Susan is right and so is John Picton, in stating the naked truth. And I support and cheer their interventions. Personally I can say my silence is more a product of the first month at a new teaching gig and the mountain of work I owe my students (sorry folks, they come first!) than of being stunned by harsh but real revelations. I should say, along that line, that Colin's and Frank Ugiomoh's earlier posts regarding the desperate situation in the academy in Africa--though we Americans are in a position of relative luxury--sounded all too familiar. It is as if some intimation of third worldism is now, too, edging into American higher education (the arbitrary cuts, the creeping instrumentalization/if not outright commercialization of even the liberal arts, the rationalization/quantification of teaching...). Are even we "lucky" scholars headed down that "African" road?
But also, what Susan describes is too familier. It was probemlatized by the authors for the 2003 "Looking Both Ways" exhibition--and already had a history before that point. Alas, the problem since then has only been exacerbated. Since then the balance has tipped even further in favor of the diaspora-politinism of advanced discourse about African art. It is a great gain, but also a loss.
It is fascinting to note that the greater audience for this work (residing in "the West")--judging from the stuff of art magazines-- does not seem to see any contradiction on the order of what John Picton and Susan Vogel have described. Why is that? In part, I surmise, it is because they feel that African artists and scholars abroad have much to say that is relevent to them (i.e. to those living outside of Africa who are not necessarily from Africa themselves). In an age with fewer newspaper readers, art spectacles are interlocutors of worldliness, as well as novel interpreters of our common condition.
The response in Africa itself (of course specific situations matter here), as Susan Vogel states, may be more tepid towards these compatriots abroad. The education crisis and limited access to global discourse is a factor in this Africa-based reception of current art. Just as sorry, in my view, is the "Western" disinterest in what African artists who operate within a more provincial purview are doing.
And yet, having watched this discourse develop (from almost nothing) since the 1980s, I have to say that we may be speaking amongst ourselves, yes, but we are not shouting into the wind.
Colin's and Frank's communiques haunt me, though: there is a feudal model for the arts, for the academy, that our colleagues still in Africa have much to teach us about.
-John Peffer, Ramapo College
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