Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments This article is a revised version of a public lecture given at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond as part of the Art History Faculty Lecture Series, 11 October 2006. An earlier draft (titled ‘The renascent figure in African and African Diaspora art’) was presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Washington, D.C., November 2005. I am grateful to Fredrika Jacobs, Michael Schreffler, Robert Hobbs, Richard Powell, Suzanne Blier, Jean Borgatti, John Dixon Hunt and the anonymous readers of Word & Image for their useful comments. Special thanks to William Marshall Mount, Larry Grobel, Doran Ross, Marla Berns, Mary Jo Arnoldi, Nii Quarcoopome, David Boxer, Verlee Popueye, Easton Rankine, Kerry Lucinda Brown, Kristina Keogh, Karen Dalton and Sheldon Cheek for helping to locate and obtain permission for some of the illustrations. Notes 1 – See Adrian Room, African Placenames (North Carolina and London: McFarland and Company, 1994), pp. 13–4 and Henry L. Gates, Wonders of the African World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 18–9. 2 – See Jean Vercoutter, Jean Leclant, Frank M. Snowden and Jehan Desanges, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1976), Vol. 1, figures 282 and 286. 3 – Carl Mooreland and David Bannister, Antique Maps, Christies Collector's Guides, 3rd ed (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989), p. 263. For a fifteenth-century map based on Ptolemy's account, see Jean M. Massing, ‘World Map from Claudius Ptolemy, Geography, c. 1466’, in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay A. Levenson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 228–9 (plate 127). 4 – See also John B. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 10–20, 34–56. 5 – Ironically, certain biblical passages (such as Genesis 20: 3, 31: 24; Psalm 18: 9–12 and Numbers 12: 6, 22: 20, among others) contradict the popular association of darkness with evil. By speaking of God as appearing to the prophets in a dream, at night or surrounded by a veil of darkness, these passages identify darkness as a symbol of His presence and an appropriate moment for divine communication and redemption. For a detailed analysis of blackness/darkness as a positive Christian symbol, see Eulalio P. Baltazar, The Dark Center: A Process Theology of Blackness (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), pp. 129–65. As Baltazar points out (p. 147), the tendency to equate blackness or darkness with evil stems from the fact that its negative associations in the scripture are more than the positive ones. See also Jean Marie Courtes, ‘The Theme of “Ethiopia” and “Ethiopians” in Patristic Literature’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Part 2, No. 1, ed. Jean Devisse (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 9–32. 6 – Didymus The Blind, Sur Zacharie 4. 312 (SC, no. 85), Vol. III, pp. 964–5; cited in Courtes, ‘The Theme of “Ethiopia” and “Ethiopians” in Patristic Literature’, p. 16. 7 – Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), p. 37. During this period, Jerusalem became the symbolic ‘navel’ of the earth. See Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, p. 44 and Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 232–3. 8 – See, for example, P.F. De Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles and Songhay-Tuareg History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Published for the British Academy, 2004). 9 – Kate Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 17 (2007), pp. 101–208 and Ezio Basani and William Fagg, Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory (Munich and New York: Prestel, 1988). 10 – According to some scholars, European colonization and exploitation of new lands would be turned into a kind of territorial encounter with gender and sexual connotations in the ‘Age of Exploration’, thus adding new meanings to their female personification. See Louise Montrose, ‘The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery’, Representations, 33 (Winter 1991), pp. 1–41 and Michael Schreffler, ‘Vespucci Discovers America: The Pictorial Rhetoric of Cannibalism in Early Modern Culture’, Art History, 28, no. 3 (June 2005), p. 295. I am not interested in the sexual undertones of the trope in this essay, except where it is unmistakable. 11 – Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art, 1725–1907 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 16–7. See also Dorinda Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment (Los Angeles: Gerry Publications, 2006), p. 144. 12 – Clare Le Corbeiller, ‘Miss America and Her Sisters: Personifications of the Four Parts of the World’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, xix, no. 8 (April 1961), pp. 210–1. 13 – Schreffler, ‘Vespucci Discovers America’, p. 17, figures 1.1 and 1.2. See also Connelly, The Sleep of Reason, figure 7. 14 – Illustrated in Heinz Landendorf, Andreas Schluter (Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag, 1937), figure 94. The palace was destroyed during World War II. See Hans-Joachim Kunst, The African in European Art (Bad Godesberg: Inter Nationes, 1967), plate 35. 15 – It will be recalled that the Romans used the lion, elephant and serpent motifs in their personification of the goddess Africa. While medieval scholars such as Saint Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) mentioned these motifs in their writings, it was the Italian iconographer Caesare Ripa (1560–1625?) who popularized them in Europe through his book Iconologia, first published in 1593. In view of Ripa's identification of the lion as a mascot, it is unlikely that the recumbent woman in Schluter's Africa is dead, more so when there is no sign that she has been attacked by the animal. As a matter of fact, none of the personifications of Africa that I have seen so far portrays the continent as dead. Of course, many Western artists have represented dead blacks in various contexts. A good example is William Sidney Mount's (ca. 1867) painting titled Dawn of Day (Politically Dead). Even here, the painting is not about Africa, but the American Civil War during which the antislavery position of the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, encouraged thousands of blacks to enroll in the victorious Union Army. According to William Mount, a Democrat, the rooster represents the Republican Party ‘trying to make more capital out of the negro who is about used up for their purpose’. [See Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), pp. 99–100 and Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710–1940 (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1990), p. 23]. 16 – See Charles Avery, Bernini: Genius of Baroque (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 198 and Ludovico Pratesi and Laura Rendina, Roman Fountains by Bernini, the Baroque Master (Roma: Ingegneria per la Cultura, 1999), p. 27. 17 – For more information on Schluter's background, see Landendorf, Andreas Schluter, esp., pp. 10–2. See also Hans-Joachim Kunst, The African in European Art, p. 24. 18 – Close to the African figure is a lion, recalling Caesar Ripa's Iconologia. Although Bernini designed the fountain, his assistants executed the statues; one of the assistants, Antonio Fancelli, carved the Nile figure. 19 – Filippo Baldinucci, Vita di Bernini (Florence, 1682); quoted by Howard Hibbard, Bernini (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 121. 20 – It should be noted that the veil has different meanings in the Scriptures, depending on the context. Apart from ignorance, it also signifies marriage, propriety, sacredness, concealment or protection and so on. See for instance, Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (London: Penguin Books, 1996), pp. 1062–4 and Paul Hills, ‘Titian Veils’, Art History, 29, no. 5 (November 2006), p. 771. 21 – See especially The Jerusalem Bible (TJB) of the Roman Catholic Church (based on Greek and Hebrew texts), first translated into English in 1966 and published by Doubleday and Company, Inc., New York. Unless otherwise noted, indented biblical quotations are from TJB. 22 – From the King James Version of the Bible. 23 – According to the new interpretation (dating back to the fourth century), Noah had three sons, namely Japhet (identified with Europe), Sem (identified with Asia) and Ham (the youngest and the father of Canaan, the ancestor of the Ethiopians or blacks). One day, Noah drank too much alcohol and fell asleep naked on the ground. Ham saw him and told his brothers who took a piece of cloth, walked backward and then covered their father's body. When Noah recovered and learned that Ham had seen his naked body, he cursed Canaan (Ham's son). Thus blacks, cast as the descendants of Canaan, became associated with the curse, despite the fact that the Bible does not identify Canaan and Ham as black. Even some of the antebellum Americans who opposed slavery still argued that it had been sanctioned by God to allow black Africans to be Christianized and civilized and return to civilize their kinsmen in Africa. For a critique of Noah's curse, see Gene Rice, ‘The Curse that Never Was (Genesis 9: 18–27)’, Journal of Religious Thought, 29 (1972), pp. 6–26 and Cain H. Felder, ‘Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives’, in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain H. Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 127–45. 24 – See, for instance, Bishop William Taylor, The Flaming Torch in Darkest Africa (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1898). On page 21, he described Christian missionaries as ‘bearers of light’. 25 – Herbert Ward, A Voice from the Congo (London: Heinemann, 1910). 26 – Ibid. 27 – Though striking a different pose, this figure reminds one of Michelangelo's female allegory of ‘Night’ (1519–1534) on the marble tomb of Gulliano de’ Medici in Florence, Italy. 28 – For details, see also Freeman H.M. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (Washington, DC: Press of Murray Brothers, Inc., 1916), pp. 92–102, 208–15. 29 – Boime, The Art of Exclusion, p. 10. According to the author, paintings by the famous nineteenth century American realist, William Sidney Mount (1807–1868), betray a similar mindset. For instance, his Farmer's Nooning (1836) features five fieldworkers on noonday break, four whites and one black. The latter is asleep while the others are awake. According to Mount's biographer, the painting is intended to demonstrate ‘How lazily lolls the sleeping negro on the hay … [while] the white laborers are naturally disposed about their farming implements’. (p. 93). See also Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 11–2. 30 – Ibid., pp. 10–1. 31 – Roland Barthes, ‘Rethoric of the Image’, 1964, in Image-Music-Text, Essays, Selected and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 30–51. 32 – Daniel Cooper, ‘Art’, in Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present, ed. Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert and David Welch (California, Colorado and Oxford: ABC CLIO, 2003), p. 21. See also W.F. Wertheim, ‘Ourselves Revealed in Our Attitudes to Black Africa’, (a review of Jan N. Pieterse's White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture) in Guardian Weekly (UK), Vol. 147, 27 December 1992, p. 3. 33 – See Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, p. 44, Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, pp. 232–3 and Debra H. Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 86. 34 – Gregory Galligan, ‘The Self-Pictured: Manet, the Mirror, and the Occupation of Realist Painting’, The Art Bulletin, LXXX, no. 1 (1998), p. 158. Michael Schreffler makes a similar point regarding Jan Van der Straet's engraving Amerigo Vespucci Discovers America (figure 1). According to him, in the text accompanying the engraving, ‘it was the conquerors who wondered if they were dreaming, while in the print, it is the figure of America who is presented at the liminal moment between sleep and full consciousness’. See note 7, p. 303. 35 – Nicholas Sanson, L'Afrique et Plusieurs Cartes Nouvelles et Exactes et en Divers Traictes de Geographie et D'histoires (Paris, 1666); quoted in William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 29. 36 – For details, see Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp., p. xxiv. 37 – Vincent L. Wimbush, ed., African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Text and Social Textures (New York and London: Continuum), p. 200 and Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 38 – From the King James Version of the Bible. 39 – See Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 55–80. See also Wilson J. Moses, ed., Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996). 40 – The trauma that slavery and colonialism inflicted on the black body politic has been the subject of many books since the nineteenth century, the most popular being Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981). See also Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us (London: Nok Publishers, 1978). 41 – Henry L. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997), p. 494. 42 – Chances are that Anne Whitney was aware of Harper's (Ethiopia) poem before creating her sculpture of Africa, though I have not been able to confirm this. 43 – Mary A. Livermore, ‘Anne Whitney’, in Our Famous Women: An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times (Hartford, Connecticut: A.D. Worthington and Co., Publishers, 1884), pp. 676–7. See also Charmaine A. Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 129–31. 44 – Gates and McKay, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, pp. 907–8. A colleague has suggested that the painting The Resurrection of Lazarus painted in 1896 by the Paris-based African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner may have a similar implication. Although the possibility cannot be ruled out altogether, this article is more interested in works with specific reference to Africa, Ethiopia or the black body politic (as in Edna Manley's Negro Aroused. See figure 18). 45 – See I. Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1974) and J.E. Harris, ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993). 46 – Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (London: C. M. Phillips, 1911), p. 171. 47 – Freda L. Scott, ‘The Star of Ethiopia: A Contribution toward the Development of Black Drama and Theater in the Harlem Renaissance’, in The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, ed. Singh Amritjit, William S. Shiver and Stanley Brodwin (New York: Garland, 1989), pp. 257–69 and Herbert Aptheker, ed., Creative Writings of W.E.B. DuBois: A Pageant, Poems, Short Stories, and Playlets (New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1985). W.E.B. DuBois’ use of the veil motif is worth elaborating here. Because of the association of the veil with the sacred in some biblical passages, he observes that ‘After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with a second-sight in this American world … It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others …’ [See William E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1903)]. However, the age-old association of the veil with ignorance would lead the Anglo-American sculpture Charles Keck to create a monument in 1925 depicting Booker T. Washington, the founding Principal of the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Youth (now Tuskegee University, Alabama) ‘Removing the Veil of Ignorance and Superstition’ from the head of a seated black figure. This monument brings to mind the use of the veil in Bernini and Schluter's personifications of Africa (figures 3 and 6b.). Even though the veil is in the process of being removed, in Charles Keck's statue, the question arises: In view of what we know now about the ancient civilizations of Africa — especially the centers of learning in Timbuktu and Sankore — does the veil being removed from the head of this seated black figure signify African or Western ignorance? 48 – For more on Marcus Garvey's theatrical oratory, see David Krasner, ‘In the Whirlwind and the Storm: Marcus Garvey and the Performance of Black Nationalism’, in A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 167–87. 49 – Richard Newman, African American Quotations (Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 1998), p. 13; quoted in Gates, Wonders of the African World, p. 10. 50 – Newman, African American Quotations, p. 13. 51 – Judith Nina Kerr, ‘God-Given Work: The Life and Times of Sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, 1877–1968’. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1986; Tritobia H. Benjamin, ‘Triumphant Determination: The Legacy of African American Women Artists’, in Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists, ed. Jontyle T. Robinson (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1996), pp. 56–9; Judith Wilson, ‘Hagar's Daughter: Social History, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-U.S. Women's Art’, in Bearing Witness, pp. 95–112 and Renee Ater, ‘Making History: Meta Warrick Fuller's Ethiopia’, American Art: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 17, no. 3 (2003), pp. 13–31. 52 – Ibid., p. 58. 53 – See Nathan I. Huggings, ed., Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 3–11. 54 – Ibid., p. 353. 55 – For a recent review of the concepts underlying the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, see Richard J. Powell, Black Art, A Cultural History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), pp. 41–65. It is worth mentioning that the Egyptian artist Mahmoud Mukthar created a monument (‘Egyptian Awakening’) between 1919 and 1921 to reflect the anti-colonial movement in his country, which gained political independence from Great Britain in 1922. The monument features a sphinx standing on its hind legs accompanied by a female figure lifting her veil, which identifies her as a new bride. See Liliane Karnouk, Contemporary Egyptian Art (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1995). I have not discussed Mukthar's work in the main text because it has a national rather than a Pan-African significance. 56 – John H. Clarke, ed., with the assistance of Amy J. Garvey, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 99–100. 57 – For more on Edna Manley, see Wayne Brown, Edna Manley: The Private Years, 1900–1938 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1975); David Boxer, Edna Manley, Sculptor (Kingston, Jamaica: Edna Manley Foundation and National Gallery, 1990) and Verlee Poupeye, Caribbean Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), pp. 71–2. 58 – See Bernard B. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz and James B. Stewart, W.E.B. DuBois on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 210–1. 59 – Edward Baugh, ‘A History of Poetry’, in A History of Literature in the Caribbean: English- and Dutch-Speaking, ed. Albert James Arnold, et al. (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001), p. 240. 60 – George Campbell, First Poems (Kingston, Jamaica, 1945). 61 – David Boxer and Veerle Poupeye, Modern Jamaican Art (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998), p. 16; quoting from Campbell, First Poems. 62 – Frederick D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1923), p. 613. 63 – Nnamdi Azikiwe, Renascent Africa (first published in 1937; New York: Negro University Press, 1969), pp. 303–5. 64 – For a detailed biography of the artist, see Sylvester O. Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2008). 65 – For illustrations, see Paula Ben-Amos, Benin Art (Washington: Smithtsonian Institution Press, 1995). 66 – Nkiru Nzegwu, ‘Ben Enwonwu: Art from a Sixty Year Career — A Retrospective’, Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World, 1, no. 2 (2000), Available online at http://www.ijele.com/vol1.2/index1.2.htm (accessed 30 January 2010). According to Nzegwu, this statue represents the female spirit of the rising sun. See also Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu, pp. 129–30. 67 – Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu, p. 130. 68 – See Aptheker, Creative Writings of W.E.B. DuBois, p. 132. 69 – Amy Jacques Garvey, compiler, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey or Africa for the Africans (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1986), Vols. 1 and 2, pp. 105–6. 70 – See F. Abiola Irele, ‘The Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement’, in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, ed. F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Vol. 2, Chap. 36. 71 – James Miller, Robert O'Neal and Hellen M. McDonnell, Black African Voices (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foreman and Company, 1970), p. 107. First published in Coups de Pilon (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956). 72 – Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu, pp. 77–8; 93–4, 181–2. 73 – It is important to note that Marcus Garvey's ‘Black Star Shipping Lines’ (founded in 1919) inspired the star at the center of Ghana's national flag. 74 – Quoted in Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publisher, 1961), p. 4. 75 – Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (Edinburgh, New York and Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957), pp. 286–7. 76 – Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom, p. 96. 77 – See Janet Hess, ‘Spectacular Nation: Nkrumahist Art and Resistance Iconography in the Ghana Independence Era’, African Arts, 39, no. 1 (2006), pp. 16–25, 91–2. See also Lawrence Grobel, ‘Ghana's Vincent Kofi’, African Arts, 3, no. 4 (1970), pp. 8–11, 68–70. 78 – Doran Ross, ‘Akua's Child and Other Relatives: New Mythologies for Old Dolls’, in Isn't S/He a Doll?: Play and Ritual in African Sculpture, ed. Elisabeth L. Cameron (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1996), p. 53.