theworldismine13
God Emperor of SOHH
African Renaissance, How The Prefix 'Afro-' May Arrest Imagination & Manifesto Salesmanship | Shadow and Act
planned this essay for the “Afro-surrealism” call that I saw published on Shadow & Act, but it became apparent as I went on and explored my own viewpoint that I was not comfortable with the idea of the book, though I thought it necessary.
I concluded that: The prefix ‘afro-’ has acquired a parasitic character, leeching off manifestos. And it has the capacity to arrest African imagination, so that the African imagination follows other manifestos, only to attach itself to them and never coming up with an original of its own.
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Couple this with an observation that I made: a blog tagged and listed musician Simphiwe Dana as an Afrofuturist; which I found a bit offsetting because the context in which the art was and is being produced, is in a way minimized. (“We've been to the moon and back”: afro-futurism in music - Downloads - This Is Africa)
The purpose of this essay is to clarify my own ideas of Art Criticism about the use of the ‘Afro-’ prefix, The African Renaissance and African art, and perhaps try to point a way forward for myself.
As writing this essay lead to the discovery of my own limits of essay writing talent, I would say this is a ‘personal essay’ that guides my own thinking as I can’t really claim it is definitive.
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The prefix ‘Afro-’
A prefix modifies a word/statement. The prefix ‘Afro-’ as used in art criticism modifies existing manifestos. In my opinion, it does not promote the generation of wholly new ideas and manifestos, but only the modification of the creativity of others. The prefix ‘afro-’ has acquired a parasitic character, leeching off manifestos: Afro-Surrealism, Afro-Punk, Afro-Futurism and Afro-etc. I think it has the capacity to arrest African imagination, so that the African imagination only follows other manifestos, only to attach itself to them and never coming up with an original of its own. I wouldn’t have a problem with it because creativity is about modifying elements that are already there to create something new, but given what’s out there at this point I have an objection. Just a quick internet search reveals that the movie ‘The Matrix’ is listed as Afro-futurism on some websites (http://afrofuturism.net/filmvideography-2/). It can go to the point where Afrofuturism can only be about a person of colour in a future space, when in fact for a project like ‘The Matrix’, the faces and races are interchangeable, it would still be what it is without black people in it.
I read an Afro-Surrealist manifesto written by D. Scot Miller (D. Scot Miller: AfroSurreal Generation: AFROSURREAL MANIFESTO) and it had me asking a few questions. In this manifesto, Miller outlines what isn’t Afro-Surrealism. He writes, “Afro-Surrealism is not surrealism.”
“…Leopold Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African Surrealist, made this distinction: ‘European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical.’”
And then he says of Afro-Surrealism, “[it] presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.”
And he goes on to say, “Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past. We revisit old ways with new eyes. We appropriate 19th century slavery symbols like Kara Walker, and 18th century colonial ones like Yinka Shonibare. We re-introduce ‘madness’ as visitations from the gods, and acknowledge the possibility of magic. We take up the obsessions of the ancients and kindle the dis-ease, clearing the murk of the collective unconsciousness as it manifests in these dreams called culture”
Miller claims that Afro-Surrealism is NOT Surrealism. And then he goes on to define something that’s different from ‘Surrealism’ and calls it ‘Afro-Surreal’. My question when I read Miller’s Manifesto was why call it Afro-Surrealism if it is not Surrealism? Why prefix the word Surrealism with ‘Afro-’? Most importantly, since it is so different from surrealism, why not call it something entirely new?
Miller considers The Neptunes early music Afrofuturist. Would that same music if it was produced by a person of a different race still be considered Afrofuturist? What made it fundamentally Afrofuturist except for race?
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African Renaissance
To give a brief overview of the African Renaissance-
Ever since the independence of the first African state there has been talk of an African Renaissance, a rebirth of Africa.
This is to be realized by taking what was before colonisation and put it in its proper place. African Renaissance can be divided into three processes: excavations, integrating the material into the present and projecting the material into the future.
The African renaissance to me is naturally linked with the development of African Philosophy that carries on today. African Philosophy has at its base the idea of the “Struggle for reason”. To quote Mogobe B. Ramose:
“One of the bases of colonization was that the belief ‘man is a rational animal’ was not spoken of the African, the Amerindian, and the Australasian…Little did Aristotle realize that his definition of ‘man’ laid down the foundation for the struggle for reason—not only between men and women but also between the colonialists and the Africans,2 the Amerindians,3 and the Australasian’s.” [1]
“The struggle for reason—who is and who is not a rational animal—is the foundation of racism.” [Ramose: 3]
These African Renaissance excavations are about restoring whatever cultural artefacts/Philosophy/idea, basically they’re an attempt to restore the humanity of Africans in the light of this ‘struggle for reason’, post-colonization; this is the environment, and artists will most certainly interact with it: Picking up bits and fashioning them, if they choose to do so.
It’s about freeing the African from this struggle for reason by collecting and restoring artefacts/philosophies, and projecting these into the future so that this base will always be available to future generations, presumably a generation of free Africans, free to create whatever they please, free from the “struggle for reason”. It is within either of these contexts of ultimate freedom and/or of the offsetting of “the struggle for reason” that I see cultural production taking place and being evaluated.
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Legitimate Art Criticism is concerned with: The Artist, who they are; the work, and the Artist’s environment.
Given what the environment was and is, it raises questions when an artist like for example - Simphiwe Dana can be mentioned in a critic’s article, which in its attempts at giving her work context, doesn’t mention The African Renaissance, but in fact shifts the cultural context to Sun-Ra’s Afro-Futurism, seeing Dana as its “offspring”.
I think in the light of that “African Renaissance” statue in Senegal, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty, for Africans and the rest of the world to think that our cultural production could in a way be immune from the psychic influence of that bulk of mass is to be a bit dishonest; to think that growing up under that mass of statue doesn’t influence our spaces is dishonest. At this point, in my opinion, no art from Africa can be considered without taking into account that gigantic mass of a statue.
In my capacity, as a self-aware creative, I’ve asked myself questions: Without my context, my environment, would I have done that Muhsinah’s ‘Yiy’ music video the way that I’ve done? If my dad, driven by the renaissance, hadn’t encouraged me to know myself, would I have fashioned my art as have? The answer is no, not at all. When an African artist does a film for the renaissance, or out of the renaissance, as I have done as a creative, the art is at times found on blogs dedicated to Afrofuturism, even though the artist himself is not aware of what Afrofuturism is, of which I wasn’t aware of in 2008. It is labelled ‘Afrofuturism’ without even mentioning the artist’s context. I will expand on this in point 6.
For example, for the movie “U-Carmen eKhayelitsha’/Carmen in Khayelitsha, it took a special environment and circumstances for that film to get funding and get made, even Roger Ebert in a minimal review said, ‘That the [South] African Renaissance in film continues with...Carmen in Khayelitsha’. To a more recent release like, ‘Viva Riva’ I spotted a post on a facebook timeline post that mentions…the African Renaissance. This is the environment, no matter how minimal it may seem it is important: In which cultural environment did Mark Shuttleworth go to space to be the first “African in space” and create a flavour of Linux operating system and name it ‘Ubuntu’? What where his reasons for undertaking that expensive space trip? These context questions matter.
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Manifesto salesmanship
When I first heard of Spoek Mathambo he called his music “Township Techno”; true, it may not be a step too far from prefixing it ‘Afro-Something’, but it was still an honest attempt to contextualize his music within the township continuum, with South African music as its lineage. Hearing the genre name itself, ‘Township Techno’ gives a pretty good idea what is happening, though it doesn’t go as far as I hope it should, which is just naming it something different like, ‘HighLife’ music (music originating in Ghana) or Kwaito.
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