Haitian Art -by Gérald Alexis
Preconceptions about Haitian art have led to hasty conclusions that, in turn, have nourished misinterpretations of the production of our artists, both trained and the so-called "primitive". Among other things, these preconceptions have sustained long debates on the African component of Haitian culture. In these debates it has generally been asserted that only Haitian popular artists, the "primitives" as they are often referred to, have carried on African traditional forms and that artists and intellectuals of the social and economic elites, have instinctively rejected all things African because of their possible association with the primitive, the tribal or the simple[1].The exhibition Racines: The Idea of Modernity in Contemporary Haitian Art , seems to be as an excellent opportunity to dispute this idea.
Let us begin by establishing an important premise: Haitian popular artists were not and have never been concerned with identity issues. This is not the case for those from the elite and the middle classes who felt the need to define themselves culturally in the context of the American occupation of Haiti[2]. Their quest for identity is at first evidenced in these artists’preference for tropical landscape, often palm trees silhouetted against sunset skies. Such a choice of subject was in conformity with Normil Sylvain’s suggestion that artists and poets seek out inspiration in the natural environment in order to praise the beauty of the land[3].
Around the same time, and again in the context of defining a Haitian identity, Dr. Jean Price-Mars, an influential intellectual, asked that his peers consider the values preserved by the peasantry for, as he put it, "they are what represent the true Haitian culture". Such a statement, although not really explicit, inferred that the Haitian peasant was an African transposed in the Americas, perpetrating ancestral traits from generations to generations[4]. Abiding to Price Mars’ request, some artists, associated with poets and novelists of the indigenist movement, ventured into candid renderings of the daily activities of men and women from rural areas. Influenced by their education, their social background and the dominant ideas of the time, these artists painted from the heart, giving form to the dignity of these rural populations, hence exalting a feeling of national pride. Their art is seen today as superficial, giving priority to elements of style rather that content. Yet, considered in their context, the stylistic choices of these artists are justified, on the one hand, by the taste of the Haitian art buying public for European traditional styles and, on the other, by the example set by an American artist, William E.Scott [5], who visited and worked in Haiti in the early 1930’s. Scott’s work showed the undeniable influence of his artistic training in France beneath the bold colours that came out of his Haitian experience. Scott’s work was at the time strongly criticized by his fellow African Americans. They commented that he lacked personal orientation[6] insinuating that "he was not black enough".. Shortly after the Centre d’Art of Port-au-Prince revealed what came to be known as the "primitive art" of Haiti, the same criticism came to these indigenists who, as a mean of expressing their
identity, were paying tribute to the land and its people.
The fact of the matter is that the presence of American troops during the occupation of Haiti had brought to the U.S. certain images of the Haitian population, focussing mainly on its practice of voodoo. Because of that, and because the population is basically of African descent, most Americans were inclined to believe that Haitian culture was essentially African, except for a small elite that prided itself of its European ancestry. Thus, all other possible influences were discarded, that of the indigenous Indian populations among others. This idea was still dominant when the Centre d’
Art opened in Port-au-Prince in 1944, at the initiative of an American artist named Dewitt Peters. The idea prevailed even though it was noted that, Haitian artists emerging from the lower social classes, and that came to the Centre were essentially painters and not sculptors, as one would expect. Indeed, sculptors were scarce among Haitians in general[7].Such a discrepancy was overlooked however, since these artists were adepts
of a religion whose fundamental principles are rooted in regions of West Africa. In spite of this association with the black continent, the paintings by Haitian "primitives" did not seem to carry an African character, not even in works intended as images of voodoo deities.
It is important to understand that because voodoo practices were ostracized since colonial times, voodooists came to adopt iconographic forms of Catholicism, forms that were widely available since the 1860 concordat with
Rome. In this process, images of saints came to generate new symbols and thus became prototypes of voodoo iconography. At first, to reproduce these images, the self-taught artists used a simple method dominated by a
subjective style of drawing. Contrarily to the rigor required in tracing the emblematic drawings known as vèvè, the rendering of figures eluded such strict rules and gradually moved toward a reinforced naturalism. With
their acquired skills, some artists abandoned the prototype to create personal symbols, figures often disconcerting for the uninitiated. Such was the case of painters like Hector Hyppolite and Lafortune Felix.
In 1942 was created in Port-au-Prince the Bureau of Ethnology. Its founder and first director was Jacques Romain a Haitian graduate from the Sorbonne in Paris and from Colombia University in New York. The Bureau was the
first national institution to develop an interest in ancient Caribbean cultures and in voodoo. In its collection comprised mainly of ancient Indian artefacts, there were voodoo ritual objects rescued from the destruction of temples during the anti-superstition campaigns of the1930’s and 40’s. These anonymous rough iron pieces called assein[8] suggested
that some tradition of sculpture existed in Haiti but developed only in a religious context. A sculptor like Georges Liautaud was obviously pursuing that tradition[9]. Also in the collection of the Bureau were a number of
African statuettes and masks that the Cuban painter Carlos Henriquez sketched in formal studies[10] during one of his stays in Port-au-Prince. He also did a series of drawings suggesting rituals, drawings in which African statuettes were represented. It is interesting to compare one of these with a charcoal drawing of Lucien Price of the same period.
Although different, these two works show a common inspiration: that of traditional African sculptures and their reference to its magical and legendary value.
The Cuban vanguard artists who, in 1945, visited Haiti and exhibited there,had contact with European artists of the early 20th century. Some, like Wifredo Lam were close to intellectuals of the Negritude movement like the
poet Aimé Césaire from Martinique. As a result of this, they came to re-evaluate African sculptures as elements of their ancestry. These could be associated with the salve trade in which masks and statuettes crossed silently the ocean in the memory of those men and women who came to toil in the plantations of the New World. Such an art form has since been regarded as a major African component of, an important source of inspirationn for what was developing as "the culture of the Caribbean[11]".
Lucien Price(1915-1963) was a Haitian artist who made a living as a coffee expert. To carry out his profession, he travelled throughout the countryside and was able to confirm the indigenist premise that the Haitian peasant had preserved many African traditions[12]. The idea of a Haitian culture impressed with an African heritage was thus very present in the
mind of Lucien Price, in spite of his upbringing in an aristocratic family, nurtured by European fashions. Price’s work had a strong social content, and his commentaries were conveyed by the attitude of the characters he sketched during his travels.
Yet, his portraits and genre scenes, much like those of his contemporaries of the indigenist movement, were too documentary and did not truly provide the necessary terms that would allow him to express an African heritage.
He thus ridded himself of his academic training, and free from all aesthetic doubts, he produced a series of studies, at first, using the mask as a formal element rooted Africa, and that his art could stem from. Because of the immediate association of the mask with the face and thus with one’s personality, Prince was able to transform in non-narrative works some of
the physical and spiritual misery he witnessed in his rapport with the proletariat.
In deed, in this charcoal drawing, one can appreciate de angularity of the forms, the muted expression of the mask and highlights obtained by the technique of scraping commonly used by Max Ernst. In a work like this one was accomplished the indigenist ideal according to which Haitian artists should represent Haitian realities using the most advanced techniques. In further studies, Price dealt with the mask, as Wifredo Lam would have done, that is in compositions where planes come close and cut across each other.Later, as Price was moving toward abstraction, facial details became more and more stylized. At the end of the 1940’s, when he irreversibly adopted the abstract expression, Price created his series: Symphonies and Rhythm: Song of Africa, telling of his complex personality, his double heritage as a Haitian mulatto. In these drawings, he expressed pictorially what the Haitian poet, Leon Laleau once wrote:" …do you feel the supreme suffering and despair of having to reclaim with words from France this heart that came to me from Senegal[13]".
In his series Rhythm: songs of Africa, Price moved away from a realistic representation of the drum, which would be that of his "primitive" contemporaries. Instead, he translated into lines the rhythm of the drum, this ritual instrument that has passed, practically unchanged, through centuries, from Africa to Haiti.
Lucien Price had many students in his art classes at the Centre d’art of Port-au-Prince but he had few followers. One of them, Max Pinchinat (1925-1985), early on in his carer, had come to the conclusion that the academic tradition was unsuitable for the expression of the Haitian temperament. In his opinion, this was so simply because of this African
heritage that precludes him from having what he called "la raison raisonnante" meaning the Cartesian, the western way of thinking. It is interesting to see how, through the work of Picasso, Pinchinat grasped the African aesthetic to express the substance of his personality: a profound romantic nature. In doing so, he had gone in a direction opposite to those
artists that Andre Breton called the "devourers of the primitive arts of
Africa"[14].
Much younger than Pinchinat is Jean Claude Garoute (1935) better known as Tiga. Tiga and his companion Maude Rombart had waged war against Haitian art interested in modernism. They argued that, complying too often with
trends brought in from the outside, their contemporaries seemed hesitant and lacked confidence in their own values. They were therefore turning away from what could give authenticity to their art. Tiga’s participation in the Negro Arts Festival of Dakar (Senegal) in 1966 was determinant in outlining a new orientation. While there, he most certainly realized the
efforts sustained by President Leopold Sedar Senghor to bring about a generation of Senegalese artists who would draw their inspiration from the concept of the Negritude, defined as the comprehensive cultural values of Negro communities around the world. Tiga surely witnessed the changes, the dynamics, the research undertaken to come up with new aesthetic references aimed at liberating the Senegalese creativity from European trends. Upon his return to Haiti, he joined forces with another young artist, Patrick Vilaire, to create a cultural centre to which they gave the name Poto-mitan [15]. Their objective was to take their contemporaries, and most importantly future generations, into a profound and systematic exploration of the cultural values of voodoo and an application of its philosophical principles. The mask, as an object earlier considered by Lucien Price, reappeared in Tiga’s paintings.
Natural forms, feathers, are assembled in something that, in spite of some abstract elements, is clearly anthropomorphic. As such, and based on previous experiences, we see it as a mask. Comparing it with Lucien Price’s first masks, we realize that Tiga’s use of the object implies no other intention than that of its representation. It is a pure artistic motif. In
another painting, inspired by a boa mask of the Congo region, one can sense an interesting combination of traditional African earth tone with touches of the exuberant colours of the Haitian "primitives". The colour is applied here in a way that not only suggests scarification but also contributes to convey the carved aspect of the object.
Although Tiga abandoned the representations of mask, per se, he did maintain the use of facial features in his paintings and later in his "soleil brulés[16]" in a way that suggest a state of transition and change, as if we, the viewers, were witnessing a metamorphosis.
Poto-Mitan never reached the point of an environment with an organized structure, like that of the surrealist movement for example. It had little impact on its adherents, unlike Tiga himself, who will be very influential in the art of a younger member of the group: Philippe Dodard. Philippe Dodard was very young when he began visiting the artists working at Poto-Mitan. He would stop there every afternoon, on his way home from school. At first, he was impressed by ink drawings that were executed there. Ink was relatively inexpensive and could be used very expressively As a matter of fact, it did become one of Dodard’s favourite mediums when he came to define his own style. Before that, as do most young artists exposed to various influences, he experimented, exploiting the creative possibilities offered by acrylic paint. Blending colours, he created strange atmospheres in places indefinable in time and space. During that same period, curves
lines, elegant forms, became very trendy through the work of artists wrongfully grouped under the label "School of Beauty". These artists painted often still and silent images. Dodard adopted their mannerist style and, for a while, filled his canvases with movement and dynamic forms set in immeasurable spaces. This art in essence decorative had a huge commercial success. In 1981, Philippe Dodard had a solo exhibition at Galerie Marassa in Petionville. The show was sold out one hour after its opening.
It’s a known fact that success brings confidence to artists. On the other hand, it can push him into a total submission to the public’s taste. The artist then looses control and falls in the trap of making art for entertainment only. Whether or not Philippe Dodard felt the danger coming, the fact is that his style changed completely. The stylistic change may have been brought about by a long sojourn in the peace and tranquility of a hermitage in mountains outside of Port-au-Prince. His hours of meditation, submitted to the discipline of his guru had given him a different view on life and allowed him to better understand the rapport between mind and body.
There also was the death of his father and increasing responsibilities toward his younger siblings. And so with maturity came growing interest in human conditions. He soon realised that such emotional issues were incompatible with an iconographic program aimed at fashionable circles.
At this point it is necessary to emphasize that Philippe Dodard assumed a multifaceted career as a poet, a painter, a graphic artists, as a sculptor. And because these art all interwoven and related disciplines, his works have
since shown a strong sense of unity.
At first, his liberating shift came about in the silence of his ink drawings: vigorous and daunting black lines contrasting on a pure white background. In this process, man made a triumphant entrance in the work of Philippe Dodard. Later followed the anthropomorphic details such as facemasks and totems, underscored in a 1992 exhibition presented in Miami
and in Pétionville. These visual sources most probably came from his association with Tiga who continuously recommended making reference to ancestral traditions.
The facemask, as a visual symbol has principles established by conventions within a society, in a given time and place. In Dodard’s art, the interpretation of the African mask, at the representational level, is strictly that given by its anthropomorphic features. He thus chooses to give a different meaning to these signs that are conventional in an African
context and that convey social, religious, and moral values. In other words, he uses this traditional style, often depicting ancestors, spirits, mythological beings… to portray contemporary men and women. It’s easy for us to make such an assessment because it results from an objective observation of Dodard’s work. Although it is much more difficult to
determine precisely the motives that led him to make such choices, we can consider some objective facts pertaining to the artist and his oeuvre in an attempt to understand his appropriation of such forms.
One can easily sense that the paintings, drawings and poetry of Philippe Dodard emerge from the same sensitivity. His yoga training had brought him to imagine a world where man lives harmoniously with nature and with each other. If we assume that the artist wanted to create images embodying an unattainable moral and physical ideal by means other than those prescribed by Greek cannons, African art could very well provide him with such means, considering that it traditionally treats the human form as an idealized image. On a few instances, the image painted by Philippe Dodard makes
reference to a particular person. In those rare cases, the idealisation prevails, as in the depiction of ideas that he personifies. There again, an appropriation of African forms could be and was worthwhile. Further, he appreciated the great diversity of these masks and statues, enabling him to find a wide variety of expressions.
We can assume that Dodard sought idealized forms, different figures those of Bernard Séjourné and Jean-René Jérôme who were leading personnalities on the market, at the time. Wanting to set himself apart he may have chosen to
abandon the elegance associated with the work of these two artists to adopt forms that are simpler, rougher. Of course, we can also assume that, much like European artists of the early 20th century, Dodard’s choice of a primitive style was only an out of reach fantasy, a mean to evade what he experienced on a daily basis: an ever degrading social economic and
humanitarian situation.
Such an assumption can be challenge arguing that Dodard needed not going back so far in time and space since Haitian art is known to elude reality. In the 1940’s and 50’s this characteristic was coined "miraculous (or
magical realism" by authors like the Cuban Alejo Carpentier and the Haitian Jacques Stephen Alexis. In the 1970s, this concept was expressed once again visually through the virtuosity of so-called "neo-primitive" artists who created works of graceful appearance contrasting with the straightforward works of their "primitive" predecessors. If such sophisticated images were once part of Dodard’s repertory, as we have seen, they had ceased to be.
Undeniably, Philippe Dodard’s approach of African sculpture was basically aesthetic. Much like European artists of the early 20th century, he was interested in the expressive strength of this art form. Over the years, he became a passionate collector of African art, which in turn gave him the possibility of getting the information first hand. The shape of the
figures in Dodard’s art is rarely organic. Instead, he replicates the interplay of flat, convex, and angular forms of the masks and statuettes. Lines are of a foremost importance and are sometimes incised in the thickness of the paint. His colors are applied much like the traditional painted patterns used to complement the design. His images of masks are often so close to the original that one would have no difficulty in placing the original model geographically. The representation of the mask, however, is not an end in itself, like it is in the work of contemporary African American artists. The mask is a face used to express something. If indeed Philippe Dodard tells us of his phantasm, at times sexual, out of many of his works emanates a sense of melancholy.
In a text presenting Philippe Dodard[17], Tiga considered him as an element of the avant-garde. He argues that Dodard dared to make choices, refusing the idea of the "man-machine" enslaved by the consumer society. But more than that, by reconciling contemporary trends with a "profoundly romantic nature" that develops out of a century old memory, Dodard deserves to be considered as part a tradition of great Haitian artists, like Lucien Price, Max Pinchinat and Tiga.
And since the century old memory they all share is also that of people all over the world, his art, much like that of his predecessors, knows no boundaries and can therefore attain the universal, in spite of its particularities.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bibliography:
>[1] - Von Sertima Ivan – The voodoo gallery: African presence in ritual
>and art of Haiti, Journal of African Civilisations, November 1981, p. 88.
>[2] - Haiti was occupied by the U.S. from 1914 to 1935.
>[3] - Sylvain, Normil – "Un rêve de George Sylvain", La Revue Indigène,
>july 1927, re-edited by the Fondation Haïtienne de la Santé et de l’
>Éducation, Impression Magique, Port-au-Prince, 1982, p. : 3
>[4] - It has been said, by Senghor among others, that Price Mars was
>influential in the development of the concept of "negritude".
>[5] - Most of the works by the artists found in public collections in the
>U.S. were created during his sojourn in Haiti. Some can still be found in
>Haitian private collections.
>[6] - Locke, Alan Leroy – The New Negro, Albert and Charles Boni, New
>York,
>1925 refered to by various sources.
>[7] - At the time the Centre d’Art opened in Port-au-Prince, only two
>Haitian sculptors were known: Edmond Laforestrie and Normil Charles.
>They
>both had academic training in France. Later came André Dimanche and
>Georges
>Liautaud who had no formal artistic training. .
>
>[8] - They have been compared to iron altar standards (ases) from Dahomey
>by Robert Farris Thompson in The Flash of the Spirit: Haiti’s africanising
>vodun art, Haitian Art, Brooklyn Museum catalogue, Harry N, Abrams, Inc,
>New
>York, 1978, p.30
>[9] - .Although the talent of a Georges Liautaud remains undeniable, an
>explanation to the hustle and bustle around his discovery in the early
>1950’
>s must take into account the scarcity of Haitian sculptors at the time.
>Georges Liautaud was in deed the first blacksmith to be raised to the
>status
>of artist. He did produce metal figurines representing voodoo divinities
>yet, he is mostly known for his rough iron crosses like the one that he had
>done for the cemetery of his home town, Croix de Bouquets, and that
>impressed by talent scouts from the Centre d’art.
>[10] - These drawings are today in the collection of the University of
>Havana and were exhibited in June 1995 as part of a series of cultural
>events that took place in Havana celebrating the 50th anniversary of the
>first visit to Haiti of Cuban vanguard artists during the exhibition of
>their works at the Centre d’Art.
>[11]- see Wood Yolanda - Resignificación plástica de un legado africano:
>la máscara. Catauro. Revista cubana de Antropología. Fundación Fernando
>Ortiz. La Habana. Año 2: No: 3. 2001 pp.: 171-182.
>[12] - this idea was first expressed by Dr. Jean Price-Mars in his
>conferences compiled in Ainsi parla l’oncle
>[13] - Laleau, Leon – Hérédité, from an unpublished poem, in Raphaël
>Berrou and Pradel Pompilus’, Histoire de la Littérature Haïtienne, Vol. 2,
>Editions Caraïbes, Port-au-Prince, 1975, p. 496.
>
>[14] - Breton, André – quoted by Pierre Gaudibert in La planète toute
>entière, Magiciens de la Terre, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, 1989, p. 19,
>note 4.
>[15] - Poto-mitan is the central pole in voodoo temples said to be the
>way
>by which would descend the spirits called upon during ceremonies.
>
>[16] - A technique developed by Tiga in the early 1980’s, by which he
>creates images where the colour, predominantly brown, is treated in order
>to
>create camaiëu effects
>
>[17] - Garoute Jean-Claude Foreword - Philippe Dodard – Soir d’encrier ,
>Collection Galerie Marassa, Pétionville, 1993, p. : 6
>
>Gérald Alexis
>510-1520 boulevard de l'Entente
>Québec, Qc G1S 4Z7
>Canada
>(418) 683-3754
  
Philippe Dodard
Beyond Unicentricity: Transcultural Black Presences
Carole Boyce Davies, Research in African Literatures; 6/22/1999
Unicentric approaches to culture, such as Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, create oppressive systems but solutions calling for diversity of view or multiculturalism cannot be effective unless they establish relationships among all segments of a population. Afrocentrism is limiting because it is defined by Eurocentrism. A multicultural approach must recognize diverse cultural currents within the African community and establish ties with all other ethnic communities.
The paradox of cultural heterogeneity, or cross-cultural capacity, lies in the evolutionary thrust it restores to orders of the imagination, the ceaseless dialogue it inserts between hardened conventions and eclipsed or half-eclipsed otherness, within an intuitive self that moves endlessly into flexible patterns, arcs or bridges of community.
Wilson Harris (The Womb of Space xvii)
I define Unicentricity as One-Centeredness, a logic which demands a single center (intellectual, economic, political, cultural, geographic) from which all emanates. In unicentricity the logic of core and periphery, even in the "world systems"(1) sense, functions to center some experience, marginalize others. Further, it assumes a unidirectional movement outwards from this constructed source. Thus, unicentricity turns on the idea of a certain essential meaning, beginning, parentage, ancestry, origin. Unicentricity thus cannot imagine multiple and equal centers but instead has to operate with one constantly expanding center. Unicentricity, then, legitimizes its gains, seeking and expanding the set of peripheries that it gradually pulls into its orbit and thus inevitably can become a colonialist project. The single center logic, then, is the basis of dominance and control, for it functions with other communities in terms of competition, hierarchy, and subordination. What is centered becomes the most important, the proper, the politically appropriate. Rather than an interactive logic of multiple, relational spheres of interest, in unicentricity, something has to be centered. That something attains dominance and becomes the central star around which all others orbit.
In my view it is necessary to pursue analyses of "unicentricity" because we have several extant versions. Unicentricity, or one-centeredness, I am arguing, is the logic of Eurocentrism as well as that of its counterdiscourse, Afrocentrism. My definition, then, comes from observing both philosophical positions operationally, and their forms of representation, relationally. While I am not arguing that they are in any way symmetrical or have access to the same levels of power, what interests me is the logic that drives each position.
It is against unicentricity, another form of one-dimensional thinking, that I want to challenge the imaginative to pursue other paradigms that move away from the logic of center/periphery, single origins, one-centeredness. I want to assert here, then, that a world in which we consider variable approaches seems appropriate for a number of reasons. It gives us more scope; it prevents fascism and the kind of dominance that we have seen under Eurocentrism; and it opens a wider range for reflection. The assumption of a "politics of possibility" means that there are many other possibilities. The task which follows is to imagine better versions of the worlds we inhabit, but also all the possible worlds that could exist--other kinds of states, other models, other paradigms. Imagining other possibilities allows us, along the order of Wilson Harris's statement above, to pose a new series of suppositions.(2) My interest is not a free-floating imagination occupied just with its own pursuits (which on its own could be a desirable, creative scenario), but rather the freeing of the imagination to other possibilities which allow us to create better pictures of what kinds of communities we live in, but more importantly, how they can be.
Samir Amin in Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (1985) put forward the idea of a genuine polycentrism as a basis for an economic restructuring of the world. While Amin was engaging in a political economy with a specific set of interests in terms of a critique of capitalist economies, his logic of polycentrism is one of the few attempts to identify other paradigms than the popular oppositions. Polycentrism assumes a many-centeredness which necessitates the absence of a single center.
Others have talked, as Ngugi wa Thiong'o does, of Moving the Centre (1993) in his first chapter, "Towards a Pluralism of Cultures." Basically, Ngugi does not challenge the idea of a center nor the idea of a certain "pluralism" that assumes symmetry. Instead, his preoccupation is with relocating the center: "I am concerned with moving the center in two senses at least. One is the need to move the center from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world. The assumed location of the center of the universe in the West is what goes by the term Eurocentrism, an assumption which developed with the domination of the world by a handful of Western nations" (xvi). The second sense in which Ngugi wants to use it has to do with moving the internal center from "a dominant social stratum, a male bourgeois minority" (xvii). The link between the two centers he identifies is world domination by a Eurocentric bourgeois male and racial minority. Claiming, then, to be a true humanist and/or universalist, Ngugi suggests that it is only with moving these centers that "a true humanism can flower among the peoples of the earth" (xvii).
It is important to point out here that Ngugi's second point has already been made by at least three generations of feminist scholars of a variety of racial, ethnic, and class affiliations. Additionally, one might need a clearer understanding of how his use of humanism might be appropriate. Still, within Ngugi's first formulation is the idea I am addressing, the need to move toward "a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world." This logic of multiple spheres, in a way, overwrites a certain "multiculturalism" that has had more traffic in and outside the academy than, say, the leftist polycentric model of Amin. A proliferation of texts and popular discourses of multiculturalism now populate the academy and the media, and still without a sense of the different histories and inequalities that continue to exist. Cornel West in an earlier and "prophetic" commentary titled "Beyond Multiculturalism and Eurocentrism" (1993) would identify multiculturalism as a "buzzword," "undefined," "promiscuous." (In a bit of wry humor that would cause some of us to bristle, he would add further: "It tends to function in a rather promiscuous manner, to lie down with any perspective, any orientation. So we need to handle it. It is a rather elusive and amorphous term."(3)) The "Black Studies" opposition is that multiculturalism, loosely constructed, often lacks specificity or any kind of relation to history and, further, that it is sometimes a convenient way of not addressing Africana Studies at the institutional level. Anthony Appiah, in a review essay entitled "The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding" (1997), identifies some of the current issues in multiculturalist thinking that sum up the popular media coopting of meaning in a very North American way of denuding troubling formulations.
Robert Stam and Ella Shohat in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media speak of a "polycentric multiculturalism" or a "radical multiculturalism" (1994), seeing it as an opportunity for debate rather than a fixed discourse, prodding it in the direction of a radical critique of power relations. They are uncomfortable with the popular and trivialized notions of multiculturalism, which they see as "polysemically open to various interpretations and subject to diverse political force field ... an empty signifier on to which various groups project their hopes and fears" (47). The problem with popular multi-culturalism is, of course, that it assumes a "liberal symmetry" in fields and cultures that have been dominated by a Eurocentric episteme. Stam and Shohat's "radical multiculturalism" would then talk about a "profound restructuring and reconceptualization of the power relations between cultural communities" (47). Polycentrism, for them, globalizes multiculturalism. From this conclusion, they are able to identify seven possibilities for their "polycentric multiculturalism," the first of which speaks of not privileging epistemologically any cultural community or part of the world and the last of which speaks of a dialogical, reciprocal mode of engaging ideas and problems with the possibility of change as a desired outcome.
In any thinking beyond unicentricity, the idea of pluralism is often posed as one other possibility. Still, pluralism as it is popularly used is a construct loaded with a great deal of historical baggage. In thinking past unicentricity still, it is impossible not to account at some level for pluralism at its base meaning of "manyness." Harry Goulbourne in Ethnicity and Nationalism in Post-Imperial Britain (1993),(4) critical of the ways in which pluralism has been casually used, identifies a range of discourses in which pluralism has variable meanings. These range from the US liberal pluralism to the "new pluralism" that he prefers to apply to contemporary Britain. Still, he assents that in Britain, multiculturalism produces an anxiety similar to pluralism in the United States.
I want to briefly raise the formulation known as diversity in order to dismiss it here as now reduced to institutional rhetoric (thereby becoming another of those media-denuded terms) geared to meeting affirmative action mandates. Generally, diversity discourses have proven not to be anything institutions invest heavily in beyond the glossy photos and words of different students, relative programs, and faculty, or promotional purposes. Having participated in diversity struggles in some specific contexts,(5) I can say with confidence that true diversity can only come from a radical transformation of institutional structures from curriculum to personnel. Most institutions, particularly state institutions, have no interest or desire to do this even if they control the means of institutional transformation.
Let us therefore look at the assumptions of dominance in knowledge production that are at the center of Eurocentricity and its descendant US centricity. It is perhaps easiest to mount a critique of Eurocentrism in the academy as a great deal of literature has been amassed in this effort. This critique has been well advanced by a variety of black scholars throughout black intellectual history in the wake of Middle Passage enslavement and its aftermaths. More importantly, the evidence of Eurocentrism is still all around us and masquerades as universalism or "normalcy." One recent contribution in the attempt to challenge Eurocentrism is Marimba Ani's Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (1997), which pursues Eurocentricity in a detailed and, in her own words, "African-centered" manner. Still, Ani's approach, in order to work, has to claim a certain set of essential (often geneticist) meanings of Africanity and often gives over to Eurocentricity much that it should not. So rather than invent these critiques of Eurocentricity, I want to briefly summarize some of them here with the aim of arriving at some understanding of its larger logic of unicentricity.
The entire project of what began to be known as "Black Studies" in the late '60s and early '70s was directed at challenging the Euro/US-centric bases of education under which the contemporary academy rested. Indeed, while "Black Studies" as a field assumed a certain cohesion in the wake of entry into the institutions of black students (integration), prior generations of scholars had consistently whittled away at the assumptions of Eurocentricity. This is not to suggest that Latin American, Asian, and Arabic thinkers have not been engaged in this project of challenging Eurocentrism and its construction of the other. Rather, the concern here is to identify some of the scholars in the "Black Studies" tradition. Among them, the generation that included W. E. B. DuBois engaged in an unrelenting attack on the Eurocentric bases of knowledge and consistently advanced African peoples as worthy subjects of study. Scholars like Carter Woodson and a range of others subsequently pursued similar tasks at the level of recognizing this "mis-education." Subsequently, historians like John Hope Franklin, in "The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar" (1963) identified how racism and Eurocentrism interfered with the ability of black scholarship to flourish. Thus, the entire enterprise that has come to be known as African-American, African, or Africana Studies can be defined as the interrogation of knowledge production in ways that challenged the epistemological violence that Eurocentrism visited on non-Western and Western peoples. The conclusion would be that the entire edifice of Western civilization operates on falsehood and perpetuates ignorance and misinformation as it is assumed/continues to assume this Eurocentric error.
Eurocentrism, however, operates in a certain Manicheanism as its basis. It had to set up oppositions between itself and the non-European other that consistently located (and continues to locate) that other in a position of disadvantage. European = civilization; non-European = barbarism. This "Manichean aesthetics" has to make the other barbarous, different, dependent, monstrous, Calibanesque. The series of binary oppositions that are then produced begin to be actualized in a variety of concrete ways, but precisely through language and social structures.
In order to center itself, Eurocentrism has to operate with a logic of single ownership of knowledge. To do this it had to construct a certain originary point from which all knowledge emanated and reduce the rest to backwardness. Rather than identifying gains and advancements or breakthroughs at certain points in history and in different cultural contexts, it instead incorporates all advances as European or erases them as nonexistent.(6) Amin identifies Eurocentrism as a recent phenomenon. Although there would be prior attempts at unicentricity at different points in history, Eurocentrism becomes a crystallization of a discourse that accompanied European expansion, colonialism, and imperialism.
Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism (1955) identifies the violence that European colonialism meted out to various non-Western peoples. The violence of which he spoke was both the physical in terms of wars, destructions of ecologies and peoples, civilizations, and the epistemological, the parallel legitimization of racism in Western philosophy. He asserts that the violence that was manifested via a Hitler was already within the philosophical language of Europe. Thus, the hallmark of Eurocentrism is that it consistently linked physical violence with epistemological violence.
This epistemological violence was also marked by a certain monologism that reduced other cultures to "hearers," not participants in a dialogue (see Slaughter). All of the disciplines of the current academy are infected by this monologism, acting it out in various ways and consistently assuming that other peoples of the world have nothing important to say. The projects of "Black Studies" and "Women's Studies," for example, have been to interrupt the monologue and to allow a variety of other voices to speak or articulate a different set of issues. In his Eurocentrism, Amin anatomizes Eurocentrism through a variety of detailed steps that I find helpful, locating it in history as accompanying the rise of capitalism and specifying some of its theoretical terrain. Cornell West relatedly asserts that one must be careful in identifying Eurocentrism to delineate class and historical contexts, cultures of resistance in Europe itself from dominant cultures, a place of grand experiments and colossal failures. Important for this discussion as well is that for Amin, Eurocentrism is a "culturalist" (as distinct from cultural) phenomenon as it "assumes the existence of irreducibly distinct cultural invariants that shape the historical paths of different people." Thus, while it masquerades as "universal," Eurocentrism is really "anti-universalist" (vii).
The logical heir of Eurocentrism, says Aime Cesaire, among others, is US-centrism, which is, in his words: "Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder" (59). US-centrism is marked, in my view, by a very distinct capitalist colonial relationship with the rest of the world, which expresses itself through media, markets, military. These three M's as modes of domination operate differently from prior colonialisms in that they often do not demand occupation of colonies all the time (we hasten to maintain that there are many still-existing colonies of the traditional model) but have the technology and might to control outcomes, penetrate locations, and influence production. US-centrism can be as benign and insidious as televangelists in Brazil attempting to erase local cultures in favor of an American model or as violently overt as direct invasions if necessary, or more insidiously, the moving of military fleets to vicinities of control. Language such as US "interests" carries forward these postures as they widen the centers of influence to a certain globalism to advance market interests.
US-centrism, following Eurocentrism, identifies internally a linear narrative of founding that erases histories of others that do not fit the national narrative, and then exports this narrative. In its domestic operations, US-centrism advances itself through what I have called the "discriminatory paradigm" in which every group not described as the mainstream must consistently negotiate itself into serious consideration. In US-centrism, furthermore, the US becomes the equivalent of America, and prior formulations of "The Americas" and the "other Americas" become nonexistent or erased in their very formation, i.e., America = the US.
It is not unusual, then, for a variety of US scholars, including Afro-US scholars, to create similar paradigms and narratives of identity. Sometimes, then, US-generated Diaspora formulations may reference others outside of this linear narrative but, in the main, conceptions are intrinsically US-centered, US-bordered. Importantly, for black scholars based in the US, a domestic agenda of confronting racism has been necessary and has gained some ground in the area of participation in US mainstream culture and politics. However, this does not preclude other arrangements at the international or diasporic level which remain much more limited in recent times than the times of Anna Julia Cooper, DuBois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright. Indeed, DuBois's vision of the twoness of American and Black identities and that struggle for a certain recognition of the conflict was an early recognition of this and is echoed in his final departure for Ghana. My point is that while US-centrism thrives on that kind of borderedness, it has not been unusual to have a number of scholars throughout history who consistently broke through those limitations.
The logic of centricity still has currency in certain Africana Studies circles and has had extension into the popular Afro-US community discussions on identity, culture, and self-presentation. It is important to say from the outset, as we assess its gains and limits, that Afrocentricity(7) is a counterdiscourse, created in the context of unrelenting attacks on African peoples from European projects. It is also important in my view to delineate the current project of "Afrocentricity" as advanced by (and not necessarily singly defined by) Molefi Asante and the Temple School, as an attempt to deploy a theoretical model with which to advance African self-perceptions. One can also identify a variety of schools of Afrocentricity, or Africentricity as some prefer to name it. Following in a line of discourses that sought to raise Africanity to a parallel consideration with Eurocentricity in academic and aesthetic formulations, Afrocentricity pursues ideological positions that have been raised throughout modern black intellectual history(8): Negritude, negrismo, black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and so on. Thus, it provides a way of re-inventing oneself outside of Eurocentric mandates.
Still, Afrocentrism is a culturalist model in the sense that like Eurocentrism it "assumes the existence of irreducibly distinct cultural invariants that shape historical paths of different people" (Amin vii). In this way it is different from Pan-Africanism, which, diasporic in formulation, assumes distinct and different nations, states, and cultural communities and identities operating in an interrelated umbrella political structure.
According to Asante in The Afrocentric Idea, Afrocentricity "means, literally, placing African ideas at the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior" (6). While this may be a laudable task and, one may argue as does Asante, that numerous black intellectuals have engaged in the development of such a paradigm (i.e., the centering of Africa and African peoples in one's thinking, research, approaches, etc.), culturalism is embedded in the very formulation. For African ideals have to be reduced to some definable set of principles, from a definable geocultural source, centered in Nile Valley Civilization.
Afrocentricity then becomes the attempt to conceptualize and metatheorize a series of practices through time, which have sought to valorize black identities, histories, cultures. As a popular counterdiscourse, then, Afrocentricity has meaning in counterassertion to Eurocentricity, which performs the opposite--erases other cultures and histories, valorizes things European, and so on. But Afrocentricity also makes a grand play for being a theory that has, additionally, the capability of subsuming Eurocentricity.
Its gains have therefore been heaviest in the area of culture and alternative educational paradigms--Afrocentric coloring books, Kwanzaa celebrations, Afrocentric history books, classrooms, schools. And similarly in black cultural definitions--style, fashion, hair, jewelry, interior decorating; and at the aesthetic level--art, concepts of beauty (and even pornography). Still, Afrocentricity comes out of a particular North American reality in which US racism mandates a certain subordination of black personality. Thus, Afrocentricity as counterassertion relocates African identities for Afro-US peoples and then deploys them in a formulation resting heavily on a gloried past of kings and queens and empires in order to challenge European lineages, royalties, and so on.
It is important to point out that even in the US, there exists a wide range of Afrocentric positions, from the Melanin organizations to those which participate in limited-range or occasional samplings of the "strategic essentializing" variety. Additionally, outside the US, Afro-Brazilians like Abdias do Nascimento who identify an "Afrocentric" position in the face of Brazilian racism do so similarly as a counterdiscourse that is sometimes North American-influenced but often generated out of the specific socioeconomic realities of Afro-Brazilian experience.(9) Even so, do Nascimento's "Afrocentricity" is strategically counterdiscursive, does not articulate itself to the exclusion of a specific Brazilian formulation, which he defines in "O quilombismo" as clearly transcultural. Black British Afrocentrists, like Amon Saba Saakana, tend to pursue the work of African scholars, following the line of Cheikh Anta Diop and their contemporary, Theophile Obenga, seeking to uncover the erased black connections in Nubian civilizations and to use these as counterassertions in identity construction, education, and so on. The varying and necessary positions and types of Afrocentricity, not limited to Asante, share a commonality, however, in their culturalism and in their attempt, nevertheless, to find that center, that single source or originary point, from which all emanate. My point is that the variants of Afrocentricity all still turn on the logic of centricity.
The limits of Afrocentricity are the following: First, it cannot get out of the boundaries set by Eurocentrism. As a counterdiscourse it still enters into a dance with Eurocentricity, in much the same way that the white-black oppositional gaze works at the level of desire. Its opposition, Oxen, limits it to presenting a discourse in the same terms as Eurocentricity. It simply reverses the paradigm, the language, the concept, and thus performs a substitution or inversion.(10)
Thus, secondly, Afrocentricity is also Manichean--consistently negotiating white domination and challenging black subordination, reversing the equivalences for blackness with whiteness. In order to do this, it has to assume purity, a direct line of sources. It similarly has to also consistently widen its center and locate everything into itself. Thus at its furthest reach it is not unusual to hear Afrocentrists claim that the entire world is Afrocentric, including all Europeans and their cultures, using the available archeological evidence to support this claim. In this framing of things, Native American peoples and Asians either disappear or have no independent cultural relations.
Thirdly, in order to have a certain validity, Afrocentricity often has to normalize and accept ethnocentricity as a positive. In some of the most reductive of these definitions, ethnocentricity is simply reduced to any racial or ethnic group being able to center itself and focus directly on its issues, histories, projects. Ethnocentricity thus normalized, it follows an argument that runs along the lines that European people have always centered themselves in history, knowledge, and so on, so African people also need to center themselves,(11) Laudable as this may seem from an Afrocentric point of view anxious for self-assertion, we already have ample proof throughout world history that ethnocentrism taken to its logical conclusion leads to "ethnic cleansing."(12)
Fourthly, Afrocentricity produces a totalizing discourse that obliterates internal differences or subsumes or annexes them, as in "Afrocentric feminism."(13) E. Frances White's "Africa on My Mind: Gentler, Counter-Discourse, and African-American Nationalism" (1990) mounts an interesting critique of Afrocentricity as a paradigm and particularly as it has to do with issues of gender and sexuality. She asserts that "paradoxically, Afrocentric ideology can be radical and progressive in relation to white racism and conservative and repressive in relation to the internal organization of the black community" (55). Further, Afrocentricity often utilizes the same language as Eurocentricity. She says, for example, that while Asante challenges African-Americans to move beyond the Eurocentric binarisms, in formulating the discourse called Afrocentricity, he was already entering an already created binary--e.g., "Europeans are materialistic while Africans are spiritual ..." (61)--which was one of the cornerstones of certain brands of Negritude. Thus is reversed language and concept.
Fifthly, there is in Afrocentricity an ongoing "invention of Africa" that is mindless of the fact that scholarship on Africa is clear that Africa itself is a European construct.(14) While it is true that African Diaspora communities have of necessity always invented particular notions of homeland as a unified entity, some distinctions can still be made between the larger ideological imperative to create an African origin and the realities of variable existences and transformations globally. I find it even more exciting to understand the transformations and reinterpretations of African cultures in New World communities as in the continental locations themselves.
Sixthly, Afrocentricity often does not particularly identify African contemporary realities. Rather, it simplifies intra-African cultural and social relations into a reification and glamorization of selected African elements, and, because it comes from capitalist US, it has the potential of being coopted for Afro-US (Afrocentric capitalist) business interests operating in Africa (Ghana, South Africa, Gabon as examples) or the high-priced marketing of African products in the import-export businesses while the producers garner little financial benefit. Further, while it is possible to export Afrocentricity, like other US products, to other locations--Brazil, the Caribbean, for example--rarely are concepts like quilombismo developed out of the Brazilian intellectual and activist tradition used to inform conceptually these Afro-US paradigms. And in this connection it carries some of that older logic that drove the founding of Liberia, and the Garvey movement--that Africans in the West are most equipped to return to develop the continent. Additionally, unlike concepts such as Diaspora, there is no way of accounting for historical imbrications, overlapping Diaspora and centers, and the truly crosscultural or transcultural.
Still, in my view, a distinction has to be made between African-centered research, scholarship, and practice, as identified by, for example, John Henrik Clarke in Who Betrayed the African World Revolution? (1994) in which he defines "Africancentricity" as does Marimba Ani, whose work Clarke identifies. He goes on to delineate various movements in African-American history, such as the Harlem Renaissance, as manifestations of "Africancentricity" (117): "It's our way of looking at things different from other people. It is our point of view, our window on the world, our vantage point based on our view from that window" (117). Still, he identifies it as "looking and feeling," verbal technique, a consciousness of the loss of Africa and the parallel reclamation of "what slavery and colonialism took away" (118), and above all a "five-hundred-year struggle." Clarke importantly critiques the attempts at narrowness in the approach but would want to see it as a "totality" of the experiences. If there is a critique of Asante by John Henrik Clarke in all of this it is that his version has not been able to move beyond infantilism and navel gazing, and pretends that it has invented something that has always been fundamental to black history and scholarship. Further, it erases some of the most important thinkers, such as W. E. B. DuBois, if they do not fit too closely the paradigm as it is most popularly articulated (122).
While I understand John Henrik Clarke's position, it is still an assertion that identifies itself as a centricity, which is my primary point of analysis here. Instead I would assert a need to move outside the "ethnic model" to an assertion of "transcultural black presences," multiply located and presented with a set of relations to a variety of other cultural identities and therefore not fixed in any given center.(15) A move to what Tejumola Olaniyan would identify as a post-Afrocentric poetics, simultaneously anti-colonialist, asking instead for historical specificity and negotiating transcultural transactions (26).(16) In other words, Afrocentricity can be for some a position to occupy along the way, some of its cultural aspects practiced as one advances to more complex understandings of the world.
In the institutionalized tendencies to keep the easy binaries, many other possibilities, some of which have been in place for some time, remain unaddressed. Cross-Cultural Paradigms challenge the notion of easy binary opposition. For example, a distinct Black Left discourse continues to remain seriously unaccounted for in most academic contexts, including Black Studies contexts. This may be the result of a certain "conservative" tendency among black intelligentsia and the US history of consistent erasure of socialist alternatives. Scholars and activists such as Oliver Cox, C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Amy Jacques Garvey, and others remain unaccounted for conceptually in Africana discourses, except in passing citations. The Black Left is often inherently transnational because of its identification of class as that which cuts through a range of histories and geographies. Activists like Claudia Jones were able to build institutions that created alliances between Africans and Asians--for example, her founding of The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian-Caribbean News in England (1958-64) and a series of grouping that brought together a variety of peoples struggling against racism and for decolonization.
A true diaspora discourse beyond the limitations of "Black Atlantic" formulations has as yet to account for the range of African peoples and their locations. Again, if the formulation remains an essentialized African one, then many African peoples remain unrecognizable, unseen, unaccounted for. Diaspora discourses, then, can also address the ways that a series of Diaspora relate, the places where diaspora collaborate as in Afro-Indian tassa drumming in Trinidad, or the meaning of Ghandi in relation to an Afro-Brazilian political and carnival context or South African anti-apartheid and Indian decolonization struggles.(17) Similarly, they need not operate as competing Diaspora but as a series of relational spheres that can then identify how people are interrelated beyond the "centricity" logic.
Creolite, which is Diasporic in intent, is often represented only in its culturalist formulations. Creolite has on the one hand the idea of local creative possibilities in terms of language, cultural styles, modes of being, cuisine, and so on. Still, in its other incarnation, creolite has to be seen as the product of sexual deviation of white male society and the rape dimension of all New World culture.(18) Additionally, the creation of a series of mixtures outside of Eurocentric or Afrocentric definitions continues to defy and challenge the racial paradigms on both sides. I use rape here not only in the sense of the biological rape of the bodies of native and African women but in terms of the rape of the land and the exploitation of its resources and the installed asymmetries and inequalities. Creolite then has to be read complexly and in gendered terms, classed and relocated in terms of its historic meanings. A variety of critiques have also identified that it continues to articulate a certain fixity that is contrary to more active process of "creolization" that Glissant, for example, favors.(19)
A fully transcultural paradigm, in my view, has to pursue and account for a range of relations of African peoples internationally as they interact with a variety of cultural spaces. In this connection, the logic of Diaspora guides as it identifies as many locations as are available where African peoples reside, and tries to understand and account for their existence in these locations. In Afro-US history, a number of artists have deliberately sought inspiration and aesthetic sensibilities from a Diaspora interaction. Dancers like Katherine Dunham; artists like Louise Maillot Jones and Romare Bearden. And scholars like Mercer Cook, Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston consistently saw their lives as connected to communities outside the US. Fernando Ortiz's assertion of "transculturation" is helpful in that it sought to address the "deconstructive and constructive moments in histories affected by colonialism and imperialism" (Coronil xv) and to put on the table the idea of "globally interconnected particularities instead of a Western particularity. Still Ortiz as an anthropologist was trying to account for the "process of transition from one culture to another and its manifold repercussions" (xxv).
Crosscultural African Diaspora discourses, as I define them, speak to the variety of movements ushered in by migrations and the consistent reproduction of different modes of being in the world. Rather than a giant, monolithic, traditional African culture, then, we can assert multiple, transcultural presences within and outside Africa. Thus, crosscultural, transnational discourses are also "transformational" ("New World Discourses") central to Diaspora. Examinations of the relationships between aspects of African cultures and histories and indigenous Native American, Asian, Islamic, and Western cultures imbricated with a "range of colliding and collaborating relationships" are similarly critical. In other words, by this means we actualize the idea of related spheres beyond unicentricity.
NOTES
1) See for example Wallerstein.
2) Discussions with Alrick Cambridge (5 Oct. 1997) helped in the articulation and clarification of these points.
3) I hasten to add that my own formulation "Beyond Unicentricity" does not take oft from West's, whose discussion is helpful nonetheless for my own as it is an earlier thinking around the same issues that I thought needed to be addressed conceptually, although his does not go as far as defining "unicentricity" as I do here.
4) I was introduced to Goulbourne's work during Spring 1997 in London when I was a member of the Race and Culture Policy Research Unit in Brixton, England, headed by Alrick X. Cambridge, and want to thank them here for the opportunity of working with such a group.
5) I have participated in several diversity fora and institutional initiatives, was a diversity trainer and invited consultant to a number of institutions around the country, actively engaged in diversity battles at the SUNY-Binghamton site. Those geared towards internationalizing their curricula seem to me to have met with the most success.
6) Bernal is conveniently cited as his work challenges the genealogy that cuts oft at Greece and therefore deliberately does not reveal Egyptian contributions to the development of human knowledge.
7) This is an important preliminary disclaimer as there have been right-wing attacks on Afrocentricity with the expressed purpose of belittling African-based scholarship and challenging the knowledge gains of a range of black scholars in the institutions in which we work at the end of the twentieth century.
8) Clovis Semmes is pursuing work that clarifies the long line of African-centered scholarship not necessarily reduced to "Afrocentricity" in the US, as presented in a paper at the "21st Century Paradigms in Africana Studies" conference at Florida International University, May 1998.
9) See Hanchard and see also Butler for some of this discussion of racial politics in Brazil.
10) Few scholars have attempted internal critiques of Afrocentricity. Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Europe Upside Down" pursues this argument of inversion in its entirety. Gerald Early's "Understanding Afrocentrism" seems to be one such internal critique. A more recent book by English scholar Stephe Howe, Afrocentrism, was published after this article was written.
11) This point was made repeatedly to public school teachers attending a Teachers Workshop at Florida A & M University in June 1998, by two faculty presenters who were explaining to public school teachers the efficacy of accepting Afrocentricity as an umbrella category for addressing the introduction of African-American materials in the public school curriculum in Florida.
12) John McClendon argues that Afrocentricity is an ethnocentricity in "Revolutionist to Revisionist: The Sojourn from Marxist-Leninism to Neo-Marxism in African-American Studies."
13) See, for example, the work of Collins on this issue.
14) I make this point in my Migrations of the Subject 9-10.
15) Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation is one of these attempts. See also the work of Sylvia Wynter in this regard, particularly as it relates to the "orders of the imagination."
16) See, for example, Olaniyan.
17) This point was brought to me more deliberately after a visit to Durban, South Africa in 1996.
18) This point came through discussions with Monica Jardine at various times.
19) See his Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays and Poetics of Relation for further discussion of his logic of a more mobile identity. See Michael Dash's review essay, "Textual Error and Cultural Crossing," for a helpful discussion of some of the contexts. Thanks also to Jean Rahier for further clarifying this point at the level of language (e.g., the French -te that ends "creolite," carrying the idea of fixity) after presentation of this paper at Louisiana State University, 6 Mar. 1998.
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Carole Boyce Davies is Professor of English, Africana Studies, and Comparative Literature and Director of the African-New World Studies Program at Florida International University in North Miami.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Indiana University Press
VARIATIONS POETIQUES AUTOUR DE L' OEUVRE DE PHILIPPE DODARD
Ni blanc, ni noir. Ni bleu, ni rouge. Ni jaune, ni vert. Ni Dieu, ni Diable. Ni homme, ni femme. Ni eau, ni feu. Ni jour, ni nuit. Ni abstrait, ni figuratif. Mais le tout et le rien dans la globalité mystérieuse des paradoxes et des contraires où s' enchevêtrent infiniment la vie et la mort, l' imaginiare et le réel, les ombres et le néant.
L' oeuvre de Dodard se tient debout dans sa richesse multiple, son insolite beauté et l' opulence de sa totalité créatrice en marge des vieilles béquilles de la critique traditionnelle obsédée par les citations ennuyeuses et les repères historiques déphasés.
L' Oeuvre de Dodard vibre de par elle-même dans l' autonomie d' une gestuelle créatrice qui se renouvelle et se modifie dans une perpetuelle quête hors des clichés et des stéréotypes pollués par les boursouflures du mercantilisme envahissant et les virus mortifères de la paresse généralisée et du plagiat institutionnalisé.
Les faussaires et les assassins de l' art ont envahi la Cité. Mais les artistes authentiques ne capituleront jamais face à l' arrogance des trafiquants débiles.
La massive ignorance d' une catégorie de pseudo-collectionneurs complices des faussaires et des copieurs ne parviendra jamais à éteindre les dernières flammes de l' imaginaire.
Philippe dodard fait partie de cette infime minorité de créateurs dont l' oeuvre transcende les gesticulations des médiocres et les jongleries de la bêtise conjoncturelle.
Les fabricants de désastres continueront peut-être à brasser des recettes catastrophiques pour décorer l' abime. Mais la création artistique demeurera, hors de tout tapage folklorique, cette aventure pleine de mystères intarissables dans le musical silence de la vérité intérieure et de la solitude.
Solitude avec le voeu brulant de rencontrer l' aube au tournant des énigmes et des incertitudes. Voeu d' aurore au croisement des ambiguïtés fondamentales.
Formes, lignes, couleurs et mots surgissent tels des signes de lumière égratignant, écorchant, creusant, fouillant les obscures entrailles de la nuit.
Eclaboussures d' échos fugitifs et de brulures explosives aux zigzags du silence.
Flamboyance de voix intangibles, intenses et pourtant généreuses dans la palpitation des heures fugaces entre l' envie et le désir aux battements de l' inacessible.
L' hésitations des passerelles et des ponts dans la lyrique transparence des rives crépusculaires et la tragique dérive des astres vers une aube hypothétique.
Les fêlures du rêve au tourbillon des formes fascinées d' ailes divines dans la sorcellerie des lampes décoiffées. Incendie intérieur dans l' anarchie des feux indomptables et des amours inextinguibles.
L' ardente sensualité des blesures et des cicatrices dans l' espace agité de la toile saturée d' orages bruyants et de rage femelle.
La quête. Encore la quête. Toujours la quête à travers le désert de l' angoisse pour que la démarche créatrice retrouve les feux jubilatoires de la mémoire collective.
Ardente. Interminable. La quête sublime de l 'art qui s' évertue à retrouver à la fois les racines et les fruits dans l' espace des utopies modifiables aux frontières de la magie.
Philippe Dodard a joué de tous les signes, de toutes les formes, de toutes les lignes, de toutes les couleurs, de toutes les nuances, de toutes les clartés et de toutes les ombres dans le ballet des êtres embarqués dans un voyage sans frontières et sans fin.
Dodard n' a jamais cherché à déchiffrer, ni à expliquer quoi que ce soit. Mais, par les questionnements subtils de son oeuvre multiforme, peut-être qu il nous a incités à recycler nos rêves, à moduler nos illusions, et à modeler nos ailes pour froler l' imaginaire divin et inventer une aube nouvelle,
FRANKETIENNE
31AOUT 2006
HAITI
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