Bennetta Jules-Rosette

Black Paris: touristic simulations.

Abstract From the 1920s onward, Paris was seen by the black American elite as the locus of artistic freedom and expansion. Black American Paris contains a collection of touristic sights and experiences that are grafted onto the rest of American expatriate Paris. In contrast, Afro-Antillian Paris is a zone of migration with attractions accessible to domestic tourists who already know the city well. The transformation of the locales of everyday life into touristic sights connected with the identity of a particular foreign ethnic population is part of the process of postmodern simulation in tourism. This essay addresses the process of simulation in relationship to the imagery of black Paris.

Song and spirit: The use of songs in the management of ritual contexts

The Apostolic Church of John Maranke (Vapostori or Bapostolo), an indigenous Christian church founded in Umtali, Rhodesia, now has congregations across Central Africa. For the Churchs central ritual event, the Sabbath kerek , and other occasions of worship, singing constitutes the core of ritual practice and is used to invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit. These songs combine traditional Bantu rhythmic patterns with a unique Apostolic form. Often drawn from biblical themes, the songs are composed by members as spiritually inspired pieces.

The Consumer Connection

Marcel Mauss’s Essay on the Gift (1925/1967) was an initial look at the relationship among cultural symbolism, moral obligations, and the economy in preindustrial societies.’ He dealt with the internal structures of primitive and archaic economies as autonomous units. Reciprocity and redistribution were the bases for obligatory gift exchanges. Karl Polanyi (1968:12–25) has examined the relationship between external trade and gift exchange, or status payments, which are internal to a society. The growth of the tourist art and craft market in Third World countries is an example of the interface of informal sector economies with an international monetary system. The concept of the gift is central to the interpretation and use of tourist art objects both in their production settings and abroad. In this chapter, 1 explore the economic aspect of tourist art and its impact upon imagery. I do so by examing the buyer-seller relationship, or the consumer connection, in symbolic and economic terms.

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika and the Liberation of the Spirit of South Africa1

Footprints of cultural artefacts travel across borderlands and boundaries of multiple inscription, from villages to towns and back again, between territories of the imagination and fetishised, armed and dangerous national states, imprinted in landscapes of experience and practice. Anthropologists and oral historians have recently become fascinated with how rumours, fantastic tales, songs, and images become enshrined in a mobile African popular culture taken for granted by many of those who partake of it. 3 Indeed children’s songs (whether folk, or composed like Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika) have in their resilience played an important role in the indexical transmission of African history. So the demarcation of Basutoland’s colonial borders by the British Resident Major Warden is memorialised in the satirical Basotho children’s verse, Majoro Wardene, Majoro Wardene, Nka thipa ea hao u sehe naha (Major Warden, Major Warden/Take your knife and cut the country). The objects circulating in this mobile popular culture blur the boundaries between sacred and secular, as well as public and private social life. In music, as with other popular arts, the framing of images through lyrics, harmonies, and melodies inscribes historic moments in what Johannes Fabian (1996:226– 277) calls a remembrance of the present. 4 Each rendition of a song is connected to the community or context in which it is performed, imbuing the piece with a distinctive, historically emergent social and political meaning. The hymn Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (God Bless Africa), known as the African as well as South African national anthem, occupies a field of such experience and practice at the intersection of public religion and popular culture. Two decades ago, one of us wrote that “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika has come to symbolize more than any other piece of expressive culture the struggle for African unity and liberation in South Africa” (Coplan 1985:46). Yet the song’s popularity extends beyond the borders of South Africa and the confines of the liberation struggle that it so actively

Working with Clay

Prototypical distinctions between men’s and women’s activities and social domains emerge boldly through African art. This situation, however, is not peculiar to African societies. The history of women in Western art from the 15th century to the present demonstrates a close relationship between the social status of women and their public exclusion from the mainstream of art production (Tuchman, 1975:171–202). At the beginning of the Renaissance, women were not considered capable of any significant contribution to the arts, except, perhaps, to the needle arts, and they were excluded from craft associations (Wilkins, 1975:107–115). By linking cultural perceptions to the process of art production, it is possible to examine the origins of expressive culture and its relationship to particular social groups. We can see how the sign value of the art object is transformed when it is exchanged between one subgroup of producers and a broader consumer audience.

The myth of modernity in popular african art: Symbolic representations in popular carving and painting

The contemporary artists of Lusaka, Zambia are engaged in an image-making process. They present idyllic portraits of an Africa “as it was” to an audience of tourists and outsiders and play upon a unique blending of traditional and contemporary symbols for an African audience. The latter symbolic forms are representations of modernity and depict both the positive aspects of social change (e.g., material improvements) and its negative dimensions (the gradual destruction of tradition). This paper examines images of modernity in the representations of the natural world, men, and women by contemporary African artists. These images are living myths in the making and are expressive cultural responses to a diverse audience of consumers in a rapidly changing cultural milieu.

Afterword: From Grassroots Ecumenism to Global Entanglements

This path-breaking collection deserves not one but several afterwords to embrace the debates and new vistas of research that it inspires. By bringing together interdisciplinary scholars from anthropology, history, and comparative religious studies, this special issue reflexively reproduces the phenomenon of ecumenism that it so adroitly explores. In his introduction, Richard Werbner asserts that new ground is broken by examining how ‘the ecumenical and the agonistic transform together’ under conditions where religious unity may become a valued, although fragile, ideal. Grassroots ecumenism, which is one variation of inter-religious communication and co-operation, is an elusive, ephemeral phenomenon. Its value is often hotly contested, even by those individuals and organisations who attempt to engage in co-operative activities. As a result, the authors find themselves in a situation of having provided a many-coloured and tightly woven cloak for a large body that has rapidly outgrown it. But that is the nature of some new inventions. Through their collage of case studies drawn from southern Africa, they wrestle with a variety of definitions of ecumenism, ranging from the local to the global, from the indigenous (grassroots) to the institutional (stateand internationally sponsored), as they strive to locate the ecumenical impulses reflected in African-based religious beliefs and practices. Happily, the authors shy away from outmoded church/sect typologies in preference for viewing the groups by their own self-descriptions and appellations. Nevertheless, in spite of the ethnographic integrity of this choice, some of the groups studied exhibit ‘sectarian’ characteristics in terms of the exclusivity of their shifting membership and their struggles to uphold what I have described elsewhere as ‘a separate, often retreatist or isolationist, identity’. Ecumenism, in such cases, may become a pragmatic survival strategy of unity or a paradigm for grassroots responses, which appear to be local, in relationship to top-down or externally imposed administrative measures. These problems lead to further definitional issues.

Unpacking Ethnographic Film and African Cinema: Imbricated Border Crossings and the Communicative Gap in Spectatorship

Do invisible gods, in effect, merely have a “double,” or are they themselves a “double”? (Rouch, 1978, p. 3)Ethnographic film provides a prototype for visual border crossings in anthropological res...

‘Le Musée d'Art au Hasard’: responses of Black Paris to French museum culture

Abstract During the colonial period, Black Paris began to respond to French museum culture. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Joséphine Baker maintained a close association with French museum culture. Other voices from Black Paris surfaced surrounding the Présence Africaine journal in 1947 and the turbulent debates of the 1950s. In the 1980s, the rediscovery of contemporary and popular arts led to a virtual explosion in French gallery and museum spaces. From the Centre Georges Pompidou to the Musée Dapper, new environments arose for the display of African art. Globalization and commercialization cordoned the gap between ‘authentic’ collectibles and contemporary pieces in museums and galleries. Museums reflect symbolic conflicts between the metropole and the excolonies and between the center of Paris and the peripheral banlieues. Drawing on case studies from three historical periods, this article examines the influence of new forms of aesthetic display and artistic diffusion. It also explores the roles of cultural brokers and gallery connections in developing a new audience for African art. This audience provides a response to state-sponsored initiatives such as the Musée du Quai Branly and serves as a point of departure for reflecting on the future of African-oriented museum culture in France.

Black Paris: The African Writers' Landscape

Documents the struggles and successes of three generations of African writers as they strive to establish their artistic, literary, and cultural identities in France