A sidelong glance: the practice of African Diaspora art history in the United States.

by Tohmson Krystal

In 80 percent of the job advertisements published by the College Art Association over the last twenty years in which the words "African diaspora" appear, they are accompanied by "and/or": "African diaspora and/or African art history" and, in rarer instances, "African diaspora and/or African American and/or Latin American art history." (1) While the latter string of fields warrants critical analysis, I want to concentrate on the former, more common job description. What can we make of the frequent conjoining of Africa and the African diaspora? Would such a geographic breadth and unspecified temporal span be imaginable in other contexts, i.e., "art history of Europe and/or the study of art of people of European descent throughout the globe"? Or do the distinct historical circumstances through which the modern African diaspora came to be formed, those of transatlantic slavery, make that conjunction a necessary and even a political one?That being said, how do we understand the "or" in such job descriptions, that small but resounding indicator not of connection but of substitution, which suggests that the study of the African diaspora can take the place of the study of African art or that art from the continent can conversely overshadow, occlude, or preclude, the diaspora? What does such exchangeability tell us about understandings or misconceptions of African diaspora art-historical studies and their place or their lack of standing within the discipline of art history?

This institutional configuration of the African diaspora in art history job announcements serves as a point of departure in this essay, which sets out to assess historiographically what it means to study art history from the perspective of the African diaspora. I look primarily at African diaspora art history in the United States, where the area of study first developed and continues to dominate characterizations of African diaspora artistic and art-historical practice, even though I am attentive to how concepts, research, and scholars from other parts of the African diaspora have transformed this scholarship. The essay offers an overview of how the field has been interpolated in both art history and African diaspora studies. (2)

I start with an examination of the methodological centrality of art history in early African diasporic scholarship. Associated with the anthropologist Melville Herskovits and carried forth in the work of the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, this strain of African diaspora scholarship sought to trace an African presence in the Americas by analyzing its material and visible remains. After the publication of Thompson's Flash of the Spirit in 1983, the discipline of art history proved intrinsic to what has been described as the "rebirth of African diaspora studies" in the academy.5 I go on to explore the reorientation of African diaspora scholarship that took place after the publication of the sociologist Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic (1993), which focused on the constitutive, even precursory, role of the African diaspora within the formation of Western modernity. In the wake of Gilroy's work, African diaspora studies increasingly engaged, expanded, and exploded Western notions of modernity and modernism, democracy and citizenship, objecthood and subjectivity, and the beautiful and the representable. African diaspora art history, taking up these forms of critique, increasingly explored how African diasporic art, representation, and ways of seeing offered critical reflection on conventional meanings, teleologies, and ontologies of modern art in the West and interrogated the primacy of vision and visuality more generally in modern Western society The field not only broadened the parameters of what qualified as the object of study in art history but lingered on the very limits of visibility the evidence of things not seen and represented in Western modes of visual production. As African diaspora art history increasingly gave Western representation a sidelong glance, Africa--once the focus of scholarly attention in African diaspora art-historical studies--increasingly retreated from view. I argue that characterizations of African diasporic art history as interchangeable with African art history in contemporary job announcements reflect a failure to acknowledge the modern turn in African diaspora scholarship, which has dominated the field of African diaspora studies over the last fifteen years. Such mischaracterizations of African diaspora art history marginalize it, rather than highlighting how this history is intrinsic to modern Western art history.

Ironically, as African diaspora art history moved away from the study of African retentions, it became less visible in African diaspora studies. By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholarship on the diaspora increasingly shifted emphasis from the visual evidence of African roots to the role of music and print culture in the formation of modern African diasporic communities. What might be interpreted as the recent diminished presence of art history in African diaspora scholarship is reflected in several oft-cited genealogies of diaspora studies in which there is a conspicuous absence of any discussion of art historians' work. (4) 1 conclude by asking what course art historians of the African diaspora should be charting within the shifting terrain of African diaspora studies and art history in order to open up new horizons within and beyond the field.

The African Diaspora: Concept and Context

"Diaspora" is a Greek word, a combination of the prefix dia- (meaning "through") and the verb sperein ("to sow" or "to scatter"), and refers to the dispersal of people of common origin, background, or belief. "Dispersal" seems like a mild and passive way to describe the processes through which the modern African diaspora came to be formed: through transatlantic racial slavery. Commencing in the fifteenth century and continuing for almost four centuries, slave traders brought more than eleven million Africansto the Americas, and approximately two hundred thousand to Europe and to Asia. An estimated two millionAfricans died en route. While there were at least three earlier diasporic movements out of the continent of Africa, it was the modern slave trade that inaugurated "the most massive acculturational event in human history." (5)

The concept of the African diaspora as a subject of study gained academic currency in the English-speaking world in the mid- 1950s to mid- 1960s in the writings of the historian George Shepperson. (6) "African diaspora" characterizes how diverse subjects affected by transatlantic slavery and its aftermaths came to think of themselves as a group, across geographic locations, based on (but not limited to) a shared history, be it of slavery, homeland, ethnicity, colonialism, imperialism, imperiled decolonialization, white racism, or precisely the conditions of dispersal and acculturation. (7) Since almost the beginning of the slave trade, writers, thinkers, travelers, political leaders, and artists in the African diaspora--whom Shepperson describes as "trans-Atlantic men [and women] of African descent"--across the world sought to align themselves with other people of African descent and saw themselves as parts of a larger black international community. (8) In conferences such as the Pan-African Conference in 1900, led by the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams, and in the congresses organized by W. E. B. Du Bois and others in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, 1945, and 1974, people of African descent came together to foster, as Du Bois put it, "intellectual understanding and co-operation among all groups of Negro descent in order to bring about at the earliest possible time the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro peoples." (9)

In the art world this internationalized sense of diasporic community was fostered through the travels of the African American artist Robert Douglass, Jr., to Haiti in 1837-39, in the subsequent transatlantic journeys of the American sculptor Edmonia Lewis to Italy in 1865, and in the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam's sojourns in Spain, France, and Haiti in the 1920s through mid- 1940s, to the staging of art festivals, like the first World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, and more recently the Festival of Black Arts and Cultures hosted by the same city in 2010. These events brought together artists, musicians, and cultural practitioners from Africa and the African diaspora. A diasporic sense of identification was not necessarily created through travel but could involve a reconfiguration of location through representation, whether the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs s projections of herself as a free person as she lay immobile while hiding for seven years in a crawlspace in her grandmother's home; Jamaican Rastafarians' allegiances to Ethiopia generated and sustained through photography prints, and murals; or the philosopher Alain Locke's understanding and fostering of a "new internationalism," indeed "a new Negro," across and within different African diasporic communities through the arts in the 1920s. (10) Locke's edited volume The New Negro (1925), which brought together artists, poets, anthropologists, and authors from throughout the diaspora and indeed from across national, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, enacted his understanding of black internationalism, efforts to "recapture contact with the scattered peoples of African derivation."

African diaspora art history explores the role of art, visual culture, and visu-ality in African diasporic cultures. (11) It examines in part the visual representations, tropes, technologies, and practices through which diverse internally differentiated groups of people of African descent came to see, understand, and represent themselves as connected to each other or as sharing cultural expressions, religious practices, political views, experiences and conditions, pasts, or imagined futures. Art does not simply illustrate these efforts, but has been an intrinsic part of the ongoing processes through which diverse individuals and groups, under distinct social conditions, forge and express a sense of diasporic belonging. (12) The field also takes account of how persons in the diaspora sought to image the subjectivity, modernity, creativity, memory, and humanity of black subjects. The idea and meanings of diaspora are, of course, not preformed or static, nor is art simply illustrative or monadic of a fixed sense of what constitutes diaspora. Rather, African diaspora art history is concerned with the multiplicity of identities that constitute diasporas (and that trouble their constitution), the ever-changing and historical ways that subjects in the diaspora see, see themselves, and are seen, and the conditions of visibility and invisibility in and beyond the art world--from modernization and modernism to multiculturalism and post-blackness--that inform the work, interpretation, circulation, and practice of art in the African diaspora more broadly. (13)

African diaspora art history also reflects on the specific sociopolitical environments, philosophical and aesthetic ideals, and visual regimes that figurations of diaspora take place within and against, the contexts that have (and often continue to) cast black subjects as noncitizens, as nonhumans, as not representable, or as unworthy or incapable of art. It offers an analysis of art and visuality as discerned from the changing historical perspective of people in the African diaspora. African diaspora art history analyzes what the African American sociologist and leader Du Bois so provocatively characterized in the Reconstruction era as a "second sight" into the American world, a view of American and modern Western society from the perspective of those who are seen as a "seventh son." The sight of African diasporic subjects is ultimately the perspective of the observed, those who experienced "a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," and the observers, those often consigned to and actively engaged in the process of looking, beholding, inspecting.1' Who knew better the meaning and uses of the visual in Western society than those who were defined as black, as other, as property, based on the surface appearance of their skins? Who understood better what art and aesthetics does, affects, and affords, or the importance of being represented than those who were often defined as antithetical to notions of the beautiful, the modern, the visible, the representable? In these ways African diaspora art history grapples with how African diasporic subjects approached, viewed, and visualized the broader environments in which they lived and forged creative lives, both the sociopolitical environment and representational landscapes. It is attentive to how black subjects came to be seen and represented as such and how their lived experiences at the nexus of Western regimes of visuality reveal much about the logic of the visual in modern Western culture and its limits.

The insights of Hannah Crafts, an author who wrote a fictionalized biogra-phy of her life as a slave in the nineteenth century, offers a prescient example of the vision of the observed and observer that I focus on here as an approach to representation and a way of seeing in the African diaspora, a perspective analyzed in visual studies of the field. Her narrative highlights too how African diasporic identities and subjectivities were precisely constituted through vision. Crafts's account is written from the perspective of a slave who had "no training, no cultivation," but "fancied pictorial illustrations and flaming colors" and from childhood developed "a silent unobtrusive way of observing things and events ... wishing to understand them better than I could."tt Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (1853-61) abounds with contemplative and critical reflections on the things that comprise her protagonist s world--from the "appearance of wealth and splendor" in her master's house, and the rooms "inhabited by marble images of art, or human forms pictured on the walls," to the questionable whiteness of her masters bride-to-be.'6 She also is cognizant of her and other slaves' intense subjection to observation, to visual scrutiny. Crafts s description of an old woman who met her death when hung alive on a linden tree by her master is her most spectacular description of the potentially punitive consequences and uses of the surveillance of black bodies. Her account calls attention to how she and her peers experienced and negotiated their visual world, its quotidian and violent extremes.

One striking part of Crafts s narrative comes when the protagonist enters a gallery filled with a "long succession of family portraits." (17) As she assesses the portraits of her master and his ancestors, the painted countenances appear to come to life in the sunlight that bathes the room. Crafts lingers over the portraits, attentive to the experience of viewing them and to the changing visual effects of light on the images: "Movements like those of life came over the line of stolid faces as the shadows of a linden played there." Intriguingly Crafts describes her own transformation: "I was not a slave with these pictured memorials of the past. They could not enforce drudgery, or condemn me on account of my color to a life of servitude. As their companion I could think and speculate. In their presence my mind seemed to run riotous and exult in its freedom as a rational being, and one destined for …

Source: Access my Library/ Art Journal  

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