary, and performance arts. Studies of the popular arts consistently describe them as topical, new, innovative, and modern. Most scholars, Barber included, identify the emergence of an African popular art with one setting and one period, the urban colonial and post-colonial world. A plethora of new arts combining local African and Western forms have emerged and been documented precisely during this period. Barber identifies this syncretism as a characteristic feature of African popular art. She argues persuasively that many contemporary urban popular arts seem to derive their vitality and energy from the scale and tempo of this change and to be fundamentally about this change. Although this definition of popular arts in Africa is especially seductive to scholars because of the scale and tempo of change in the colonial and post-colonial urban setting, it risks too close an identification of African popular arts with one period and setting and denies them any history within the pre-colonial era and within non-urban settings. The ahistorical tendency of most studies of popular arts arises in part from scholars' retention of a Western model of art which categorizes the arts as folk/traditional, popular, and elite. Barber notes that the Western tripartite classification is still invoked with only minor modifications in most accounts of African popular arts. The paradigm which characterized African traditional society and its arts as closed, consensual and unchanging has been successfully challenged in the past decades by Africanists in history, anthropology, and art history. Few scholars would now assert that “traditional” societies or their arts were ever static or frozen. Yet, it is still tacitly held in studies of popular arts that African “traditional” arts are monolithic and undifferentiated in their local setting and thus they are all subject to the same rate of change.