JOURNAL ON AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY
ISSN: 1533-1067
Issue 3 (2003)
| JOURNAL ON AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY ISSN: 1533-1067 Issue 3 (2003) |
|
GENDER IMPERIALISM IN ACADEMIA |
“Sisterhood”
white sister told me
all women are one
united in de face
of chau’vism.
(paa’don my engilis)I smiled
pa . . . paa
pa . . tri . . archy is the cross
women carry, she charged
we must unite
to fight it
with all our might.I laughed . . .
racked by spasm
my head jerked back
and crazily wobbled
from side to side.
pampered sister
titillates herself
to frenzy
with quixotic tales
of male ‘xploitation.I . . .
“dumb” black woman
laughed mirthlessly on
flicking away tears
of pain from eyes.I looked up
from my chore
on the kitchen floor
where, new found sister
had ordered me to be
on knees
to scrub the floor clean
for the pittance she paid:
on knees
to scrub the floor clean
for sisterarchy.-- Uwechia, 28/7/90
Language and conceptual ideas can be dramatic sites of violence imperial activities in which the humanity of others’ are violated. The contemporary aspect of imperialism is preserved in relations between United States citizens and victims who are not United States historical colonials—Filipinos or nationals of Guam, but Africans. This imperial order is sophisticatedly presented as normal academic relations in which African women are requested to prove that they are knowing subjects. Imperialism is marketed in ways that disconnects it from the patently clear order of colonial relations. This chapter examines the social, psychic, and political effects of the structures of epistemologies of imperialism in academia, in the specific varied forms of gender imperialism. This mode of imperialism arises from the conceptual denials of African women’s cultural personhood. The examination is especially detailed as it methodically unravels the link between gender and imperialism, and interrogates the processes by which knowledge is both racialized and hierarchically structure in the construction of hegemonic discourses. A 1988 review of the Heroic Figures catalogue provides an entrance into the invisible, subtle politics of racial and hegemonic difference, and to the “silencing” strategies imperialism utilizes to erase the Other and reinscribe privilege. The catalogue reviewer becomes a metaphor through which I argue my case on gender imperialism; for this reason, most of what is said applies also to the hegemonic actions of a large number of white professional women.
The argument is divided into seven major moves. The first deals with the effects of whiteness on the bodies of African professional women in academia. The thoughts generated by a panel on “Resisting Imperialism” provides an entrance into a discussion of the ways participation in the eurocentric Western structures of privilege fractures and erodes the identities of non-European peoples. In the second move, I establish the link between gender and racial imperialism as I explore the effects of authorial arrogance in the production of knowledge. This leads to a consideration of the mental reversals that facilitate the racialization of knowledge. In this third section, I will examine the process by which knowledge is gendered to enhance the power and privilege of white women. The fourth section looks at the commodification ideology underpinning knowledge production in the structures of whiteness; and in the fifth part, I consider the ways the guise of expertise masks ignorance and legitimizes the theoretical reconstruction of cultural data along lines that inscribes whiteness. By focusing on how a white woman “knowledgeably and sympathetically” offers a white aesthetic scheme for evaluating Ibibio ekpo, I shall then examine the epistemological sub-text of her argument to illuminate the political agenda of her position. Since the issue of aesthetic sensitivity and knowledge of the Ibibio artistic scheme are disingenuously raised in the review, in the sixth move, I consider the effect of linearity in knowledge construction and raise the issue of language and translation, and the relegation of Africa and African perspectives to the margin of art historical discourse. In the seventh section, I conclude by identifying a useful strategy for resisting imperialism and avoiding its manifold psychic and physical mutilations.
Oburo mbosi ukwa dalu
ka oga ele,
oburo mbosi o’daa
ka o’le.
It is not the day the breadfruit falls
that it will rot,
it is not the day it falls
that it rots.
-- Toronto 1992
At the fifteenth annual conference of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy (C-SWIP), a plenary session was organized to explore the ways in which women are dealing with the impact of imperialism in their lives. Titled “Resisting Imperialism,” the panel was comprised of “Visible Minorities,” the official Canadian expression for “people of color.” The of three presenters were an Iranian-Canadian political theorist, a Chinese-Canadian philosopher, and an African philosopher.
At the time of the meeting, the Iranian-Canadian political theorist was in the midst of a grueling anti-racism hearing with her university in Canada. The charges she brought against her political science department had sparked an uproar that exposed the subterranean racism of the department. The Chinese-Canadian philosopher was teaching at a university in Manitoba where, as in the rest of Canada, the dominant preference was for white male philosophers, and philosophy was narrowly defined as Anglo-analytic philosophy. As the lone non-white Asian Canadian and the only woman in the department, she was institutionally positioned as a deviant presence, placing her at the receiving end of various institutionalized forms of racist and sexist attitudes. The African philosopher came to the panel with a weighty baggage of experiences accumulated in social and intellectual encounters in both Canada and the United States where African women are patronized. Being an African and a woman in these contexts meant being the oppositional other, the alter-ego to the deliberative, competent, rational, and civilized white person.
Worried about the negative effects of sharing personal experiences in an imperial structure that had encouraged their exclusion, they all stoically contemplated their participation. If their political struggle was to disrupt imperialism, guard against its exploitation of my experiences, and resist its racist erasure of their personhood, they had to be alert to its multiple sites and continually changing forms. Since imperialism is coded and skillfully inscribed in Western intellectual and cultural activities, the only way they could do this was by constantly questioning the basis on which they were invited to participate in events and by critically evaluating conveners’ agenda.
Thinking through the terms of participation unleashed long forgotten memories. The African scholar recalled having witnessed the exploitative edge of British imperial rule in her impressionable years in Malawi (then Nyasaland). She recalled her b father’s counsel that one ought to be cautious when solicited to share personal testimonies within imperialist structures. Using the lives of then revolutionary leaders Jomo Kenyatta, Kenneth Kaunda, and Julius Nyerere as examples, he had explained that imperialism often legitimizes itself first by appropriating the experiences of the oppressed, and then sustains itself by exploiting the power of those experiences. His view of the matter is that if one decides to participate in imperial structures one must critically study the Kenyan Mau Mau’s model of resistance and be alert to the numerous diversionary tactics of imperialism.
They accepted the invitation to the panel to fully comprehend what happens when race and class intersect. Working independently of each other, they responded to the topic of imperialism from the standpoint of personal, specifically located experiences rather than from abstract, experientially disconnected postulates. Each analyzed the implications of imperialism from the specificity of their experiences knowing that the experiences of other women of color would differ from theirs, but nonetheless would illuminate important undeniable commonalities. The breadth of issues raised from the three culturally divergent perspectives underscored the non-monolithic nature of “visible minorities” in Canada. Yet the vast areas of experiential overlaps revealed the common effects of imperialism on a culturally diverse population.
Why gender imperialism? Five minutes to commencement of the symposium, one of the panelists was mistaken for a serving staff by one of the “progressive” white women at the conference who, from across the room, saw her quietly waiting at the back of the room for people to settle down. She approached and asked when the coffee would be replenished. I am choosing the topic of imperialism to interrogate whiteness as it relates to and is practiced by white women. I know that imperialism defines a hierarchical relation of dominance and subordination between nations and institutions, but I wanted to understand how that relationship also works between elite racially-privileged women, and elite racially-disadvantaged women. It was important to question the institutionalized authority and privileges that establish a dyadic mistress/mammy power relationship between white women and women of color in a professional environment. I needed to examine how that relationship impacts on authorial production of knowledge, and what tacit gender images and expectations rule in that setting, many of which I am expected to uphold. Furthermore, I wanted to question the commitment of tenured and non-tenured white women colleagues to the principles of difference and cultural diversity. Were their overtures of friendship genuine, or were they an enticement to subjugation? Were our white sisters serious in their commitment to the principle of difference, or were their assertions merely rhetoric? With past experience as a guide more troubling questions followed. Would they evasively screen out the ugliness of the pain created by their privilege and in the process shut us out? Would they step out of the comfortable confines of racial privilege and work to end that privilege?
It was clear at the outset that gender imperialism would be a most difficult subject to tackle given its nebulous form. The politically correct postures taken by some of its ardent perpetrators as well as the general denial that white women have power in academia were additional obstacles. The well-entrenched view that white women are victims of patriarchy but never its conscious perpetrators1 fosters this denial despite the roles of many as gatekeepers of privileges, mistresses of patriarchs, and matriarchs of a new developing canon. Many of our white “sisters” assume that having women of color as friends or having cross-cultural expertise proves their non-racist nature. However, when one moves beyond “politically correct” pronouncements to the realm of deeds and actions, one finds that most privileged white women function either as surrogates of white males who desire to stay above the fray or, having internalized the oppressive structures of whiteness, are themselves engaged in an imperial mission of their own.
Understanding the internal dynamics of imperialism means recognizing the different permutations of its exploitative nature. Imperialism is gendered when the political, economic and social character of dominance is constructed on racial and gender lines, when white women exploit their racial and institutional privileges to racialize others, to claim advantages, and to assert authority over women of color. In so far as these women’s legitimizing authority derives from the structure of the larger socio-political framework of imperialism and global economics, and establishes a racialized relationship of subordination between women, white women cannot absolve themselves of complicity in imperialism and oppression. Their claims to sisterhood is diversionary.
“Occasionally we do more than serve.”
— Haideh Moghissi, my Iranian-Canadian co-panelist when she was “mistaken” for a serving staff five minutes before her talk at the 1992 C-SWIP conference in Toronto.
Unconscious gestures often reveal more about latent attitudes than carefully thought out actions and intellectual theorizations. Such split second judgments speak more powerfully than words and feminist critical writings about white women’s attitudes towards women of color and their perception of them as subordinate in social encounters. Such unmeditated instinctual gestures isolate the inferior serving maid roles they have reserved for women of color, and highlight the roles women of color are expected to play within the structures of white imperialism.
When I accepted the invitation, my difficulty in thinking through my panel participation was that it forced me to directly confront what imperialism had done to me in North America: how it forces me to be other than I am; how it assumes that I must be other than I am. Knowing all this, I became even more reluctant to have some white interpreter present my reality. As the late Nwalie Egbuna, the then head of Ikporo Onitsha, had counseled, “avoid them, through their writings and interpretation they have always managed to make us out into monkeys.” To avoid misrepresentation, I realized I had to speak, even if in fear. Some of the things I wanted to highlight were best said by me. My voice, my anger, my pain are cognitive acts that must be epistemically conveyed; they cannot be captured by someone else, lest they be erased. I searched for words:
Many things are still painfully difficult in your white system. The pain derives from the forced mutilations, identity destructions, oppressive psychological manipulations that take place each time one functions in your system. Even in this mundane public act of sharing my experiences with you, I still undergo innumerable metamorphosis and translation. First, I have to sublimate my frustrations (as stilted “civilizing” voices harp: you cannot show your emotions in public, its unprofessional). Next I have to suppress large parts of myself and familiar ways of speaking (as I recall the stiletto whine: wait a minute, could you speak in English? Nobody here understands your language). Then I have to switch languages and translate my visceral thoughts into cold foreign words that leave out the spirit of my talk (still I hear: oh, you have an accent. Where are you from?). The distortions drive me to the processing plant of inhuman, professional power-language (because you have to write and speak in a “theoretical” way, the way stuffy white males authorized). And as if all that isn’t enough, I have to swallow my anger, and valiantly find some lessons that I could offer the sea of white faces to let you know that I value you, that you are blameless, and that somehow, I made sense of all these senseless mutilations and appreciate the insight it gave me of myself.
Imperialism is implicit in the very structure of western academia and encoded in its processes, in the very production of knowledge. It stipulates a definite logic of being, a certain mode of thought and behavior, and covertly sanctions a definite style of speech, of being, of acceptability, and of propriety. Voice, gender identity, and most especially skin color are discursively dispersed and subsequently marshaled to determine whether one is worthy of speech, of respect, and of even admission.
Within the sacred halls of academia we find the inscriptions of imperialism and racism in the very categories of Rationality, Objectivity, Universality, Truth and Knowledge. Racialized, they acquire exclusionary force that is utilized in three major ways: to keep people of non-European descent at the gate; to delegitimize what these non-European scholars know and bring to theoretical work; and to pass off as scholarship prejudices, irrelevancies, half-baked truths, and problematic interpretations about others by white scholars. Imperialism in academia works both by refusing to see me, and by refusing to allow me be myself. The variant I am familiar with racializes and forces me to accommodate whiteness by forgetting myself and becoming more like it. Caught in this conflicted web of legitimation, the ideological force of whiteness works through a “silencing” cloak of invisibility. Being invisible, the structure always insists on the vulnerability and “nakedness” of others as a precondition for understanding them. Never revealing itself, the physical and psychic force of whiteness systematically destroys cultures, peoples, and objects in its path without disclosing its varied sites of operation. Being invisible, it is automatically absolved from blame for you cannot assign responsibility to something unseen, that leaves no trace of its presence.
Knowing all this, I worried. Should I or should I not participate in the panel? True, the audience is composed mainly of progressive white women, but what does that matter? The leopard never changes its spots. Where is the assurance that this occasion will be different, that these liberal middle- and upper-class women will listen? (Again the intermittent inner voices, this time from a different cultural location: Can you trust? Remember the innumerable occasions in colonial Africa, in the slave plantations of the Americas, in the suffragist movement, in the civil rights movement, in apartheid South Africa, and even in today’s multiculturalized social, political, and economic worlds of the betrayal of black women by white women who have professed friendship.) These memories cautioned me to be less optimistic and less eager to form alliances. Their immediacy was overpowering especially since I had no equally compelling memory-evidence to refute them.
I was aware of the weighty political dimensions of my task when I accepted to speak on resisting imperialism. What I didn’t anticipate was the extent and depth of the corrosive effect on my body, mind, and in my psyche. I stopped to count imperialism’s numerous inscriptions: bodily mutilations, mental dis-colorations—black skinned, white-minded, alienated voice, internal voices of the advocate constantly pleading the oppressor’s case, the yet unexorcised apologetic voices ignorantly accepting and meekly accommodating domination, and on and on. To be really worthwhile, participation in the panel required “truthful-speaking,” which in turn required that I completely expose my vulnerabilities and mutilations to the very same structures of whiteness capable of destroying and erasing by means of its invisible cloak.
Things need not be this way I am told. Those with whom I shared my experiences are not directly responsible for the traumatic condition in which I live. Patriarchy is the problem they say; but as I look to real life encounters, I ruefully wonder how to distinguish between the two kinds of women. How do you tell who is the progressive, and who is not? Since all lizards lie on their bellies, how do you tell the one with a belly-ache? Since all I see is the white skin, how do I determine the women’s intentions? Like the invisible structures of whiteness these too are concealed.
The more I looked at the structures of whiteness the more I fathomed the importance and significance of skin. The privilege of skin allows them to be on either side of the divide, to ally with the imperial power structure when fortuitous. And when it is to their gain, as Third World women discovered in Nairobi at the 1985 Women’s Conference, we see them congregate on the side of the institutionally disadvantaged, jostling for leadership roles, insistently explaining their own agenda, stridently advocating for priorities that will inflate their powers. Yes, always exhorting against sexism that benefits them, never of racism that takes away some of their privileges. When it’s depression time at the liminal edge, do we find them with us? Don’t we find them on the institutionally advantaged side where life in a melanin-deficient skin is valued higher than the rest, where racism becomes a statistical index of black people’s inability to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps and make a success of their lives?” Living on this North American “black” side where lives, opportunities, interests, expectancies, goals, hopes, and identities are viciously constrained by the loaded criteria of America’s social, political and economic institutions, one lacks locational flexibility. Stuck in an institutionally devalued skin, the stigmatizing structures of whiteness are experienced as the brutal rapier thrusts of exclusion and oppression.
In anger I turned the edge of my talk to the past, present, and future actions of the audience, questioning their intentional and unintentional complicity with the oppressive structures of whiteness. By perpetually framing questions in ways that stroke their ego, putatively separating them from the white imperialistic structure that crush non-white realities, they win concessions and end up preserving their white privileges.2 Though I remained vaguely aware that my immediate audience may not necessarily approve of the despotic behavior of their “siblings,” nonetheless my voice hardened to also indict these progressive white women with whom I ought to be establishing alliances. I indicted them for their latent racism, and for those of their absent reactionary “sisters.” “Dressed” in white, the differences between the two sets of women blurred; they merged as one as images of power, of mistresses and mammies, flashed through my mind. I saw only the expanding whiteness and the crushing weight of privilege that goes with it. I felt the enveloping privilege of that cold clammy skin that crushed me.
Living in North America, I know that racial imperialism is not simply a matter of choice, of whether one approves or disapproves of somebody’s position. As a perversely normalized part of reality, it is an amorphous, disingenuous power that conceptually stigmatizes, psychologically castrates, and socially marginalizes. Resisting imperialism in academia means resisting cultural death. It means re-visiting sites of resistance to draw sustenance and strength from the works of women who had audaciously shaken their world, women who refused to roll over and die: women like Queen Kambasa of Bonny,3 the visionary Atagbusi,4 Iyalode Efunroye Tinubu 5 and Iyalode Efunsetan Aniwura, Omu Nwagboka,6 Yaa Asantewaa of Edweso,7 Nwanyeruwa, Ikonnia, Nwanedie, Nwugo and the countless participants of the 1929 Women’s War in Eastern Nigeria,8 Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti,9 Margaret Ekpo, Janet Mokelu and Janet Okala,10 Umekwulu Odogwu, Veronica Uwechia, and Nneka Chugbo;11 and the Kenyan environmentalist Wanguri Maathai. I draw strength from these odogu (brave warriors) to examine the dynamics by which the invisible mechanics of whiteness are brought to bear on African scholars.
Nne m’agadi si
na oburo mbosi ukwa dalu, ka ona ele
“Echezona,” ka ‘agulu n’afa
na mbosi ole
anyi ewe ulu ya melu ife.
My grandmother said,
that it is not on the day the bread fruit falls that it will rot
“Do not forget,” is a name we gave a child
that on the day of reckoning
we will put the memory to use.
Umekwulu Odogwu, the acting head of Ikporo Onitsha in the 1970’s, accounts for her coolness in the face of a provocation by explaining that it is not on the day the breadfruit falls that it rots. Nwannyiuzo Eze-nwa-oduga, my grandmother, counsels against hasty responses on the ground that all facets of a provocation need to be carefully explored before framing a response. “Have patience!” she always advised, “When you have deepened your understanding of your opposition, set a time and date and then let them know where they have been shortchanged by their chi (personal spirit).”
Putting this advice to work, I reflected on an event that occurred long ago that raises interesting questions for gender imperialism or sisterarchy. In this case, intellectual coercion was applied to achieve intellectual subordination. In a scathing review of an essay of mine, I was pressured by a white woman, Rachel Hoffman, to speak in the voice and manner of her own pedagogical training. She compelled me to dwell on “contemporary controversies” which originate from Eurocentric assumptions and recycled anthropological misrepresentations about Africa. This attempt to embroil me in issues that are incidental to me but central to her is a silencing strategy that is employed to preserve EuroAmerican dominance of the intellectual realm.
I should make abundantly clear that my reflection on Hoffman is not on the person, but on the strategies that she and others like her employ to perpetuate EuroAmerican vision and pre-eminence in scholarship, and the basis on which they reproduce imperial relations of power. Lest this reflection be taken as a covert attempt to avoid critique,12 I should add that I do not subscribe to the view that white women scholars have no right to critique the works of black women scholars, or that whatever black women scholars write is necessarily correct. However, while upholding the authorial right of white women scholars to critique, I want to explore the motivational basis of these critiques so as to ascertain what is involved when whiteness critiques the experiences of its marginalized other.13 Implicated as we are in a racialized global economic structure of dominance, such an investigation is crucial since it ensures that the resultant critiques of white women do not conceal a colonizing agenda. While it is true that not all white women’s critiques are imperialistic, we have to establish a procedure to weed out hostile colonizing ones from those that both inform and enrich.
Thus, following the idea that there is something to learn from hostile critiques, I set out to discover who Hoffman is, and was surprised to learn she was just an ordinary graduate student. Having said that, I should add, not polemically, that Hoffman became a very important metaphor for the colonizing attitudes that I and many women of color encounter from white female colleagues in the academia as we strive to articulate and bring elements of our cultural, social, and political consciousness to our theoretical work. Although just a student at the time she wrote the piece, Hoffman already exhibited the sorts of imperialistic attitudes that her senior, professionally established white “sisters” display towards women of color. Usually hidden by masks of collegiality, this subterranean attitude becomes evident when the works of women of African ancestry either are virulently and publicly critiqued as naive, as mine was done, and then indicted for missing the more (always unspecified) important theoretical issues; or, are represented as “descriptive” and in need to be elevated to a theoretical level.14
At the time I “met” her on the pages of African Art, Hoffman lived in what would be perceived in Nigeria as “God’s own kingdom” (the United States of America) and plush Los Angeles to boot. She had reviewed the Heroic Figures exhibition catalogue in which I had the essay, “Overcoming Form-Content Tensions in Appreciating African Art Forms” (1988). The Heroic Figures exhibition was organized by the Africanist French art historian, the late Jacqueline Fry, for the Agnes Etherington Art Gallery, Queen’s University, Canada. It complemented the Canadian African Studies Association (CASA) conference whose 1988 theme was “Domination, Resistance and Liberation.” By inviting me to submit an article, Fry wanted to make a statement about domination and resistance, namely, that it is by creating spaces to encourage the flourishing of marginalized voices that domination could be defeated.
In choosing my topic, I addressed an attitude repeatedly encountered in North America, and which I believe obstructs understanding and appreciation of Africa’s art. For some “inexplicable” reason, one finds that what is African is almost always denigrated as illogical and incomprehensible to a broad section of the Canadian and American public.
From my position as an African and one whose culture’s artifacts have continually been devalued as “strange, exotic representations” by Western audience, I believed that if Africans are to seriously challenge the underlying resistance to deeper understanding, we must explore its epistemological basis to determine for ourselves what genuine problems there may be.15 We must ascertain to what degree a resolution of the problem of appreciation requires formal-stylistic elements and contextual-cultural information. Before accusing the audience of racism, it seemed more prudent to first explore whether or not genuine cognitive problems exist. My analysis led me to conclude that a synthesis is necessary if viewers are to avoid the kind of puzzlement that over-reliance on one component may bring.16 Context is critical but there has to be a clear idea of the artifact’s stylistics and form.
Since two main epistemological approaches, formalism and contextualism, have been the predominant approaches to understanding,17 an evaluation of the efficacy of both seemed an appropriate place from which to begin de-mystifying cross-cultural appreciation. In retrospect, I realized that I laid myself open to criticism by adhering to the prescribed number of pages. The problem was not that the crucial argument cannot be made in that number of pages. Rather, the operative modalities of white intellectualism ascribes ignorance to black women. Its criteria of scholastic assessment require black women in academia to prove our knowledge and intelligence each time a white person happens along.
In my ardent desire to engage in a discussion of my culture’s artifacts, I had forgotten I was no longer residing in Nigeria where the intelligence of a black person is taken for granted. I had naively forgotten I was in North America where the sexist and racially slanted academic environment is one in which white people, particularly men, are taken seriously even when speaking about things of which they are ignorant.18 In my irrepressible desire to speak, to participate in intellectual discourse, I had forgotten the racial sub-texts and narratives of the arena. I had ignored that African women like myself are not supposed to know, hence should not participate in intellectual discourse without obsequiously paying homage to the white gods and goddesses of the profession. Thus, the required proof of our knowledge in the Western structure of whiteness is our official declaration of our colonial servitude; the cost of our entrance and participation is intellectual and gender enslavement.
In her review, published in 1989, Hoffman was not expecting a philosophical argumentation on any area of African arts. The review’s tone was stern. Hoffman reprimanded me for not being “familiar with the current (that is, Western) scholarship;” for failing to “give the reader any real sense of contemporary controversies;” and for producing an essay that virtually every publication in the field for the past twenty years had addressed. According to her, my treatment of the contextualist approach as an outsider’s approach and my “categorical segregation of the formalist/contextualist camps” were all rhetorical devices that were “hardly insightful or innovative.” “The form/content dichotomy,” she asserted, “does a disservice to the novice (for it) suggest(s) that there are but two angles.” As she derisively saw it, my “generalizations are patronizing, a disposition easily discernible by followers of any scholarly route.” The problem, Hoffman conjectured results from my “not being trained in art historical method;” the danger she feared is that my “interpretations may misrepresent artistic motivations and compromise artists, authors, and readers alike.”
Before ending on the outraged note that the essay is “specious and labored,” Hoffman had deprecatorily called it a “‘how to’ manual for appreciating African art;” she had stated that she “was provoked and insulted by judgments...about (two types of) Ibibio ekpo masks” as disgustingly ugly and aesthetically sensitive and appealing; she had dismissed as presumptuous my contention that many Western museum visitors are confused and perplexed by African art; she had consistently underscored the idea that I was a novice; and she had suggested that I was hardly suited to participate in a historical discourse of African art.
When I first read her “Heroic Figure” review in 1990, I had dismissed it, having assumed that Hoffman was an old-time colonial anthropologist indignant that her textual-trophies had been ignored. Knowing the politics in the Africanist field and the gate-keeping role of reviews, the haughty outraged voice I heard resonated with the fear of the possible disruption of a dyadic patron/subordinate relationship that prevails in the field. The mannerisms and omniscient tone of the review reflected that of white male gatekeepers who valorize a preferred writing style, and who position “the literature” (in which the writings of a large number of African scholars are excluded) as the only creditable source of knowledge. Having emulated these mannerisms of privileged white male professors, Hoffman projected an image of the expert who, as she also mentioned, is aware of all the main issues in the literature for the past two decades.
Given Hoffman’s emphasis on “the literature,” an emphasis that treats the written word as the pre-eminent source of knowledge, it was clear that she viewed the lived experiences and orally preserved knowledge of many African peoples as irrelevant. Pre-emptorily positioning herself as the legitimizing authority of both my lived experience and art historical knowledge on Africa, she regally asserts her authority in the field.
Hoffman’s imperial response raises important questions about authorial arrogance in the production of knowledge of others’ realities, and the role of an imperial power relationship in the subversion of knowledge. Consider her contestation of my claim that many Western museum visitors are often confused and perplexed by the strange African mode of representation. In hastily dismissing it as a presumption, Hoffman unwittingly denied the 1977 findings of a Winnipeg Art Gallery survey of visitors to its African art exhibition which revealed that a significant number of the visitors were indeed puzzled and perplexed by what they described as a “strange” mode of representation.19 That the Winnipeg 1977 findings are not atypical nor outdated is seen when one enters into a serious discussion with the non-specialist North American audience, and in some cases with members of the specialist public.20
As usual in the dynamics of domination, Hoffman instinctively challenged the validity of my claims by assuming the omniscient role of an expert. Having placed me to signify intellectual otherness, she saw only ignorance in my African female identity and loudly proclaimed that fact. In the process, however, she ignored the social implications of her white privileged identity and the access to certain social arenas it either offered or denied her. Caught by the dominance ideology of white intellectualism, she failed to realize that her authorial identity as a white art historian removes her from contexts where the general North American public poses racist questions, narratives, and stories to Africans.21 Her absence from such arenas signals her “otherness” and places her out of touch with this cutting side of the public’s racism. Hence, regardless of the breadth of her training and her mastery of the literature, her white interpretive framework lacks this vital information.
Ironically, in dismissing the validity of my claim, Hoffman perpetuates and directly challenges the existence of racism in North America. Indirectly, the epistemic effect of the challenge is to assert that white people have full knowledge of Africa’s cultural artifacts. This falsehood and racialization of knowledge begins because Hoffman hegemonically positioned herself and members of her society as being in possession of all the facts. Within this illusory cognitive terrain, the logic of imperialism and racialized knowledge kicks in to reconstruct reality to suit a white supremacist view of it. These reconstitutions permit her to disregard the social implication of my African identity and the access it provides to social encounters where depreciatory views are insensitively expressed about Africa. Because she is unwilling to admit and interrogate her own racism as well as that of her culture, Hoffman’s white interpretive framework propels her to racialize knowledge and to foolhardily oppose any suggestion that white people (including scholars) may be ignorant about Africa’s art, culture, and life.22
The very suggestion that the viewing public knows calls attention to two false assumptions underpinning the imperial authorial position. The first is that Africa’s artistic intentions are transparently simple and can easily be discerned by any white observer regardless of expertise. The second is that such observations correctly reflect the intended artistic rationale. Now, when the Winnipeg case is viewed against these false assumptions, we read Hoffman as saying either that the intended artistic rationale of African artifacts are confusing, or that to say one does not know (as in the Winnipeg’s case) is to imply that one knows. To the extent that a contradiction follows in both cases, Hoffman’s contestation is not only misguided but incoherent.
Such incoherency is important not because it underscores the implausibility of Hoffman’s assertion, but because it points to a backdrop of powerful racial narratives, stereotypes, and assumptions that underpin knowledge production in North America. Even at a time when feminist and postmodernist interrogations are deconstructing and reshaping the mode of knowledge production, these imageries at the heart of whiteness remain exceptionally powerful, fueling the imperialistic need to assert white superiority. In the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy, white intellectual superiority is proven by bouncing it off the manufactured image of “naive Africans.” In like manner, Hoffman exploits the “ignorant African” stereotype to set off her intellectually superior response. Not unlike the white male professor who gave me a lower grade on the basis that “I didn’t know you did analytic philosophy in Nigeria,” Hoffman dismissed my essay on the supposition that the “naive African woman” could not possibly know African art history since she has not been tutored by those whom she (the legitimizing authority) considers knowledgeable. In short, Hoffman fed off her ignorance to loudly proclaim the ignorance of the ‘Nigerian sculptor turned philosopher.’
White racism is such a normalized fact of North American reality that many do not seem to realize how deeply immersed they are in it, nor how much they manifest the tendencies. It is so much a part of the conceptual apparatus through which reality is perceived and knowledge is produced that white beneficiaries do not care to fully grasp its oppressive nature. Their reluctance derives from the fact that to interrogate racism is to interrogate their very identity, to shake the very center of their normative order, and to forego their privileges.
Gender imperialism is consequently misrecognized because the oppressive attitudes of white women are a normal part of that unnamed, colonizing reality. Further complicating the issue is the fact that white women generally mask their power by cleverly blaming the patriarchal order that stigmatizes blacks as deviant. Distancing themselves from its oppressive character, they vilify the patriarchal structure yet gratuitously draw their power, social status, and identity from it. This refusal to acknowledge their complicity in the structure enables them to forget the ways they are advantaged by the system and become partners in oppression. ‘Forgetfulness’ allows them to ignore the fact that the only reason they are institutionally privileged and superior to women of color is because they have been defined as such by the white patriarchal system they spend so much time vilifying.
White women’s collusion in patriarchal forms of power and the relation of that power to imperialism is receiving increased attention as African women and other women of color engage in feminist theorizing.23 In these times of critical reexamination of traditional assumptions and structures of knowledge, one way to broaden our understanding of the intersection of racism and sexism is to shift from the exceedingly narrow focus on patriarchy and its articulations to the broader issue of imperialism and its manifestations. Focusing on social contexts of power provides a useful perspective from which to observe the shifting, interlocking nature of racism and patriarchy and the impact of the two in hitherto unexamined sites. Concealed racialized attitudes of domination are revealed in social and intellectual interaction, even as the perpetrators (some of whom are white feminist liberals) have donned their “politically correct” garb. Naturally, what gives them away is the instinctual stereotyping and denial of intelligence to anyone who is not socially perceived as white. That they always assume a divine right of leadership regardless of the inappropriateness of contexts blatantly reveals the underlying imperialist ideology of our white “sisters,”24 and of feminism.
It pays to note that gender imperialism or sisterarchy manifests in the academia where white women erect barriers to listening and perceiving their averred sisters of color. Our “white sisters” adopt a way of hearing without listening, thus hear just what they want to. Deploying their internalized supremacist stereotypes, narratives, and images, “our sisters” quickly make judgments about our intellectual capacities and attitudinal behaviors and screen us out. This elimination process is demonstrated by our “progressive” white sister who saw a serving staff in Moghassi. Her “white gaze” had automatically projected ignorance, servitude, and incompetence on the Other, clearing the way for her to assert her rights, and imperiously demand what she felt was her due.
Ifi Amadiume tells a revealing story of a young white sister whose goal in studying social anthropology was to travel to Zimbabwe to teach the local women how to organize (1987, 7). In her desire to fulfil her dreams, our intrepid teacher had pre-emptively constructed a dyadic relationship between herself and her Zimbabwean sisters. Drawing from her affluent First World geopolitical location, she imperiously assigned herself a leadership role through imagining that Zimbabwean women lacked organizational skills. Lost in her narcissistic reveries, she neglected to study Zimbabwean history, hence she missed the vital data that her erstwhile students were veterans of a fifteen year civil war. Through their incredible fortitude, organizational skills, and participatory role in the liberation struggle, Zimbabwean women with their men had successfully wrested independence from the repressive, racist white minority regime of Ian Smith.
Imperialism and oppression are fostered by lack of respect for the history and cultural identity of others. Within academia, this lack of respect persists as a result of a proliferation of pernicious images, notions, concepts and ideas about Africa that are freely disseminated by elementary and high school teachers, media pundits, museum officials, scholars and theorists in their characterizations, descriptions, and interpretations of materials about Africa. In one revealing example, E.F. Fair (1993) asked his students, primarily white and middle class, to describe their images and ideas of “Africa” and “African.” He received a litany of negative descriptions:
“Africa” is “a basket case,” “jungle-covered,” “big game, safari,” “AIDS-ridden,” “torn by apartheid,” “weird,” “brutal,” “tribal,” “underdeveloped,” and “black”; “Africans” “have AIDS,” are “lazy,” “crazy,” “savage,” “exotic,” “sexually active,” “backward,” “tribal,” “primitive,” and again “black.”25
The enduring nature of this stock of stereotypical descriptions derives in part from their constant reinforcement in both educational and media settings. As Ebere Onwudiwe cogently argued, the persistence of these images are not unintentional since an “abundant body of work in sociology, intellectual history, social psychology, and cognitive psychology of the nature of images and world-views” prove that such images mediate and impact phenomenally on important policy decisions (87).
With this experience as a guide, we can see that dominance manifests within academia and feminist circles when white women avail themselves of these condescending images in their establishment of what they take to be African women, and their establishment of what they take to be the appropriate ground rules of social and intellectual interaction. Evidence of this occurs in the way African women are automatically constructed as backward, and their progress is represented as depending on the magnanimity and superior intelligence of their white sisters. That our intrepid female teacher is a student too like Hoffman underscores the role of academia in perpetuating racialized imperialistic attitudes. The systemic nature of this process undermines the feminist idea of global sisterhood, since the untheorized way in which we are “sisters” is implicated in a mistress/subordinate model of relationship, not in the consanguinal family relationship model with which we are familiar.
At the transnational global level, sisterhood functions as a metaphor for white women’s subjugation of Third World women. A further complication of this glossing of the subordinate ideology at the heart of the feminist sisterhood is that we miss how white women’s power derives substantially from the same patriarchal ideology that they claim to be subverting. Thus, as beneficiaries of this state of affairs, they need to acknowledge the centrality of the patriarchal structure in their present identity, and to recognize that the professional competence automatically ascribed to them actually derives from racially-based patriarchal privileges. In a situation in which they are the definers of African women’s reality rather than African women themselves, there is need to name the nature of that relationship given that it undermines the legitimacy of assertions about the primacy of gender equality in women’s solidarity.
Regardless of the anti-racist, anti-patriarchal declarations by our progressive white sisters, many of them regularly perform acts of erasure, “screening out” women of color, effectively dismissing and devaluing the racial, gender, cultural, as well as the authorial, identities of these women. It is as mimicry that our intrepid teacher’s delusion and Hoffman’s adversarial stance are significant. They are emblematic of scores of similar imperial acts in North America, including those used by white men to keep white women from boardrooms. What is most interesting about the formal character of this “screening out” process that Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian literary theorist, referred to as “tactics of evasion” is not just its imperial character, but its pervasiveness in academia. On the one hand, the “tactics of evasion” (including that of white women’s) signals the racialized denial of legitimacy to non-Euroethnic category and issues, which from our marginal cultural location we know to be salient. And on the other hand, it forcefully raises to attention the sorts of flawed issues that are disseminated as knowledge about Africa in academia.
The racialization of knowledge that occurs in these evasive tactics oppressively halts any attempt to re-think colonizing attitudes by devaluing the cognitive worth of issues that arise outside the structures of whiteness. “Screening out” any suggestion that is potentially damaging to the white intellectual normative order, the mental reversals feverishly work to reassert white superiority in knowledge in a manner that shores up white authority in the production of knowledge about Africa, and in a manner that exploits the image of “the ignorant African” endemic in North America’s popular culture. As the Moghissi incident illuminates, the process involves both falsification and then fabrication of the nature, character, and experiences of Others. That such identity reconstructions stereotype and misrepresent people of color is consistent with the desire to foreclose discussions on power and domination. As an essential process in “naturalizing” knowledge as a white experience, the fabrication justifies white control of and dominance in knowledge. It entrenches and normalizes white power, privileges, and world-view, and it normalizes all others as abnormal or deviant. Imperialism thrives on knowledge racialization.
The epistemological difficulties in Hoffman’s conception of knowledge notwithstanding, it is also important to highlight the racist elements at play. Because Hoffman and the others she typifies consciously and subconsciously believe in and promote only European American interests, priorities, and agendas, they narrowly define knowledge in terms that exclude many interests that African scholars may have but which do not overlap with European American interests.26 The effect of this border patrol is to preclude the free discussion of ideas that are potentially disruptive of the power, dominance and prestige of patriarchs and their minions. Thus, for this reason, in the white imperialist model on which Hoffman framed her conception, knowledge is naturally a fixed hierarchical structure rather than a shifting, reflexive, on-going activity of interrogation and counter interrogation. Its white intellectual vision naturally occupies the archimedean point and issues directives that others ought to follow in the production of knowledge of non-Euroethnic cultures.
In this implicitly racialized cognitive scheme, there is a correspondingly narrow conception of knowledge, of what it does, and of who ought to be the principal spokespeople. Any issue that challenges the structure’s prescribed natural order, or threatens its legitimacy and hierarchical order, academically appears as unnatural and is subsequently “normalized” as pointless. Additionally, the existence of other bodies of literature and experiences are rarely cited and routinely disregarded, a strategy that speaks much more powerfully than words about racialized attitudes and regimentation of thought. Against this background, it is certainly understandable, though not excusable, why a Hoffman would appeal only to Western literature, categories of interpretation, and issues of interest to Western scholars to blunt the legitimacy of issues that would be of interest to an African scholar. The appeal is a mechanism that tacitly penalizes deviations from its intellectual norm by ignoring that my scholarly interest could have originated from an alternative body of literature and experiences of which they are ignorant.
It is disturbing, though entirely in tune with the dynamics of imperial power, that globally privileged white women and their men who are desirous to learn about Africa’s cultural life come to the inquiry with attitudes of condescension. In a crucial way, they ignore their outsider status and the theoretical importance for African aesthetics and artistic evaluation of deliberative discourses on art in African languages in an intellectual foray of disputations: of such printed works as E. L. Lasebikan’s “Tone in Yoruba Poetry” (1955), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Adeboye Babalola’s The Form and Content of Yoruba Ijala (1966), Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (1966), and Ben Enwonwu’s “The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist” (1968). Racism surfaces when white scholars refuse to engage the reality of African languages and to recognize the existence of another body of literature. Imperialism encourages lack of sensitivity to Africans’ concerns and interests, and compels white scholars to ignore that their own concerns, processes of documentation, and interpretations might implicitly be colonizing. To be sure, ethical problems are raised by the impact of racism on knowledge and knowledge production, especially when ideas articulated by Africans are appropriated and used without citation by white scholars to frame their intellectual work.27
With Africa as one example, the larger issue of this investigation is that of white women scholars wittingly and unwittingly having a colonial impact on world societies through the globalization of feminist scholarship. If critical re-thinking and self-reflexiveness are absent in their interpretation of African, First Nation, Native American, Chinese, or Latino/a reality, attitudes of domination will continue to surface, reproduce oppression, and oppressively erase the realities of Others. While disregarding their perspective of power and privilege, and oblivious to their positionality, white women like Hoffman continually invoke a framework of domination which they use to oppressively silence and marginalize. The suspicions of the general Canadian and American public (my students included) that white scholars may, in fact, be engaged in Western aesthetic imperialism have often compelled them to ask for the insider viewpoint of how Africans really relate to their work. Such skepticism is an important step towards examining the outsider status of theorizers of African reality and the ways in which these culturally-dislocated theorizations reinforce racist attitudes, white dominance and Western definitions of academic scholarship.
Ikwe na aka felu nkpili aka
obulu mgba
When a handshake extends beyond the elbow
it has turned into a wrestling match.
In teaching people to recognize when collegial jostling turns into an aggressive or hostile act, the proverb emphasizes the importance of critically evaluating actions that may first appear to be innocuous. Whatever else it might purport to be, a handshake that extends beyond the elbow, such as Hoffman’s review, is definitely not a handshake. When read within the context of the history and politics in African studies and within the racialized lens of American reality, Hoffman’s review highlights the invidious stratagems of appropriation that relate to how whiteness is inscribed, and how “subalterns” are forcibly ejected from arenas where discourses of their realities occur. It may seem that this focus on a student is excessive, but it is necessary since it directs attention to the primary basis on which the dynamics of imperial power enter into knowledge construction and mold the character of individuals in academia. Through it, we see more clearly the connection between white intellectualism and domination, and the way in which gender imperialism exploits and thrives on the patriarchal structures of whiteness.
The stratagem of ejection practiced by scholars in the intellectual structures of knowledge has a converse side: the invasion of conceptual space. In a penetrating critique of the complex epistemological and methodological problems of data-quality control (or ethnographer bias) in anthropological research, Maxwell Owusu’s demonstrates how this invasion occurs and its import on scholarship (1978). Using the works of key anthropologists, he showed that lack of familiarity with the phonetic, lexical, and idiomatic expressions of African languages resulted in errors of translation that misrepresented the cultural logic of those societies. Despite Owusu’s critique, Africanist art historians continue to reproduce the errors he identified sixteen years earlier, as evidenced in Sarah Brett-Smith’s acclaimed doctoral study of Bamana art. Published in 1994 by Cambridge University Press, the book is vitiated by serious translational and interpretive problems. After five years “in Mali working primarily with the Bamana...the Malinke, Bobo, Senufo, Minianka, and Dogon peoples” (1), Brett-Smith mixes up tonal meanings and takes expressions too literally. In his review, Kassim Kone (1996) reveals that she reinterprets “to become impotent” into “to become a woman” (Kone, 91), a twist that erroneously makes womanhood a defect of malehood. Manyokolon, which in the carving context means “detail,” is sexualized as “penis” when Brett-Smith relies on Frenchman Gerard Dumestre’s interpretation; Kulukutuma, which means “rough,” becomes “nude;” and walaki, “to remove the bark,” is retranslated into “disrobe” (1994, 188). Seemingly oblivious to the tonal variations of wulu as “dog” and wulu as “penis,” Brett-Smith conflates the two homonyms and constructs her Bamana subject, Nyamaton, as using the word “dog” to refer analogically to the “penis” (210). The confusion is stretched to the point of incredulity when, in the endnote, she theorizes that the Bamana think this way about the penis-dog analogy that she had constructed (320).
Serious theoretical consequences follow Brett-Smith’s obsessive sexualization of the Bamana cultural logic, the most important of which is the injection of the Oedipus’ complex into the society through conceiving of the earth as a primeval mother and the termite mounds as her sex. Her contention that a new Komotigi or Komo leader swears “an oath on a red termite mound, and rinses his mouth with a liquid containing seeds found in the fine soil taken from the interior of the mound” (122),” offers a picture of a son’s access to a mother’s vagina, together with the connotation of oral sex involved. Not only does Brett-Smith turn the entire oath taking ceremony into a bizarre activity, but also she justifies her conflation of the termite mound and the female vagina and the representation of the latter as a sacred site by insisting that “[i]n the Mande world...men take their most profound oath by invoking their mother’s sex” (122). But according to Kone, the female sex organ, most especially a mother’s, is something that “no Bamana or Malinke man would mention [or think about], even in drunkenness or madness (1996, 91) for fear of “the nyama it carries when pronounced by a man” (103).
Kone’s many disagreements with Brett-Smith converge on the triple ground of “methodological approach, content, and certain translations and analyses” that Owusu identified sixteen years earlier. The resultant manipulation of meanings, ideas and cultural logic that occurs constitute the sort of predatory invasion of African world-view that Owusu raised in his critique of ethnographical practices, and which routinely occurs in the intellectual structures of whiteness after Africans have been ejected from the domain. That a highly reputable press published the book, replete with all its mistranslations and avoidable errors, is a testimony to the ways publishers serve the imperial objectives of the structures of whiteness.28 To put the problem into context, no press would approve the publication of a manuscript by an African scholar on the art and culture of the United States if it contained a tenth of the errors made by Brett-Smith. It is unimaginable that Cambridge University Press would publish a scholarly study that represents the American world as one in which men routinely swear by invoking the sexual act, and that claims that the United States’ Presidents taking their inaugural oath by placing their hand on a black book simulates the sexual act.
Other ways in which the occupation of Africa’s conceptual space is achieved is when white scholars project themselves as the interpreter of African societies. Simon Ottenberg, the American anthropologist, did this for over a decade when he styled himself “the sole interpreter of Afikpo Igbo culture”, simultaneously identifying the American art historian, Robert Farris Thompson, as the pioneer of the study of African aesthetic consciousness.29 In both cases Ottenberg strategically refused to call into question the epistemological quality and extent of what he knew, preferring instead to cut off any interrogation as to what he knows. In the first case, this strategy enables Ottenberg to erase his Afikpo collaborators who had guided and taught him what little he knows about the interpretive scheme of their culture, and in the second case, he overlooked the efforts of writers like Lasekan, Lasebikan, Achebe, Oba Laoye Kinni—the Timi of Ede, Babalola, and p’Bitek, who collectively contributed to an understanding of their cultures’ aesthetic schemes for more than a decade before Thompson wrote “The Aesthetic of the Cool”.30
In another pathway to conceptual invasion, exhortations about “truth,” “objectivity,” and “knowledge” in African studies sometimes function as ruses for the enthronement of Eurocentric views that have as their goal the maintenance of an imperial order. While in residence as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. in 1989, I asked one of the curators to introduce me to a leading American scholar of Igbo art who was also in residence at the Museum. I was eager to meet this white male scholar who was working on the arts of my people. However, on learning my Igbo identity and the subject matter of my postdoctoral research, this man aggressively interrogated me on the objectives of my form/content essay, implying that it fell short of the appropriate standard of truth, objectivity, and knowledge. He chastised me for failing to rely on the works of a white male anthropologist who had written on the Ibibio. Then, shifting to the topic of my postdoctoral research which was on spirit manifestation, he demanded to know whether I had ever seen a “mask,” and whether I had photographs of “masks.” His line of interrogation suggested that “seeing a mask” and “having photographs of masks” were the elements that constituted good research and scholarship. I responded that I was very familiar with mmuo since they were a vital part of my everyday reality, and that I could easily obtain photographs from archivists in Onitsha when I needed them. At this juncture, the scholar informed me that he had done all there was to do in his investigation of the subject and nothing else could be contributed.
While this exchange preceded my discovery of Hoffman’s review, its logic of invasion was powerfully linked to the criticisms of the latter white female colleague. Both attempted to delegitimize orality, erasing the voices of people whose experiences were being appropriated. Both substituted themselves as interpreters, insisting that only the works of white scholars of whom they approve could plausibly be used. Both made much of the fact of the standards of scholarship in knowledge production. And both tried to claim that white scholars have conclusively addressed all the pertinent issues that may be raised. In fact, the close similarity of their operational moves exposes a striking link between gender imperialism and patriarchy, and how white women are ideologically implicated in the structure.
Thus, the centrality of African sites of resistance provides the relevant framework from which to examine, identify, and understand the politics of power inherent in the Western intellectual tradition that white women emulate. Such locations expose the disempowering strategies that are disingenuously employed to assert the center/periphery dyadic logic that preserves the intellectual whiteness of academia.31 To fully understand the nature of white women’s collusion in oppressive forms of power, we must continually look to the broader everyday level of life, in which racialization of knowledge surfaces and precedes its genderization. Prodded on by the multi-tiered educational system and its inherent patriarchal logic, the female of the white species comes to an understanding of herself by modeling herself on, and reflecting the image of, her culture’s patriarchs. For this reason, Hoffman’s graduate student review captured the power dynamics of appropriation that was played out by the white male in the master/subordinate, center/periphery, metropole/colony encounter at the Smithsonian Institution. It shows her carrying on the tradition of dominance by using the flip-side of patriarchal power, matriarchy.
The masculine/dominance character of white intellectualism is inscribed in the ground rules of academic engagement, which participants’ often unconsciously reflect. Unfamiliar with my background and perceiving me for a bright eyed youngster, Hoffman had set about like the white male expert to assert her expertise and pre-eminence in the field. Without revealing that she herself was a student, she made much of the fact that I was a doctoral student, hence a junior or a “novice” as she denigratingly put it. Like her white male counterpart, she quibbled that I was not trained in art historical method, hence falsely implying that there is a method.32 Narrowly limiting the possible strategies of resistance, she argued from an imperial matriarch’s standpoint that my essay lacked art historical merit since it did not combatively engage the CASA conference theme of resistance and domination. Writing in the authorial power-language of the structure of whiteness, Hoffman invoked a mistress/mammy relationship to roundly chastise me for a “specious and labored work,” and for presuming to tell Westerners (that is, white people) how to appreciate African art.
With a slight substitution of ‘maternal’ for ‘master’, Hoffman unproblematically emerges as “mistress and gatekeeper of the canon.” In her role as a metaphor of white women’s colonizing role, her attack is more interesting for the things it left unsaid and for the sub-text of her narrative. The unvoiced commentary states that in a hierarchically structured white intellectual world, African scholars—especially African women—bring down the quality of scholarship, and hence have no business examining issues that white Africanist scholars have purportedly examined and which they have ruled no longer important or interesting. In fact, people from marginalized territories, if they are to be validated, are expected to meekly follow the linear path charted by white scholars with limited language and metalinguistic competence in an African language who are theorizing about African realities in the metropole. Ensconced in the global power of their metropolitan vantage point, Owusu’s critiques are ignored by white scholars who assume that no theoretical reassessment of the field by Africans could possibly bring any special insight.
In the context of imperialistic power relations, sarcasm functions as a tool of chastisement that guards against revisiting old issues. With sisterhood in the background, the barb in Hoffman’s review discursively raises questions about the quality of the opposition’s scholarship while obfuscating the carefully orchestrated processes of erasure, of appropriation, and colonization of another’s conceptual space. As discussed in the previous chapter, this is revealed most forcefully in her essay “Objects and Acts” (1995), in which she grapples with the idea that art objects are “conduits” and “dynamic, complex, independent reservoirs of many types of knowledge and power” (56), 33 and in which, following the anticipated retirement of a group of older white male mentors, she is being positioned into a leadership position.
From the opening sentence, right through to the end, of the essay she leaves no doubt in readers minds about the identity of her intended audience, and about her conceptual views of Africa and its peoples. She states:
For more than two decades, theorists and scholars of African art objects have been pondering how knowledge of Africa can be gained and through what means an understanding of African material culture might be possible. To whom does knowledge of Africa belong, and what are the most authentic and useful ways of interpreting and transcribing such knowledge for future generations of thinkers? In the following. . . . I too ask how we may best further our understanding of Africa and its art objects (1995, 56; emphasis mine).
As conveyed by the logical structure of her expression, Hoffman does not see Africans as theorists and scholars of African art, nor are they perceived as part of the coterie of scholars to whom she is addressing her thoughts. That this is true becomes clear once the following questions are asked: “What does it really mean for Africans to ponder about how knowledge of Africa can be gained and through what means an understanding of African material culture might be possible? Again, what does it mean for Africans to ask, “To whom does knowledge of Africa belong?” Indeed, what does it mean for African scholars to claim Africa as a research specimen, and to talk about it as if it is conceptually remote and inhabited by aliens with whom scholars (they included) cannot engage in intellectual discussion? In exposing both the incoherency and underlying imperial logic implicit in Hoffman’s language, attitudes and assumptions about her audience, we need to first recognize that the excision of Africans from the intellectual domain is already a foregone conclusion. Surreptitiously performed as it is, its value is that it funds the perverse idea that there are no intellectually accomplished Africans with whom to engage in theoretical discussions.
The perversity in Hoffman’s assumptions manifests in different ways. Without going into the details, consider the three objectives of her argument: First, “to propose that objects can and do act on us; [second] to inquire how an object can be understood cross-culturally; and [third] to suggest what it is about some objects that may differentiate them as masterpieces” (56). The first objective is basically a hegemonic appropriation of what African artists working in the traditional style have always asserted about a class of their works. With regards to the second objective, the author’s perplexity about the prospects of cross-cultural understanding retraces tired old arguments that falsely representsAfrican culture as so complex as to be incomprehensible. (While we should note that this justifies for Hoffman why Africans cannot be theoretically engaged as equals, it is remarkable that Africans, in turn, never seem to manifest this problem of cross-cultural understanding that so severely tasks the cognitive ability of some American scholars). Lastly, although cast as a legitimate theoretical question, Hoffman’s search for a criteria to identify masterpieces is driven, not by theoretical issues, but by the monetary interests of Western collectors’ concerned with assigning higher value to the objects in their collections.
Cultural appropriation of others’ realities, as performed by Hoffman in the essay, is the proof of imperialism. Just as in 1884-1885, imperial relationships are constructed when white theorists and scholars simulate artificial dialogues and controversies on African art after having excluded Africans’ views and theorizations about their reality. Evidence of this colonial act emerges in Hoffman’s treatment of the ideas of Ibrahim Poudjougou, the Dogon sculptor. In appropriating Poudjougou’s statement, Hoffman detaches it from its fretwork of ideas and assumptions from which its meaningfulness and signification are derived. Relocated to its new environment in America, Poudjougou’s culturally-dislocated statement is subjected to a battery of readings with ideas gleaned from U.S. and European theorists. Effectively shorn of its cultural reading, Poudjougou’s ineluctable comment appears pathetic and anemic.
In African Perspectives in Colonialism, Adu Boahen, a leading African historian, contends that economic factors were the most decisive of the forces propelling the colonization of Africa.34 Imperialism, he argues, had commodification as its goal; it achieved its objective by injecting laissez faire mercantile ideology into its various sites of operation.
Having become the dominant ideology of the world following its acceptance as the definitive feature of modernism and of the capitalist “Free World,” mercantilism was read into the intellectual domain in ways that transformed theories, ideas, and knowledge into commodities that could be appropriated, possessed, and traded. In the manner of C. B. McPherson’s possessive individuals, scholars became proprietors of their ideas and theories, retaining an inalienable right over them (1962, 55) and “owing nothing to society for them” (2). As theories became valued items, they became commodities to be acquired, accumulated, and exchanged for authorial “wealth,” namely, intellectual authority. Within this possessive market ideology—ideas, theories, hypotheses—everything is a commodity, everything has market value, everything is available for acquisition, nothing is sacred. As in the present global economic reality, Africa is positioned as an arena for raw materials to feed the intellectual factories of whiteness.
Unbridled market competition spawns monopolies that subvert individuals’ and cultures’ control of their resources and powers. Relentlessly striving for market control, the monopolistic impulse facilitates the oppressive foreclosures of competing arenas of discourse as a way of preserving control. Within this framework, authorial wealth is accumulated by setting one’s self up as the expert. Of critical importance in intellectual commodification and its underlying acquisitive spirit is the surreptitious silencing of competing voices, especially those with the power to unmask the privilege. Commodification stipulates what “subalterns” from previously colonized societies can and cannot discuss and critique. It does this by defining a relation of ownership and control over appropriated experiences. The inherent possessiveness of this relation further fans the exploitative desire for control, which in turn, fuels the need for dominance. The effect of intellectual commodification, as Trinh Minh Ha rightly observed about anthropology in Woman Native Other, is that it “creates a conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them’ . . . a conversation in which ‘them’ (Africans) is silenced” (1989,).
By untangling the colonizing attitudes and processes at play in the West, one comes to understand the reasons for the linearity of Western thought and scholarship. One learns that old, longstanding, stereotypes and prejudices about Africa’s material culture still drive the intellectual engine and generate much of today’s Africanists’ art historical controversies. Spinning on the axis of tradition, Western scholars and theorists still puzzle about how to understand Africa and its material culture; they discover that assumptions of tribality still haunt their intellectual imagination; they find that collectors’ search for masterpieces directs their research agenda and museum exhibitions; and they see that ritual rather than creativity still assigns value to collections. In fact, a close reading of Adrian A. Gerbrands history of African art studies (1990), and a grasp of the central issue of Joseph Cornet’s “African Art and Authenticity” and Sidney Kasfir’s “African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow” (1992) reveal the strikingly close parallel between old research questions and new ones, indicating that genuine progress has not exactly been made (Gerbrands and Cornet 1990).
The enormous power differential in the positions of those at the center/metropole and those at the margins/colonies has a corresponding impact on the sorts of issues that are perceived to be of interest to members of the two oppositional worlds. It is generally the case that what is important to the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the oppressed is hardly ever important to the centered, affluent imperialist. For while the marginalized may want to challenge the conditions of their marginalization, the imperialist is concerned with covering up such investigations: first by diversion, pointing out how much they have done to help; and second, by creating a tightly patrolled arena in which the marginalized voice is alienated and silenced. The Nigerian archeologist Ekpo Eyo knows this well, for as the former director of the Nigerian Museums he constantly encountered such condescension in the international arena. He recounted that the exhibition, Treasures of Ancient Nigeria: Legacy of Two Thousand Years, which the Nigerian Museum organized in 1980, was conceived partly to challenge the imperialistic idea that “one race has a monopoly on creativity over time and space,” and partly to expose the falsity in the idea that Europeans were the inventors of art by showing that the “early history of (Nigerian) art is coterminous with the early phase of Greek art” (1990, 113).
The refusal by white intellectual structures to acknowledge that Africans can have legitimate concerns that differ from whites’ research priorities is the final stage in the racialization and total domination of knowledge. In a plantation-type framework, only whites are deemed intellectually competent to articulate the important theoretical issues in scholarship. This bars Africans from participating in the arena where production of knowledge about their own cultural objects is taking place. Relegated to the sidelines, their role is limited to mindlessly shouting approbations, or to providing raw materials for white intellectual consumption. That the rich aesthetic insights in the writings of Babalola, Achebe, and Lasebikan, that Bamidele Arowogun passed on to Lamidi Fakeye, that Acholi elders bequeathed to p’Bitek, that are sometimes discussed at age-grade meetings, that Poudjougou’s Dogon culture provides in comprehending his statements, are never seriously validated while white intuitions about African artistic scheme are privileged, speaks to a politics of delegitimation that rejects Others’ conceptualization of their own realities.
So when a Hoffman goes to Mali for three to six months of ‘field trip” to discover the aesthetic categories of Dogon art objects and “to investigat(e) the mechanisms through which...outsiders might know and come to understand this entity” (1995, 56), I see another Mungo Park come to “discover” the hidden secrets of the “dark continent.” When she voraciously collects “raw” materials for investigation, I see a multinational conglomerate exploitatively accumulating Third World resources for First World comfort. I see another confirmation of the “center-periphery economic doctrine” in which countries on the periphery (the colonies) supply the center (the metrople) with its conceptual raw materials. When she clinically examines Dogon artists and ponders to whom knowledge of Africa belongs, I see a Conradian Marlow in the Congo seeing people who “howled and leaped...and made horrid faces” (106). When she spins out her interpretations of Dogon art object scripted through the interpretive categories of Western cultural reality, I see the dumping of intellectual toxic waste that is fast obliterating Africa’s categories of interpretation. I see a process of investigation that unlike the scientific logic of discovery proceeds from a negative focal point and is implicated in the assumptions and legacies of colonialism. I see a scholarship in which Africans have been, and are still being, judged as sub-human.
O uwa mebi
bu na onye ilo benarilu ndi nwe ozu na akwa
It is a sign of a world gone awry
that the outsider cries louder than the bereaved.
In “The Race for Theory,” Barbara Christian describes narrative forms, stories, riddles, and proverbs as forms of theorizing employed by “people of color (who) have always theorized.” (1987, 52). She characterizes this theoretical mode of speaking as “[p]ithy language that unmasks the power relations of (our) world” (52). In the African world of which I best know, we say that the world has gone to ruins when an outsider cries louder than the bereaved. We never call it hypocrisy; we tactfully save the hypocrite’s face.
So, when a white American Africanist scholar feels insulted and provoked at an African’s unflattering description of some cultural artifacts, it is not just a charge of misrepresentation on the African’s part, it is a public proclamation by the white scholar of his or her all-knowing vision. Since the issue of authorial knowledge is central to this investigation of gender imperialism, and since the structure of whiteness projects itself as having a special understanding of African art and culture, it is time to examine how white imperialism works through its interpretive scheme to override Africa’s aesthetic schemes.35
Consider the intended artistic objective of the category of ekpo masks I described as disgustingly ugly (Fig. 1a: “Ekpo with big hollowed out eyes;” Fig. 1b: Aesthetically pleasing Ekpo face and headdress.). Within the Ibibio aesthetic universe, these works are consciously made to be ugly, hideous, and frightening. Given this aesthetic ideal, carvers liberally employ facial contortions that evoke congenital cranial deformities and other deformities like leprosy (Fig. 2: “Sculpted face of Ekpo with congenital deformities”). These aberrant features are referentially located in the societal category of ugliness, and are stigmatized as horrendous, undesirable, and taboo. When these ugly types of Ekpo figures are smeared with uto (a ritual paint that is deemed to have magical significance) and then viewed against the juridical power and executioner role of Ekpe Ikpa Ukot (Man’s Leopard Society), the visceral effect resonates at the psychological level.36 They instill psychic terror which, depending on the location of the observer, may be real or feigned. Within this sociohistorical scheme, the appropriate aesthetic response of revulsion indicates recognition of the awesome persona of the Ekpo spirit; it marks respect for the underlying artistic, political, and social significance of the Ekpo institution (fig. 3: “Messengers of Ekpe” Ekpo face displaying the power and symbols of the institution).
A white scholar’s umbrage in seeing these works characterized as “disgustingly ugly” can only derive from a conceptual scheme that blunts the fierce history of Ekpo, obliterates the social implications attached to facial distortions, and obfuscates the function of the principle of ugliness in Ibibio art. Thus, unconscious of its theoretical implications, a Hoffman-type outrage is proof that one is employing a culturally inappropriate aesthetic reference frame. The utilization occurs because the evaluator has illicitly substituted a Western scheme for the appropriate Ibibio aesthetic scheme. The substitution goes unnoticed because the response is carefully positioned as sensitive and generous, in short, “politically correct.” From an African location, however, the response is brilliantly evasive. Its hollowness rings through the conceptual shift that emasculates the Ekpo’s power, and thus transforms it into a passive, non-threatening object. The castration severs the Ekpo from its rich sociological history, and relocates it into the white aesthetic framework, where it becomes a wooden object of visuality that meets with Hoffman’s “sensitive” response (Fig. 4: A wooden object of visuality.).
The replacement of Ibibio artistic intentionality with a white aesthetic scheme underpins Hoffman’s denial of the ugliness of Ekpo. The inscription of white aestheticism onto the Ibibio aesthetic scheme automatically subverts the creativity of Ekpo, and transforms Africa’s cultural artifacts into benign objects to be viewed with maternal familiarity and benevolence. That Hoffman’s feelings of insult really derive from an inappropriate gaze is revealed when we challenge her inability to confront, grasp and respect the aesthetic implication of ugliness and its role in fashioning the ekpo’s identity. For one so concerned about the welfare of Ekpo, Hoffman seems not to know that to describe such Ekpo as “disgustingly ugly” is not to put them down but to validate their aesthetic ideal. It is to recognize their mystique, and to understand that they derive from the exploration of the principle of ugliness that aims to terrify. That Hoffman needs to be told that, is proof that she never accorded aesthetic primacy to the Ibibio scheme. Had she done so, Hoffman would have acknowledged the history and executioner functions of Ekpo, recognized that in the Ibibio creative scheme, ugliness embodies an ambiguous element which, in the evaluative realm, presents a positive review as a “negative” evaluation. (This sort of aesthetic ambiguity resonates in African-American culture’s use of “bad” to describe being cool; or in Onitsha where to aesthetically compliment Oganachi (Spirit/mask) is to underscore its intense ugliness.)
In the larger context of imperialism, knowledge reversals occur as white scholars and theorists impose a truncated vision of reality onto Africa’s cultural landscape. Imperial relations of power (by no means restricted to African art history) are invoked as Western notions of art and creativity are mapped onto African views of it.37 The result of this colonizing inscription is the obliteration of Africa’s categories of thought. In short, the intellectual bleaching of Africa’s aesthetic landscape.
Africanists’ (white scholars for whom Africa is merely a place of study) theorizations in the arts sometimes serve as organizational tools of difference, or of homogenization for white aesthetic imperialism. This allows them to inscribe Western attitudes on African art even as they publicly defend that art. Like the-outsider-who-sees-through-the-nose (Yoruba proverb), Hoffman conveniently imagines that a “negative” description of an Ekpo by a non-Ibibio Nigerian is symptomatic of ethnic bias. Rather than question the limitation of her “acclaimed insight” and received racialized knowledge, Hoffman projects out her ignorance and indicts me for tribalism. Convinced she has uncovered the root of the problem, she introduces my ethnic background and promotes the idea that my comments are tribally motivated: that “judgements rendered by Nzegwu, herself an Igbo, writing about Ibibio Ekpo mask” cannot be trusted. It is instructive to note that the problem of misunderstanding never arises for the imperialist in the metropole; it is always reserved for the periphery, the dominions, the tribes, the marginalized, the subaltern.
The tribalizing strategy of Hoffman’s review, also employed by other white scholars in academia, illuminates the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of imperialism. During European colonization of Africa, the concept of tribality was divisively deployed to accentuate Africa’s ethnic differences, and to promote distrust among the different ethnic groups. Hoffman’s red herring shift to ethnicity is a classic obfuscation move that follows that tradition. In the late 1980’s, in which it was deployed, it appealed to the media images of Africa’s horrific tribal conflicts and “black-on-black violence.” The violent inter-ethnic strife surreptitiously invoked becomes the wedge that “proves” the existence of irresolvable Igbo/Ibibio hostilities, and proves that Africans cannot legitimately comment on each other’s art. (Sub-text: As members of opposing tribes, they lack objective distance. Only us—white imperialists—can comment because we lack ethnicity, we are beyond such tribal pettiness.)
The ulterior motive behind the deployment of the concept of tribality is, of course, to the regulation of intercultural critiques between Africans. By problematizing ethnic differences, the immediate and relevant experiences that Africans may bring to discourses on African art and in the evaluation of white scholars’ writings are delegitimized. This enables Western scholars to present their white intellectual intuitions as objectively neutral knowledge, and to offer their aesthetic scheme as the best possible standpoint from which to understand and interpret African art.
The insidious assumption that Africans cannot objectively engage in intercultural critique38 has long allowed Western scholars to epistemically privilege their field notes and diaries and the sometimes misleading interpretations that follow from there. Further, the assumption enables the deflection of damaging critiques by African scholars, by casting these critiques as inherently problematic. Many white scholars of African art recurrently employ that tack to conceal the cultural paucity of their “knowledge” and to preserve the legitimacy of their misrepresentation, while validating their privileged location in the white intellectual structure of knowledge. Allusions to torrid tribal animosities allows these white Africanist scholars and trainee-scholars like Hoffman to perversely emerge as benevolent masters and mistresses, virtuously “protecting” Ibibio art from a “vicious” Igbo assault.
When Yorubas describe the outsider as one-who-sees-through-the-nose, they emphasize the wide discrepancy between things as they are culturally constituted and the incredulous interpretations of the outsider. In promoting the idea of cultural difference, white female colleagues like Hoffman subversively relegate experientially informed knowledge of Africans to the sidelines and restore the centrality of Western constructions of African art. More fundamentally, they establish their authorial legitimacy by constructing themselves as “intimate outsiders,” in the process reconstructing Africa’s social landscape to accord with their view. Reading Nigeria’s history from Hoffman’s tribalized adversarial reference frame, one gets the impression that Igbos and Ibibios live in mutually exclusive homelands, that they are in perpetual conflict, that Ekpo performances are restricted to Ibibio areas, and that Igbos are uninformed about Ekpo performances so there is nothing they could possibly offer. Interestingly, this white reading of Ibibio art takes place against a corollary reinterpretation of Nigeria’s historical reality to accord with a false anthropologized ahistorical Africa.
Living far away on the West Coast of United States, and anxious to exploit Igbo otherness to Ibibio culture, Hoffman and other white women like her are often unwilling to accept their thrice removed otherness. Striving to legitimize her expertise, Hoffman seems unable to grasp that my otherness to Ibibio culture is radically different from her Western otherness and the conceptual chasm it entails. She refuses to see that there are important overlaps in the cultural experiences of Igbos and Ibibios which she does not share. Some of these derive from cultural similarities, our colonial experience, our Nigerian history and identity, and the forging of inter-ethnic friendships and scholarly collaboration between the two groups.39
Although I am an Igbo, the modern Nigerian reality in which I was raised was one in which these two ethnic groups shared the same administrative structure up until 1968. Even as I remember the formidable presence of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Michael Okpara, and Kingsley Mbadiwe, I remember too that it was the time of Margaret Ekpo, Eyo Ita, N.U. Akpan, H.U. Akpabio, E.O. Eyo, Udoma Udo Udoma, Francis Ikpeme and many others. As part of the political and economic unit known as the Eastern region, members of both groups lived and worked in each others’ geographical area.40 Ekpo performances were prominently featured in the annual festival of the arts as well as during Christmas, New Year, and Easter festivities in places like Aba, Port Harcourt, Degema, Onitsha, Enugu, Lagos, Ibadan, and Okitipupa. Although some performances were primarily geared towards entertainment,41 any Igbo child knew enough about Mmanwu (spirits) from the cultural logic of his or her own lived reality to know that an Ekpo is a spirit, and to adopt the proper gestures of respect. Most importantly, as part of our pre- and post-independent Nigerian history, and in addition to our everyday lived experiences and oral cultural history, we learned about the Man Leopard Society.
Africa’s complex histories and cultures always appear unproblematically simple to those in the metropole, whose perspectives are uncritically informed by a linear evolutionary model of cultural development. Although Hoffman and others like her will quickly distance themselves from this charge of anthropologized, ahistorical reading, the outrageous ideas they feel compelled to assert and defend give them away. To attain scholarly adequacy, white Africanist art historians, like Hoffman, would need to discard the fictitiously timeless lens of their anthropological training and integrate the concept of historical change in their analyses. A prolonged period of lived experience, as Barry Hallen, a white American philosopher who lived in Ife for over fifteen years found out, is required to arrive at some informed understanding of the cultural practices before participating in meta-aesthetic conversations.
Harold Garfinkel,42 the interactionist social psychologist, explains why embeddedness in cultural practice is critical. His experiments revealed that the observer approach (of the sort favored by white Africanist art historians) is necessarily a disengaged perspective that is ill-equipped to discern the rationale and motives of actions. The flaw in the observer approach is that it relies on intuitionism to make sense of phenomena that is outside the scope of its interpretive framework. Consequently, attempts to understand an observed culture in terms of the observer’s familiar scheme subverts the logic of the observed actions and compels the outsider “to see through the nose.” In a corollary study, Garfinkel notes that it is by becoming a participant, immersing oneself in the experience as a member of the studied unit that the alienating barrier is breached. To the extent that an insider perspective is a revelatory one that yields the significance and logic of an artistic scheme, it is critical to an understanding of the artistic significance of any culture’s art. Thus, no equivalence exists between “the literature” of reconstructed textual readings and the lived experiences of people in a culture whose mode, production, and transmission of knowledge is orally structured.
Asi na etiye nwata aka odudu
egosiya mmee
It is said that when one hits a child to swat a gnat
as evidence, one is obliged to present a bloodied palm
As the proverb demonstrates, evidence is critical in establishing motive and proving that one acted responsibly and prudently. If one missed the gnat, then one must be able to show the insect in flight. Where evidence cannot be adduced, or where it fails to match the act, one lacks the socially validated basis to justify the good intent of an act.
In the wake of Hoffman’s review, I have spent time examining the historical context of privilege in which anthropological theories and methods were constructed. I also considered the charges made by leading African scholars against white scholars who appropriate Africa’s material culture and eliminate the African voice in their writings. I recall that Enwonwu made the charge in “Problems of the African Artist Today,”43 contending that “the science of anthropology has...been used to create an intellectual barrier which makes it extremely difficult for most Africans to be considered qualified to play an important part in the development and preservation of their native art.” I remember Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike declaring they were bolekaja (come down let’s fight) critics and stating that Towards a Decolonization of African Literature was written out of a need to combat the “stale, sterile, stifling” effect of Eurocentric categories on the literary arts of contemporary Africa.
As the memory reel unwound to the Foundation of Nigerian Traditional Music, I remembered Akpabot wondering how John Cage could seriously be credited with discovering indeterminacy in music when the Birom (Nigeria) musicians of the kara flute ensemble have been playing random music for most of their history. I recalled Enekwe’s affront as he argued in Igbo Masks: The Oneness of Art and Ritual that the fluid, non-specificity of the Igbo dramatic mode was being devalued because it failed to fit the radically different European model. In Hope and Impediments, I watched Achebe demonstrate how Conrad’s Heart of Darkness “fortifies racial fears” by erasing the humanity of Africa. As the reel raced to the end in “The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective” (1990), Rowland Abiodun asserts that Westerners’ ignorance about Africa’s aesthetic categories results from their inability to proficiently speak any African language and to enter the conceptual universes of discourse.
At the end of this long recollection, I revisited Hoffman’s indictment that I am out of touch with “the literature” and its “contemporary controversies.” I wondered which literature she had in mind: the writings of African scholars which may be more relevant, or the writings that issued from the structures of whiteness? I then remembered the exclusion of Africa’s conceptual schemes in canonical literature, I thought about colonialism as I recalled the proverb, and I wondered what gnat Hoffman was striving to kill.
While working on the essay, “Overcoming Form-Content Tensions in Appreciating African Art Forms,” (1988) it was not my objective to examine the depths of what white scholars of African art really know about the artistic and aesthetic schemes of the various African cultures. In a spirit of good will and as a mark of respect to them for having chosen to work in this area, I accepted whatever they claimed to know. Knowing that most African societies preserve their artistic and aesthetic concepts in an oral mode, it was not important to disclose that very few white scholars proficiently understand the phonetic, lexical and idiomatic meanings of Africa’s tonal languages, nor have extensively lived in the societies to acquire the requisite deep level mastery of the concepts and categories relevant for critical understanding.
Intent on drawing our attention to how whiteness is reproduced in historical interpretation, Boahen once said that when the tiger controls the telling of history, we should remember that the historical account is the tiger’s story, never ours. Boahen’s parable cogently highlights the fact that whiteness is reproduced in historical interpretation, because narrators typically strive to impose their vision on the world. A. E. Afigbo caught G. I. Jones at this when he examined the latter’s assertion that there is “little weaving or dyeing of cotton cloth (in Igboland except where introduced or borrowed from Igala or Yoruba).”44 Not only was Jones’ assertion unsubstantiated by oral tradition and even European travelers’ journals, but also it lacked factual basis. The falsehood was concocted by colonial officers’ in their intense distaste of the Igbos during the early days of colonial rule.
As those who reside at other centers of life and who have heard Western scholars interpret their reality know, Boahen’s observation and Afigbo’s discovery speak succinctly to the sort of distortions that white inscriptions create in their reconstruction of Native Canadian, Native America, African, African American, and Chinese realities. If such narratives are imperialistic and offensive, as Boahen and Afigbo indicate, it is because they say nothing about us, our actions, our lives, or our reality. Imperialism emerges in the substitution of Africans’ voices for the narrator’s Eurocentric voice. This voice emerges powerfully in Michael Crowder’s The Story of Nigeria making it a white reading of Nigeria’s history; Gerbrands’ “History of African Art Studies”45 is a story about the presence of an European anthropologist in African art; and Herbert Cole’s African Arts of Transformation is similarly a white center-periphery survey of the continent’s arts.
While recommending that scholarly focus be shifted from the present anthropological bent to an art historical axis, Abiodun revisited the twin problems of an anthropological-outsider perspective and non-African scholars’ lack of proficiency in an African language (1990). His preliminary insider analysis of Yoruba aesthetic categories showed up the work of white Africanist scholars’ as lacking the necessary cultural understanding needed to formulate an appropriate reference frame for art historical analyses. Reminding scholars that the discipline deals with art forms in oral societies, Abiodun insisted, as did Robert Rattray too (cited in Owusu 1978, 323) that acquisition of the relevant language and metalanguage proficiency would greatly expedite access to the knowledge repository of African societies, and is critical to understanding the aesthetic and formal elements of art in Africa. The suggestion of the two scholars (one Nigerian, the other British) offers a relevant path to white scholars and theorists to effectively redress the sort of speculative interpretation they have been engaging in that leaves Africa out of the equation.
The problem of language, as revealed by Kone’s critique of Brett-Smith’s study, is a problem of conceptual erasure in which the humanity of others’ is distorted. The critical shortcomings of much of white scholars’ writings on Africa and its art occur at the very intersections of language and translation, calling into question the competence of scholars and their compliance with the requisite standard of scholarship. In art history in the United States, doctoral students (including Africans) must satisfy two language requirements, especially in their area of specialization, before commencing their study. For those whose area of study is Europe, fluency in the relevant language of the society is crucial.46 This, however, is hardly the case in African studies, where many European and American Africanist scholars have attained positions of prominence without ever having passed a proficiency test, or achieved conversational fluency, in any African language. In the global intellectual arena, where African scholars and theorists are competing from a position of triple disadvantage (financially, linguistically, and technologically), the requisite standard of scholarly work is waived or lowered for white Africanist male and female scholars so that they can function in the field.
Such affirmative action measures for whites retards academic progress in African art scholarship. Take the case of Hoffman, who defines Dogon culture as an area of study, yet fails to speak the language. Easily absolved from satisfying the language requirement, the imperialist-scholar now pressures illiterate sculptors to step outside their own familiar linguistic and cultural scheme if they are to be written about. Working with informant/translators (many of whom are unreliable), she excuses her inability47 to speak the language by contending that “Dogon languages and dialects are many” (1995, 91). This classic imperialistic complaint ignores that the burden of language learning is being shifted on to the Dogons, and that for serious scholarly work to be done language acquisition is crucial since it is the medium in which Dogons’ express their views, histories, philosophic ideas, social values, norms and practices. Moreover, Hoffman ignores the fundamental epistemological problems of informant-dependent mode of research and the data-quality control it creates in her chosen methodology: “At the start of each interview, I would ask the sculptor his preference: to work through an interpreter or to speak directly to me in French. In almost all cases, the sculptors spoke some French and preferred to speak directly to me” (1995, 91).
The epistemological problems identified by Owusu cannot be solved by simply shifting the burden of language learning to another, or by blithely assuming that a subjects’ limited French will not negatively affect data-collection. Most troubling in this disingenuous maneuver to avoid learning the language of her primary area of research is that Hoffman presents her tainted material as respectfully collected. And then tries to avoid culpability in distorting Dogon culture by representing Poudjougou’s (the sculptor with limited French) verbal expression as “eloquent” (91) and having him assert reassuringly that his “Dogon is as poor as my French” (91). Noteworthy in this elaborate performance of language-learning avoidance, is that the central problem of data degradation is covered up by passing off tainted materials as respectfully collected, and replacing questions of methodological rigor by appealing to an interviewee’s eloquency. Hardly addressed at all is the fundamental issue of transmogrification of meaning that comes in part from Poudjougou’s limited French vocabulary, particularly from his inability to translate complex cultural concepts and ideas into French, and from the triple process of translating from Dogon to half-baked French (Poudjougou), from half-baked French to standard French (Hoffman), and from standard French to English (Hoffman).
Lack of proficiency in the relevant language and metalanguage of discourse results in flawed interpretations about Africa’s material reality. Without admitting to the fact, Western researchers typically rely on their cultural categories of interpretation to make sense of a different reality without ascertaining whether or not there are conceptual overlaps in the observed phenomena. At one level, the utilization of inapplicable cultural categories, rooted in Western epistemological order, seriously calls into question the relevance, veracity, legitimacy, objectivity, and the rationality of the resultant interpretations, the proceeds of which still make interesting reading. At another level, as Paul Tiyambe Zeleza underscored, the occurrence of such theorizations in African studies is “a reflection of relations of dominance of Africa by the West [since it] enhances the capacity of Western scholars for intellectual accumulation, appropriation, and domination in African studies” (1994).
Important theoretical questions emerge when the white cultural poltergeist inhabiting the interpretive framework problematizes Africa’s values, history, and philosophic logic and degrades the level of theoretical interpretation. An instance of this occurred when Brett-Smith constructed Bamana and Malinke men as swearing their most profound oath on their mother’s sex (1994, 122). If after five years of research Brett-Smith is still subject to such outrageous interpretations, there is need to reassess the issue of language waivers and the relevance of language-learning. In such badly theorized work as Brett-Smith’s and Hoffman’s, culturally informed Africans can easily note the slippages and shortcomings of Africanist scholarship because we can detect the geo-cultural displacement of our center to a marginal position, as Kone did in the work of Brett-Smith. Unlike outsiders, who most need to acquire cultural competence, informed Africans do not need to ponder with the anthropologist the process by which they gain a knowledge of Africa, just as informed United States citizens do not stop to inquire about the process by which they know United States culture. Indeed, as Ayo Bamgbose demonstrated in his etymological analysis of the concept of Olodumare, deep cultural knowledge is required, a substantial part of which comes from knowledge of social history, the syntactical rules of language derivation, the logic and philosophic concepts of the society, and the different dialectical shifts of the language (1971).
It is relatively easy to hear the hollow sound of otherness in the speculative interpretations. Residents at the social margins of life in North America are intimately aware of the theoretical limitations of canonical literature that fall below acceptable standards of scholarship in representing their cultural experiences. Unlike most African scholars, few white scholars (women included) ever bother to sufficiently “enter” the metanarrative level of discourse of the African thought worlds they are reinterpreting. Like the perpetual tourist, they stand at the cultural doorway, casting fugitive glances, seeking quixotic materials to use in framing Africa with the next trendy theory or hypothesis. Because they never really grapple with the specific cultural logic presented to them, their views and occassional interpretive accounts say more about the totalizing discourse of imperial epistemologies and interpreters than about the phenomena and peoples being described.
Remembering the colonial legacy of 19th century anthropology, and the cold war legacy of African studies programs in the United States, Africans need to acknowledge the heavy political and emotional investment at work in securing the foundation of the white normative order in area studies. Eva Cockcroft’s article, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” highlights the intimate connection between art/culture and the United States foreign policy during the cold war era,48 and the formidable role of the Rockefeller Foundation in transforming art/culture into an effective political instrument of global change. As Cockcroft argued, this political relationship resulted in the establishment of area studies programs in select American universities to provide policy makers with the necessary information on the emergent nations of Africa and Asia as part of the United States’ global defense against communism. Initially provided by some peace corps volunteers who later became Africanist scholars and theorists, the much needed information generated numerous publications on the histories and cultures of diverse African nations. Since the African studies program was primarily designed to provide information for the political objectives of the United States, the orientation of materials collected, the emphasis of interpretation, and scholars’ accountability of the knowledge produced had to accord with America’s perception of, and centrality in, the world. That knowledge qua knowledge was not the overriding objective of American research in Africa explains why the recovery of Africa into the American intellectual imagination invoked the hegemonic center-periphery relationship of United States imperialism.
In light of this narrative, it is instructive that Suzanne Preston Blier’s account ignores the significance of this political relationship of the discipline to the State and to its Cold War objectives in shaping the agenda and direction of the area studies program. In the essay “African Art Studies at the Crossroads: An American Perspective” (1990), she constructs a benign apolitical history of the development and growth of African art studies in the United States in which the discipline vigorously flourished under the energy and dedication of a few highly motivated liberal white scholars. Yet as Cockcroft makes clear, the imperialistic goal of the Cold War entered into the character and structure of the programs and created a U.S.-centered view of the world. In different programs, scholars (unwittingly or wittingly) lent themselves to the realization of America’s global objectives, which converged with their personal objectives to become the definers and experts of diverse regions of the world. Reinforcing Cockcroft’s analysis are historians Keletso Atkins, John Higginson, and Atieno Odhiambo who shed greater light on the history of African Studies in the United States (1995). According to them:
“[t]he decolonization of European empires in Africa, coming as it did during the height of the cold war, posed new challenges for America’s conception of its ‘national security.’ Policy makers demanded background and up-to-date information on the emergent nation-states of Africa. Hence, African studies was constructed by an alliance of academics, private foundations, and government agencies. It is this relationship that nurtured the growth in African history and African studies in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, not Africanists on the ‘fringes’ of the civil-rights struggle with ‘sympathy for the underdog’” (1995).
At the very least, a historicized, accurate reading of the creation of African studies program at leading research universities in the United States provides an answer to the sort of culturalist questions that are of interest in the field: e.g., how do “we” understand Africa? Do Africans have a notion of art? Are African masks produced by the community or by individual artists? Do the artists have names or are they nameless? What are their names? An accurate narrative of the history of the discipline should facilitate an understanding of the ways race and Cold War politics converged to construct the foundations of the discipline, define the paradigms of research, and establish who are considered worthy of speaking. Wielding enormous power and influence as chairs of departments, jurors for exhibition and research proposals, architects of African art programs in universities, and editors of journals and reviewers of article submissions, were white male scholars (many of whom spoke no African language) who set the research agenda and defined publication orientation in light of their own knowledge, understanding, biases, interests, and prejudices. That today Africans’ have problems with the prevailing paradigms of the discipline is not because they are intellectually inferior, but because the paradigms were not designed to substantively address issues of knowledge, but rather to reflect American intuitionisms about Africa and the sorts of knowledge white America think should be produced.49
Thus, in African art studies, in particular, and African studies, in general, gender imperialism interweaves with cultural imperialism as white women curators, scholars, theorists, and researchers, uphold the America-oriented paradigms of knowledge that invidiously erase African realities. Privileged over their African American counterparts, the white female students of these white male scholars succeed both by being drawn into the inner circle of these mentors and by upholding the imperial epistemologies and methodological style of their mentors. Parlaying individuality for trooper-identity, they play the politics of the discipline, adopting the hierarchical position of power and privilege accorded to them in the program. In their role as gatekeepers of the status quo, many of these white female scholars (many of whom do not speak any African language) effectively control the interpretation of African reality by corralling discourse into the “house of canons” where research questions are set by transmogrified interpretations.
The importance of this canonical edifice is that it provides a means to subvert the legitimate basis on which the outsider/insider dichotomy is marked. By covering up the cultural location and identity of the theorist, it is easier to persuade the skeptic that all interpretations are the same, and that there is no distinction in the level of knowledge between Africans and white Africanist scholars. Placing all scholars (Africans and non-Africans) on the same cognitive level of cultural knowledge undermines the basis on which Africans have critiqued Africanists’ misinterpretations. In attempting to assert that any interpretation of African cultural reality is valid, it purports to state that there is no cultural reality outside of the descriptions and interpretations of the scholars. This attempt to collapse the very important distinction between reality and interpretations of it strives to render of equal heuristic value flawed outsider interpretations and accurate insider interpretations.
The argument of the limitations of an outsider’s interpretation is not being made on the ground of cultural origin, but on the quantity and quality of knowledge. In an earlier work (1985), I defended the theoretical position that, in principle, Western aesthetic theories are relevant for the understanding of African art. As cognitive tools with transcultural possibilities, I argued that the problem of ascription, or of mapping Western values onto African culture, can be avoided by clarifying the implicit aesthetic and artistic terms to rid them of their misleading connotations. Effectively, what this means is that concepts and categories can be used transculturally provided that one is aware of their ideological baggages and is careful enough to prevent the transfer of potentially distorting ideas. Whether or not this procedure will yield significant insight is a problem which interpreters have to deal with, in deciding to apply their pet theories. My main concern was to undermine the legitimacy of the idea that theories can be dismissed simply because of their cultural origin. The possibility that knowledge or theories can be produced in diverse geographical locations must be defended since such theories can have useful application outside their cultural limits. Other relevant grounds of dismissal must be established, and these must be made on epistemic or methodological grounds. If theories emerge from, and discursively work within, a racialized and imperialistic context of power, depending on the sort of use to which they are put, their heuristic value and epistemic efficacy may be compromised in significant ways that curtail the applicability of the theory.
If the image of expertise is to be assertively projected, Hoffman and others like her need to defend their claims before Africans, given their facile knowledge of African languages, cultures and realities. Before this begins, there is a need to reconcile the inconsistencies in their positions, especially the idea that whatever is art in Africa is resolved, following the acceptance by Western scholars of African material culture as art. It must be remembered that the claim of Western acceptance of African artifacts as art is highly contentious. In the first place, what do these Western scholars understand to be art in these artifacts? Do their views on the matter overlap with that of the indigenes? Why is the status of African artifacts as art pre-emptively made to depend on “its acceptance as art by Western scholars”? Why has Hoffman ignored the Africans’ own views on the matter? Moreover, what are the various African societies’ artistic and aesthetic categories?
In the racialized context of US imperialism in which knowledge about Africa is being produced, it pays to challenge interpreters on their utiliza