Allen F. Roberts

Sacred arts of Haitian vodou

Other contributors include Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, Suzanne Preston blier, Karen McCarthy Brown, marilyn Houlberg, Tina Girouard, Laennec Hurbon, Mama Lola,lizabeth McAlist

Recolonization of an African Visual Economy

Picture this if you will: In a laminated portrait of Sidi Abu Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad alTijani al-Hassani, the late-eighteenth-century Algerian holy man who founded the Tijaniyya Sufi Way by order of the Prophet Muhammad (see http://tijani.org), the saint (wali Allah) looks directly and calmly at the viewer from the confi nes of a twenty-fi rst-century European-style bourgeois living room (Fig. 1). A door behind the saint is open to a patio where one glimpses a deck chair, fl ower garden, and leafy wall. Behind the door and to the viewer’s right hangs a dimly lit baroque painting of an angel wrestling with dark forces, while to the

Flickering images, floating signifiers: optical innovation and visual piety in senegal

ABSTRACT A Sufi movement of Senegal known as the Mouride Way possesses a vibrant visual culture made manifest in all manner of popular, devotional, and healing arts. Portraits of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853–1927), the saint around whose writings and life lessons the Mouride movement has been created, appear in every imaginable medium, but all are derived from the only known photograph of Bamba, taken by French colonial authorities in 1913. In 2003, lenticular images of the saint were introduced as an optical technology new to Mourides. Astonishingly enough, one of these shifts from a portrait of Bamba to an image of “the Prophet as a boy,” underscoring their spiritual proximity. This latter picture has been traced back to a photograph of a Tunisian boy taken around 1904 by the Orientalist Rudolph Lehnert and published in a 1914 issue of National Geographic. Despite such history, visual hagiography has it that the portrait was drawn by a sixth-century Syrian monk named Bahira. When Bahira encountered Muhammad as a 12-year-old boy, he recognized that he would become the Prophet, and Bahira is now assumed to have limned Muhammads likeness. From these ancient times the image has somehow floated to contemporary Iran, where it is said to have been a favorite of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and on to Senegal. Some Mourides are uncomfortable with portrayal of the Prophet in this manner, and especially as a lenticular image flickering between His picture and that of Amadou Bamba; yet the image does exist, and it raises intriguing intellectual and spiritual issues broached here.

Senses of Time: Video and Film-Based Arts of Africa

More than fifty years ago, the art historian George Kubler wrote that time is, “like mind, not knowable as such” (1962:13).1 Kubler was concerned with human difficulties in understanding time other than by looking back upon the material record to assess processes of change and permanence. He did not, however, question how time is conceived in situation-specific modes or how it might play out differently based on location. We do live in a world made up of multiple times. Reproductive “clocks” tick according to biological time, the continents move on geological time, our watches are set to the precision of US Naval Observatory time. As scientific as such measurements may be, time is always a cultural construction. Precolonial African societies had their own senses of time, and rather than linear or strictly so, some understood time to be circular or a spiral leading from origins to present moments. Colonial authorities made great efforts to colonize time, yet vestiges of earlier temporal systems, calendars, and astrologies remain.2 As Kubler astutely pointed out, notions of time are all connected to material records—those objects often called “art,” as we often find in Africa. Now that the art world includes an ever-wider spectrum of media including “time-based” video, digital, and performance arts, relationships between time and art have become much more complicated and much more necessary a field of inquiry. The phrase “time-based media” was coined by museum conservators grappling to come to terms with artworks that move through time.3 As a result, time has too often been treated as a byproduct of the medium rather than a central strategy in the production and content of the work. The exhibition “Senses of Time: Video and Film-Based Arts of Africa” explores how and why artists work with time, to what ends and effects, and in parThe exhibition “Senses of Time: Video and FilmBased Works of Africa” is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from December 20, 2015–January 2, 2017, as co-curated by Karen E. Milbourne, National Museum of African Art, and Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts, UCLA and LACMA. Many of the ideas developed in this essay came to fruition during and since a colloquium on Time and Temporalities in African Art hosted by The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, as convened in April 2014 by Karen E. Milbourne. Participants in the colloquium were Bili Bidjocka, Theo Eshetu, Naima Keith, Dominique Malaquais, Prita Meier, Simon Njami, Sylvester Ogbechie, Sue Williamson, and Polly Nooter Roberts. The hosts and colleagues of the colloquium played an important role in helping to create a stimulating dialogue and set of discussions around a provocative subject with far-reaching implications for the fields of art history and African art. This focused exhibition brings together a selection of time-based works that address the role of temporality as embodied by the medium itself and as experienced—and produced—by the body, the senses, and the choreographies of memories and identities in motion. After opening at LACMA, “Senses of Time” will be on view at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton NY, from September 10–December 18, 2016.

Icons from the end of days: Visual hagiography among Layennes of Senegal

Remarkable street paintings in a neighborhood of Dakar, Senegal, depict half the countenance of an African holy man named Seydina Issa and half that of Jesus Christ, the images joined by an interface of golden blessing. Another street painting based upon a photograph of Seydina Issa depicts him with studio lights reflecting from his forehead in the form of a brilliant cross. The man is a saint (wali Allah, ‘Companion of God’) of Senegals smallest local Sufi order, the Layennes, who live by fishing from Dakars ocean shores. Issas father, Seydina Limamou, was revealed in 1883 to be the Mahdi or Great Guide of the End of Days come to lead the righteous, and Issa (‘Jesus’ in Arabic) would complete his apocalyptic mission. While the great majority of Senegalese are Muslims, a small but socially prominent minority are Roman Catholics. The image of Christ in the joined paintings is derived from Adolf Hylas ever-more-popular depiction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus based upon Saint Mary Faustinas holy visions of the 1930s. Such dramatic imagery reflects and fosters visual hagiography – that is, ways that pictures contribute to ongoing understanding of the lives of saints, not just in the past but in the present and future. Even as the paintings will be explained historically, then, it is equally important to speculate about what they ‘want’ and may become.

Relations Between Thoughts and Hands: Expressive Themes of African Arts

| african arts SPRING 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 1 Allen F. Roberts is Professor of World Arts and Cultures and (a liated) Professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. He has served as a co-editor of African Arts since 1999, and he conducts research, writes, organizes museum exhibitions, and sometimes co-teaches about African humanities with Mary “Polly” Nooter Roberts. His most recent book, A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo (2013), won ACASA’s Outstanding Publication Award of 2011–2013 and was a nalist for the 2013 Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association. aroberts@arts.ucla.edu “Relations Between Thoughts and Hands”1

In extremis death and life in 21st-century haitian art

(2013). In extremis death and life in 21st-century haitian art. Material Religion: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 264-266.

Christian arts of Africa and its diasporas

ABSTRACT African Christians use art and dress in a variety of religious experiences. This special issue focuses on the histories as well as aesthetic, spiritual, and moral meanings associated with these materials in Africa, Europe, and the United States. While Ethiopian church art emerged after the fourth century, early Christian missionary activities elsewhere in Africa often entailed the use of European religious art and dress as part of the conversion process. However, African Christian art was subsequently produced in several parts of Africa. The movement of Africans to Europe and the Americas has also led to an expansion of the forms of African Christian artistic expression, underscoring the oscillating dynamics of African Christian art and its expression in a global context.

Same and Other: Negotiating African Identity in Cultural Production (review)

B O O K R E V EW S 40 such as the genre called ngoma. In the 1990s, however, the government redefi ned and embraced taarab, in part because its popularity rendered it an undeniable feature of the Tanzanian soundscape at a time when Chama cha Mapinduzi, the ruling political party, was in need of a new image. Askew urges the reader to consider new approaches to the understanding of nationalism and nation-building. She advocates a “fundamentally fl uid and fundamentally dialogic take on national identity formation not unlike identity formation in individuals who are constantly at work to defi ne themselves” (p. 271). She shows Tanzanian cultural policy to be far from unifi ed in approach, but characterized by dissent, tensions, and evershifting goals within the state structure itself. Askew argues convincingly that nations are built not just by top-down state policymakers, but through a dialectic interaction between such policymakers and Tanzanian citizens themselves, whose actions guide and shape the debates that contribute to the “imaginary” of national identity. A particular strength is the way in which Askew bases this assertion on this book’s many narratives of musical performances that clearly portray such ideological negotiations. She also criticizes studies of nationalism that draw solely on analyses of print media. Based on Foucault’s assertion that “power is rendered efficacious only in its enactment” (p. 8), she contends that “power is embedded in performance” (p. 14), and she demonstrates the extent to which the Tanzanian state’s efforts to push nationalist ideologies have materialized in performance. Advancing a performative understanding of power, she argues that “music is undeniably and irrevocably implicated in the practice of politics” (p. 285). Askew has clearly met one of her stated goals: to demonstrate forcefully that popular culture and the arts are far from “tangential, discredited social domains of little or no relevance for the study of politics and government” (p.14). Performing the Nation shows the power of ethnography, when well rendered, to offer a critical corrective to “state-centric” analytical models of politics that represent institutions as the sole loci of power. Askew shows that nation-building is a human behavioral process, achieved through human interaction in performance, and that music, at least in the Tanzanian case, is central to this process. Daniel B. Reed Indiana University

Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (review)

B O O K R E V EW S 36 The Guinness Book of Records cites a baptismal record that fi xes her birth date at 18 February 1888 in Cape Verde, although she always insisted it was 1887. The administrator of the nursing home where she had lived since 1995 called her “our feisty little Portuguese sweetheart.” The use by a number of authors in this collection of arcane or nonexistent wordsan unfortunate and widespread phenomenon in academic writingis discouraging to readers interested in the subject but looking for clarity. Diasporic, orature, and valency are nowhere to be found in authoritative dictionaries. Susan Linnee Associated Press