first word
Beyond Single Stories:
Addressing Dynamism, Specificity, 和
Agency in Arts of Africa
Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi and Yaëlle Biro
In Amalgam, the spring 2019 exhibition
Theaster Gates created for Paris’s Palais de
东京, the artist focuses on the 1912 evacua-
tion of interracial individuals from the island
of Malaga, southeast of Brunswick, Maine.
Casts of face masks—including ones in styles
recognizable as Bamana, Baule, and Songye,
as well as ones that merge features of different
genres—appear throughout the exhibition as
markers of the African ancestry of Malaga’s
early-twentieth-century residents. The installa-
tion Island Modernity Institute and Department
of Tourism shows face masks displayed in cases
as well as in and around a cabinet. A neon sign
in the cabinet announces, “In the end nothing
is pure” (如图. 1). Gates’s statement highlights
the absurdity of wanting to assure racial purity
on Malaga or anywhere. Placed in proximity
to the casts of face masks, it also serves as a
reminder that the use of cultural or ethnic
group names to label arts of Africa has hinged
Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi is Associate
Professor of art history at Emory University.
Her scholarship draws on extensive fieldwork
in West Africa as well as archival research
and object-focused study in Africa, 欧洲,
and North America. 在 2014, the Cleveland
Museum of Art (CMA) 和 5 Continents
Editions published her first book, Senufo
Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity in
West Africa. The CMA released the book in
2015 in conjunction with a major interna-
tional exhibition organized by the museum.
susan.e.gagliardi@emory.edu
Yaëlle Biro is Associate Curator for the
Arts of Africa at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 纽约. She completed her disserta-
tion in 2010 at the Sorbonne on African arts’
commercial networks during the first decades
of the twentieth century. Her exhibition Af-
rican Art, 纽约, and the Avant-Garde
focused on the reception of African arts in
America in the 1910s–20s and received the
AAMC 2012 Outstanding Small Exhibition
Prize. Her book Fabriquer le regard: 行进-
ands, réseaux et objets d’art africains à l’aube
du XXe siècle was published in 2018 by Les
Presses du Réel. Yaelle.Biro@metmuseum.org
on colonial concepts of race and purity.
Scholars have long been aware that their
categories for so-called traditional, historical,
or classical arts of Africa are imperfect, 部分地
because these labels reflect erroneous colonial
assumptions.1 But we have not yet arrived at a
consensus for how to address the imperfection
of our categories.2 For example, on the basis of
form and outdated anthropological classifica-
tions rather than on specific information about
a particular work, its original maker, patron,
观众, or context of production, an ency-
clopedic or a university museum attributes a
sculpture to the culture of the Senufo peoples,
designates an object’s maker as Senufo, or oth-
erwise asserts the Senufo authorship of a work.
Alternatively and seemingly interchangeably,
a museum may identify an object with Senufo
populations or locate it in a Senufo region.
The term Senufo is used to designate differ-
ent things following the purposes of differ-
ent persons.
When art experts and enthusiasts attribute
an object to a whole group of people or a
geographic area ascribed to a population, 他们
often buttress the attribution with a single,
timeless story about the group and the types of
objects the group makes. Repeated again and
again in museums, classrooms, and publi-
阳离子, the stories suggest that art, 文化,
地理, 语言, religion, 和社会的
organization overlap neatly. They reinforce
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1 Detail of Theaster Gates’s Island Modernity
Institute and Department of Tourism (2019) 在
Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, 行进 20, 2019.
照片: Yaëlle Biro
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3
the concept of tribe even if Africanist scholars
have abandoned the term tribe from their vo-
cabularies. The accounts also sideline historical
specificity and individual agency.
The single stories experts and enthusiasts
tell are not neutral. As Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie observes, “To create a single story,
show a people as one thing, as only one thing,
over and over again, and that is what they
become.” Adichie warns listeners that the
single story is dangerous because it is partial
and incomplete. She also addresses power
implicit in storytelling, observing that “power
is the ability not just to tell the story of another
人, but to make it the definitive story of
that person” (Adichie 2009).
Our concern with the perpetuation of single
stories for historical arts of Africa in disparate
spheres prompted us to organize sessions for
这 2016 African Studies Association (ASA)
annual meeting in Washington DC and the
2017 Arts Council of the African Studies
VOL. 52, NO. 4 WINTER 2019 african arts | 1
524 fob.indd 1
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(ACASA) triennial conference in Accra,
加纳. We brought together anthropologists,
art historians, and historians who work in mu-
seums or academia to investigate longstanding
challenges in and fresh possibilities for the
labeling and presentation of art in museums,
大学, and publications.3
Following the two sessions and ongoing
conversations, we have determined that Af-
rican art scholars and other enthusiasts must
more directly confront historical roots of the
问题. We have also identified three core
问题. The first lies in the limits of categories
and language applied to African arts that
European and Euro-American art enthusiasts
have used to describe the arts and organize
知识. The second pertains to the role of
the market in the circulation and labeling of
African arts. The third is tied to ways in which
scholars can make historical arts of Africa
relevant to their audiences.
BEYOND DISCLAIMERS
Single stories for African arts become
impossible to tell honestly once we recognize
that the African continent never consisted of
pure, isolated tribes and that people, 物体,
and ideas have always circulated. For de-
你跌倒了, scholars have highlighted the colonial
construction of cultural or ethnic groups (例如,
Bazin 1985, Amselle and M’bokolo 1985,
Appadurai 1988, Abu-Lughod 1991, Trouillot
2003). And for almost as long as they have
used cultural or ethnic group names to cate-
gorize and study arts, art historians and other
scholars have questioned the validity of the
方法 (例如, Einstein 1991[1930], Vanden-
houte 1948, Sieber and Rubin 1968, Bravmann
1973, Kasfir 1984, 沃格尔 1984, Visonà 1987,
Oguibe 2004, Peffer 2005, Berns, Fardon, 和
Kasfir 2011, Gagliardi 2014, Formanoir 2018).
Yet despite this long line of inquiry, 没有
new models to replace old frameworks, 艺术
historians and other scholars have continued
to rely on singular cultural or ethnic group
classifications to assess art. Even if African art
experts have long acknowledged fallacy in the
“one tribe, one style” approach, it still plagues
assessments of the arts.4 It also distances
viewers from individual objects and specific
histories about them while pretending to offer
insight into the objects and their histories.
In their efforts to acknowledge dynamism of
cultural production, African art experts have
provided caveats or disclaimers to address the
fluidity of identities or the reality of historical
change on the African continent. But they have
still also relied on a top-down vision of culture,
one that imagines the form of an object cor-
relates to the artist’s cultural or ethnic identity
as well as the artist’s geography, 语言,
religion, and social organization. 问题
is that the logic expressed in the caveats and
disclaimers has not filtered into the vocabulary
that experts use in their actual classifications
and descriptions of art.
One significant challenge is that classi-
fications based on cultural or ethnic group
names as well as the arts labeled with the same
names have become socially and politically
important in the present. Sarah Van Beurden
demonstrates how, within the postcolonial
Zairian state, “ideology of tradition [服务]
as resistance against the legacy of colonialism”
(2015: 168). Yet the notion of tradition that
people who resisted the legacy of colonialism
embraced was often one intimately bound to
the colonial experience and colonial categories.
Given the proliferation of studies that have
demonstrated how colonial officials operating
across the African continent transformed fluid
and complex identity markers into names
for discrete cultural or ethnic groups, 货车
Beurden’s assessment may extend to the notion
of tradition elsewhere on the continent.
THE MARKET AS SUBTEXT
Contributors to the ASA and ACASA
sessions we organized as well as other scholars
have recently examined how the market is
integral to the circulation, 分类, 和
study of African arts (例如, Forni and Steiner
2015, Biro 2018, Monroe 2019). Concepts
african arts consortium
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Allen F. 罗伯茨, UCLA
Rhodes University
Rachel Baasch, Rhodes University
Steven Foloaranmi, Obafemi Awolowo University
Angelo Kakande, Makarere University
Emi Koide, Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia
Ruth Simbao, Rhodes University
University of Florida
Susan Cooksey, University of Florida
Rebecca M. Nagy, University of Florida
Fiona Mc Laughlin, University of Florida
Robin Poynor, University of Florida
MacKenzie Moon Ryan, Rollins College
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Carol Magee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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exhibition review editor, 全球的
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african arts presents original research and critical discourse on traditional, contemporary, and popular African arts and expressive cultures. 自从 1967, the journal has reflected the dynamism and diversity of several
fields of humanistic study, publishing richly illustrated articles in full color, incorporating the most current theory, 实践, and intercultural dialogue. The journal offers readers peer-reviewed scholarly articles
concerning a striking range of art forms and visual cultures of the world’s second-largest continent and its diasporas, as well as special thematic issues, book and exhibition reviews, features on museum collections,
exhibition previews, artist portfolios, photo essays, edgy dialogues, and editorials. african arts promotes investigation of the interdisciplinary connections among the arts, 人类学, 历史, 语言, 政治,
religion, 表现, and cultural and global studies. All articles have been reviewed by members of the editorial board. african arts subscribes to the ethical guidelines of the College Arts Association (https://
www.collegeart.org/standards-and-guidelines/guidelines/art-history-ethics), in particular §II.B.2 (Acknowledgment of Sources and Assistance), and of the African Studies Association (https://africanstudies.org/
about-the-asa/asa-ethical-conduct-guidelines/#informed%20consent%20and%20confidentiality), in particular §3 (Informed Consent and Confidentiality).
2 | african arts WINTER 2019 VOL. 52, NO. 4
African Visual Cultures and Colonial Histo ries: An Exp an d i n g F iel d
edited by Victoria L. Rovine
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“Artiste inconnu. Masque kodal. Style senoufo,
2
Côte d’Ivoire. Seconde moitié du XIXe, début
du XXe siècle. Bois. Museum Rietberg, Zurich,
don d’Eduard von der Heydt” at the Musée de
l’Orangerie’s installation of Dada Africa, 十二月
22, 2017.
照片: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi
American markets for African arts similarly
identified “core” features of each style. 对象
that connoisseurs have since found appealing
have tended not to deviate far from a “core”
style. While European and American consum-
ers have continued to refine their definitions
of “core” styles and attempted to identify
substyles based on different criteria, artists
in Africa certainly also contributed to the
articulation of styles, at times even quickly rec-
ognizing European and American preferences
for objects that fit within particular categories.5
The makers may have then produced objects
and stories about them to meet market de-
要求 (例如, Schildkrout and Keim 1990, Fine
2016, Schildkraut 2018).
Prevailing ideas about authenticity of histor-
ical arts of Africa are at odds with the recogni-
tion of the agency of African artists who may
have favored particular styles in their practice
and told certain stories about the objects they
made to meet the expectations of European
and American clients. When twentieth-cen-
tury dealers and collectors linked a style to a
particular cultural or ethnic group based on
limited information, they commonly imag-
ined as “authentic” works made by an artist
for a patron and an audience within a single
group and without influence from beyond that
group.6 Such a notion of authenticity implies
purity of art and people linked to art.
CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE
The late Mary Nooter Roberts considered
curatorial approaches to African arts in a First
Word essay in a 2012 issue of this journal.
Roberts explained, “Focusing on topics of
relevance and urgency not only dissolves
paralyzing categories dividing traditional from
and categories that prevail today emerged in
the early twentieth century, when European
colonization of the continent was in full force.
At the time, art enthusiasts beyond Africa
began recognizing objects from the continent
as art, and a variety of actors contributed to the
development of a vibrant art market in Europe
and North America.
Collectors and dealers who had little
firsthand knowledge about the objects they
admired adopted frameworks and terminol-
ogies grounded in late-nineteenth- and ear-
ly-twentieth-century anthropological theories
and colonial power structures to label and sell
African arts. The theories and power structures
reflected the notion that the African continent
was divided into discrete groups or “tribes,”
each with its own culture, 地理, 语言,
religion, and social organization. Such ways
of thinking tended to deny recognition of
historical dynamism, local specificity, 或者
4 | african arts WINTER 2019 VOL. 52, NO. 4
individual agency. Art connoisseurs extended
the same logic to art, imagining that an object’s
form corresponded with a style specific to a
bounded group. They also assumed that the
style corresponded with the identity of the
object’s original maker, patron, and audience.
In a recent sociological model of catego-
rization, Hannan et al. (2019) offer insights
from diverse market settings that seem to
apply also to African arts in European and
American markets. The authors examine how
market agents conceptualize “core” features
of goods, how such features relate to notions
of value and authenticity, and how certain
features and values contribute to the ongoing
production of goods. Significantly, 作者
show that “core” features are not inherent to a
set of goods but rather are determined through
conceptual “spaces” shared by market actors.
In the first decades of the twentieth cen-
图里, people operating within European and
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contemporary, but characterizes a field that
is always in the making, always at the end of
some new now” (罗伯茨 2012: 7; emphasis
in the original). During the 2016 ASA session
we organized, Silvia Forni, Kathryn Wysocki
Gunsch, and Amanda Maples discussed
museum labeling strategies for historical arts
of Africa that seem to address Roberts’s call for
relevance and the dissolution of boundaries
between so-called traditional and contempo-
rary arts. Their approaches ranged from in-
cluding contemporary voices in their displays,
to highlighting pressing social and political
issues in relation to works in their collections,
to considering the practice of studio-based
artists who challenge common categories in
African arts. The strategies aim to capture
audiences’ attention and insert a chronological
arch in their presentations. 然而, are such
valuable approaches the only possibilities for
us to signal dynamism in the production of
historical African arts or knowledge about
the works?
Insisting on the inclusion of works by stu-
dio-based artists in presentations of historical
African arts may shift the responsibility for
recognizing complex histories from scholars
in museums or universities onto living artists.
As curator Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi has
stated in a different context, the strategy risks
transforming the contemporary artist into the
spokesperson for an entire community or even
the entire continent. It may also erase speci-
ficity in discussion of historical arts (Nzewi in
Luke et al. 2018).7 While studio-based artists
working for the international art market often
reveal and investigate contemporary realities
and historical concerns in provocative ways,
they are not responsible for conducting thor-
ough art-historical investigations or finding
solutions to scholarly challenges. 此外,
the approach may suggest that historical arts
are only relevant in terms of their relationships
to contemporary arts.
We can recover history and complexity if
we look at individual works and their specific
biographies, if we carefully acknowledge gaps
in our knowledge about the works rather than
try to fill the gaps with assumptions, and if we
have in mind the colonial structures informing
our knowledge about the works. Such an ap-
proach requires a change in our language that
does not shy away from difficult histories and
that Roberts encouraged scholars of African
arts to adopt (2012: 7, citing Irit Rogoff 2010).
The approach is also more relevant than ever,
given calls for the decolonization of knowl-
edge production and other examinations of
longstanding power structures. 例如,
through the introductory African art history
course that Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi has de-
signed at Emory University, the two of us have
observed that it is indeed possible to change
our language and our methods for presenting
and making relevant historical arts of Africa
to audiences with no prior knowledge of the
subject.8
LET’S ACKNOWLEDGE STYLE
We cannot avoid the inconvenient truth that
the “one tribe, one style” paradigm has pro-
vided a foundation for commercial as well as
art-historical discourses on African arts since
the early twentieth century. In a way reminis-
cent of how a headpiece from a mask has come
to stand metonymically for the entire multi-
sensory ensemble in a museum setting, 条款
including Bamana, Baule, and Songye have
come to encompass sets of objects, 含义
seemingly related to the forms, and knowledge
about the arts. 因此, the terms today consti-
tute a common vocabulary and organizing
framework for African arts and their study.
Abandoning the terms and replacing them
with new ones would miss the point.
One way to avoid reinforcing outdated ideas
about bounded cultural or ethnic groups is
to focus on an art-historical approach based
on style and to remove altogether the “tribe”
part of the “one tribe, one style” equation.
今天, Bamana, Baule, or Songye designate a
set of formal traits recognized by African art
connoisseurs separate from a single object’s
original contexts of creation or use. As Con-
stantine Petridis reminds us, given a paucity
of firsthand information about African arts,
“most labels are assigned based on stylistic
comparison” (2018: 14). Faced with this reality,
we conclude we should clearly recognize
that the terms we use reflect connoisseurs’
evaluations of form and complex market
negotiations. Such assessments do not always
align with other information we have about
an object.
By talking and writing about a Bamana
style, a Baule style, a Songye style, or some
other style, we make clear that the terminology
reflects visual evaluation of objects (如图. 2).9
We recognize that this approach presents chal-
伦格斯. One objection we have encountered
is that description of an object in a particular
style suggests that it is “in the style of ” and
implies a questioning of the object’s authentic-
性. But a strict definition of authenticity, 一
tied to the notion of cultural purity, is itself
already flawed. Another objection reflects
concern about a style-based label as another
“single story.” Yet a single story based on form
situates the object in a specific art-historical
语境, one that allows us to reckon with
the constructed nature of the story and its
ties to colonial history. Further art-historical
investigations focused on specific objects or
their biographies would allow us to recover
additional nuances and multiple stories.
Once we recognize that our determinations
of style reflect our evaluations of form, 然后我们
must also revise our language to signal to our
audiences that the style of a particular object
may or may not reflect anything about who
made it, for whom, or why.10 Doing so without
losing sight of powerful narratives embed-
ded within each work or its formal appeal is
another challenge. We must nevertheless high-
light the unevenness of our knowledge about
物体. 的确, extant documentation often
allows us to recuperate more information
about contexts in which a particular work was
acquired, sold, and subsequently displayed and
described in Europe and North America than
information about the object’s original maker,
patron, 观众, or context of production.
We must realize that efforts to fill such gaps
with assumptions about precolonial cultures
does not translate into the actual recovery of
African experiences in the past. We must also
acknowledge that present-day articulations of
identity intersect with but also diverge from
historical ones (see also Appiah 2018). 学校-
ars have long lived alongside the unequal and
uncomfortable power structures embedded in
the circulation of African arts. Our audiences
are eager to see us address them more directly.
A danger in the single, timeless stories we as
scholars continue to tell is that they reinforce
ideas about Africa that we have known for
decades to be out of date. Rather than overhaul
our language, specialists in museums and
universities have shifted much of the responsi-
bility for recognizing the historical dynamism,
individual agency, and local specificity from
themselves to their audiences. 他们有
also tacitly reinforced notions of purity (看
Latour’s [1991] reflections on purity). 但
as Theaster Gates reminds us, “In the end
nothing is pure.” Recognizing the impact of
formal analysis and the historical definition
of discrete styles allows us to move away
from outdated anthropological concepts and
inscribe the works firmly into an art history
that is self-reflective and that acknowledges its
problematic roots.
Notes
The ideas we outline here reflect more than a decade of
conversation with each other as well as numerous con-
versations with colleagues, 家庭, and friends around the
世界. Their names are too many to list here. 然而, 我们
thank each person for the thoughtful exchanges.
1 We recognize a longstanding discomfort with the
terms traditional, historical, or classical to identify a
corpus of African arts (例如, see Lamp 1999,
沃格尔 2005, Doris 2011). The works in this corpus are
historical or have historical precedents. 在某些情况下,
artists still produce similar works. Rather than focus
on this terminological challenge here, we address other
foundational terminological concerns.
2 The April 17, 2019 Atelier Style / ethnie workshop
at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, 法国,
reflects a recent effort to analyze this challenge for the
study and presentation of African arts. Claire Bosc-
Tiessé and Peter Mark organized the workshop. Invited
participants included Richard Fardon, Jonathan Fine,
Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Hélène Joubert, Dominique
Malaquais, and Eric Michaud.
3
Silvia Forni, Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, Amanda
Maples, and Matthew Rarey presented papers during
the Shattering Single Stories session we co-organized
为了 2016 African Studies Association (ASA) annual
会议. Kevin Dumouchelle and Karen Milbourne
responded to the papers. Paul Davis, John Monroe,
Elizabeth Perrill, and Matthew Rarey presented papers
during the session bearing the same name that we
co-organized for the 2017 Arts Council of the African
VOL. 52, NO. 4 WINTER 2019 african arts | 5
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Studies Association triennial conference. Constantine
Petridis served as a discussant.
4 Here we refer to the title of Sidney Littlefield Kasfir’s
oft-cited essay, “One Tribe, One Style? Paradigms in the
Historiography of African Art” (Kasfir 1984).
5
Jean-Loup Amselle (1998) argues that efforts to
discern subgroup styles reproduce the same problematic
logic informing efforts to discern the styles of broader
cultural or ethnic groups, even if the attempts to discern
subgroup styles seem grounded in greater specificity
(see Gagliardi 2014: 46–48).
6 African art scholars and other enthusiasts have
long debated what authenticity means. 例如, 看
the issue of African Arts devoted to “fakes and fakery”
(卷. 9, 不. 3, 1976). See also Kasfir 1992, Monroe 2012,
Van Beurden 2015. Despite ongoing debates about
different possibilities for the term’s meaning, 严格的
notions of authenticity still prevail in many discourses.
On uncertainty within the discipline of art history, 看
Didi-Huberman 2009.
7 Nzewi’s statement starts around 47:40 在里面
podcast.
8
For the spring semester of 2016, Gagliardi used a
single object in the collection of the Cleveland Museum
of Art (CMA) as the starting point for each class
会议. She presented to students specific information
about each object that she gathered in the museum’s
archives in consultation with Constantine Petridis, 然后
the CMA curator of African art. She asked students
to identify when publications focused on a particular
object or on unspecific comparative examples. 相当
than present information to students with disclaimers
about the construction of identities or the insistence
on object types, Gagliardi showed students what we do
and do not know about specific objects and publications
related to them. Students in the course then considered
the nature of our evidence for certain claims as well as
uncomfortable gaps in our knowledge. They engaged
successfully with the material. The case studies Gagliardi
selected also introduced students to major themes and
concepts in the field. Gagliardi worked with Yaëlle Biro
to develop a version of the course around the Metro-
politan Museum of Art’s collection and with Petridis
to create another version around the Art Institute of
Chicago’s collection in the spring of 2018 and fall of
2019, 分别. Other scholars have experimented
with how to teach introductory African art history
courses and gathered to discuss pedagogy. 例如,
Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi and Matthew Rarey worked
with the CMA to organize a March 2018 workshop to
consider different approaches.
9 Petridis and Gagliardi experimented with this
formulation when they collaborated on the Cleve-
land Museum of Art’s 2015 exhibition Senufo: Art
and Identity in West Africa (see also Gagliardi 2014).
Petridis has not adopted the approach in subsequent
装置. 然而, Gaëlle Beaujean and Catherine
Coquery-Vidrovitch referred to object styles in the
labels they prepared for Paris’s Musée du quai Branly’s
2017 exhibition L’Afrique des routes (see also Coque-
ry-Vidrovitch 2017). Labels for Paris’s Musée de l’Or-
angerie’s 2017 installation of Dada Africa, an exhibition
organized at Zurich’s Museum Rietberg, also referred
to object styles (Burmeister, Oberhofer, and Francini
2016).
10 We use the term style here to refer to an ensemble
of visual characteristics that art connoisseurs and other
experts rely on to categorize an object with other objects
on the basis of form. Our goal is to focus attention
on the constructed nature of style categories. 我们也
aim to acknowledge how actors in the art market or
other arenas have defined style categories and imposed
style labels on objects. Discussion of the extensive
twentieth-century debates on the concept of style is
beyond the scope of our essay. 然而, as Jan Elsner
(2003: 108) explains, “Style remains a crucial reminder
of our discipline’s depths—the follies, the idealisms
aspired to and unachieved, the rigor of an unsurpassed
formal analysis supported by a compendious firsthand
visual knowledge. This is the lineage of the discipline we
practice.” He concludes, “If we abandon it entirely, 我们的确是
so at our peril.”
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