Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics

Akinwumi Adesokan

Description

Globalization's literary and artistic effects

What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.

Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Generic Transformations at the Crossroads of Capital
1. C. L. R. James Sees the World Steadily
2. Fitful Decolonization: Xala and the Poetics of Double Fetishism
3. Tunde Kelani's Nollywood: Aesthetics of Exhortation
4. Jean-Pierre Bekolo and the Challenges of Aesthetic Populism
5. Imaginary Citizenship: Caryl Phillips's Atlantic World
6. Spirits of Bandung: A Sarcastic Subject Writes to Empire
Conclusion: Being African in the World

Notes
List of References
Filmography
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• Literary Criticism
• African
• Película fotográfica
• África
• Literature
• African people
• History of film
• Cinema
• Africa
• Film
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 21 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9780253005502
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics

 AFRICAN EXPRESSIVE CULTURES Patrick McNaughton, editor

 ASSOCIATE EDITORS  Catherine M. Cvle  Barbara G. Hvffman  Eileen Julien  Kassim Kvné  D. A. Masvlv  Elisha Renne  Zvë Strvther

Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404–3797 USA

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© 2011 by Akin Adesokan

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adesokan, Akinwumi.

Postcolonial artists and global aesthetics / Akin Adesokan. p. cm. — (African expressive cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN 978-0-253-35679-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22345-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Social aspects—Africa. 2. Motion pictures and globalization. 3. Africa—In motion pictures. 4. Intercultural communication in motion pictures. 5. Literature and globalization. 6. African diaspora in literature. 7. Literature and society. I. Title. PN1993.5.A35A34 2011 302.23′43096—dc22 2011014035

1 2 3 4 5 16 15 14 13 12 11

ToNusiratu Asake and Tolani Arike, mother and daughter

In acknowledging that we are part of the Third World we are, to paraphrase José Martí, “affirming that our cheek feels the blow struck against any man, anywhere in the world.” Thomas Sankara, “Freedom Can Be Won Only Through Struggle” (1984) Finally, a word on the possible “sexism” of my language. This issue has dogged my steps for a while and I want to state my position on it once and for all. English is not my language. Though I have developed a taste for it, it was once forced upon me … Now that after thirty years of toil I have acquired reasonable competence in the language, I am told by the progeny of those who first imposed it on me that I have been taught the wrong English by their forefathers; that I must now relearn the language. Frankly, I am too old to do so. Ashis Nandy, preface toThe Intimate Enemy(1983)

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

Introduction: Generic Transformations at the Crossroads of Capital 1. C. L. R. James Sees the World Steadily 2. Fitful Decolonization:Xalaand the Poetics of Double Fetishism 3. Tunde Kelani’s Nollywood: Aesthetics of Exhortation 4. Jean-Pierre Bekolo and the Challenges of Aesthetic Populism 5. Imaginary Citizenship: Caryl Phillips’s Atlantic World 6. Spirits of Bandung: A Sarcastic Subject Writes to Empire Conclusion: Being African in the World Notes List of References Filmography Index

Preface

Living in Lagos, Nigeria, in the early 1980s, I was surrounded by art in all media: music, literature, cinema, television, radio, comic strips, photoplays, and theater, not to mention the unplanned spectacle of the expressive every day and night, the living art of the street itself. It was the heyday of Nigeria’s profligate Second Republic, a democracy only in name, and these urban media were at once art, business, and life, catering to a network of relations across social classes. I was more interested in enjoying this expressive culture than in understanding how it came to be, but felt a sense of loss when much of it began to fizzle out, probably coincidentally, following the military overthrow of the government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari. By the end of that decade, the country was deeply enmeshed in the neoliberal economic dragnet of a structural adjustment program, from which it has yet to fully extricate itself. Where did all those manifestations of a vibrant artistic culture go? Why was sustenance so easily denied them? How does one think productively about subsequent or residual forms of this culture, which never totally disappeared, even deep in those years of structural adjustment? This book is written in part with these questions in mind. It seeks to explore the aesthetic consequences of the decline of the nation-state prefigured in that disconcerting reality, turning toward works of art and the contexts of their emergence for possible leads. If all I cared for then was aesthetic pleasure, now I concern myself also with the complex socioeconomic and institutional questions of how art is constituted, focusing on the transformation of genre through the specific technological and social changes of the past several decades. These changes are mirrored in the move from the concept of the Third Worldto the concept ofpostcoloniality, and to get an accurate sense of what they represent requires even-handed attention to a number of structural formations that do not always appear to have much to do with one another. How could I have known that something called “the Washington Consensus” could be responsible for the poor quality of the movie being shown inside a theater in a Lagos neighborhood? What connections might exist between the publication of little pamphlets by a group of socialists in postwar Detroit and the best-seller status of a first novel by a young Indian woman in the final years of the twentieth century? Starting from the premise that genre, the aesthetic typology of kinds in textual production, is shaped by context, I focus on six authors and filmmakers who produce works within the historical span of both decolonization and globalization. The various aspects of both globalization and prior processes are marked by contradictions, but in representational terms, the works of these artist-intellectuals present a useful elaboration on the changes attending postcolonial cultural production. This is both because of the intellectual nature of postcolonialism—the fact that it is individuals, as artists, writers, and activists, who best articulate the problems of postcolonial society —and because of the usual tension between a pragmatic use of the apparatus of representation and a commitment to varieties of cultural or political assertion. Focusing on the different contexts in which both decolonization and globalization thrive, I identify a complex social formation, thecrossroads of capital, as resulting from the shuttle between the economic and the cultural spheres, using the West African marketplace as an example. Using this idea of the crossroads of capital, I place the increasingly popular notion of the “network society” (Castells 2000) in a historically specific setting, aligning Castell’s term with earlier theorizations of the relationships between economic systems and diasporic and postmodern identities (A. Amin 1994; S. Amin 1990; Jameson 1991; Harvey 1990; Hall 1989). My primary objects are works of art, so I am interested in how these theoretical positions can be understood in relation to contexts of artistic production, and thus to a historical, materialist idea of genre. I approach this challenge by focusing on three manifestations of the peculiarity of postcolonial texts. The first is the fitful character of artistic representation within decolonization: the idea that some of what an earlier generation of artists engaged in anti-colonial critique considered the negative effects of the colonial encounter are among the principal barometers for understanding global identities today. The second is the aesthetic dimensions of uneven geographical development, that is, the imaginative ways in which globalization and its contents determine what is generically possible. The third is the way metropolitan location and the commodity form function to shape genres. Postcolonial Artists and Global Aestheticsa perspective quite different from those of presents current discussions of the relationships between globalization and aesthetic changes. While disciplines with strong interests in African studies, such as anthropology, economic history, and political science, continue to develop cutting-edge analytical, quantitative, and ethnographic perspectives within their fields (Ferguson 2006; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006), such perspectives rarely, if ever, engage cultural forms in an aesthetic sense. This surprises me, because the aesthetic dimension of artistic

forms seems to be a fertile ground for exploring questions of agency, which are always paramount to these disciplines and which, though manifesting themselves through very complex sociohistorical processes, are fundamentally about creativity, whether individual or collective. On the other hand, disciplines invested in textual forms, such as African cinema and diasporic and postcolonial literature, are still largely concerned with thematic issues in the broadest sense, paying relatively little attention to the analysis of system, beyond standard critiques of varieties of Eurocentrism or Afrocentrism (Harrow 2007b; Murphy and Williams 2007). Kenneth Harrow’sPostcolonial African Cinema is written with great charm and theoretical rigor, but it is also notably concerned with thematics, and I discuss its strengths and shortcomings at length in this book. Murphy and Williams’sPostcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directorsis exceptional for its interest in the figure of the postcolonial artist as an intellectual formation. But one could take the implications of such a formation farther, without being saddled with the burden of representativeness. Some fascinating comparative studies in postcolonial literature have displayed an acute interest in precisely these systemic questions, but they have been concerned only with literature, primarily the novel, with an occasional nod toward other genres (Slaughter 2007; Brouillette 2007; Huggan 2001). The present book, written in part to fill this gap in scholarship on postcolonial textuality in literature, in cinema, and in other less visible genres, is thus different in both method and insight. In its method, the book attempts a rigorous discussion of postcolonial texts by selecting eclectic texts—films with different technological formats (Ousmane Sembene, Tunde Kelani, and Jean-Pierre Bekolo), a travelogue-cum-social-history (Caryl Phillips), a political tract (Arundhati Roy), and an essayistic meditation on a sociopolitical movement (C. L. R. James)—and eschewing a simple thematic reading of them. By combining the thematic interests of the scholarly titles cited above with an analytical attention to systemic issues in the conception, production, and circulation of literary and cinematic works, I develop a way of reading these texts that is seldom attempted in the field of postcolonial studies. In each case I start with the text, but I see it as both product and producer of a vast range of political, social, economic, and aesthetic factors and meanings. I highlight what the text does and is unable to do, and what I think these capacities and incapacities imply. Although I arrive at the three specific aspects of postcolonial textual forms that I focus on through a dynamic movement between texts and the systemic contexts of their production, my premise avoids a simple equation between the two. For example, while James’s and Sembene’s works provide a sense of the fitful character of artistic representation within decolonization, this fitfulness stands in a complex relationship to another of the aspects I attend to, that is, metropolitan location and the commodity form as shapers of genres, in ways that my reading of Roy’s political writings makes clear. In conceptual terms, I provide new insights by relating this idea of postcolonial textuality to four theoretical issues. First, I make a case for seeing the neoliberal capitalist system as decisive in the articulation between culture and economic change. In the introduction, I delineate the factors at work in this articulation as they occur both in the specific context of contemporary (West) Africa and in the world at large. I think it is important to set the idea of the crossroads, the localized, spatial imagery of the conjunction of economic and cultural spheres, side by side with the theoretical notion of uneven geographical development, in order to show that each influences the other. Second, I argue specifically that global relations between politics, economy, and culture catalyze genre formation. I thus extend the challenges that globalization poses for literary studies to other forms, like cinema and nonfiction. Studies of aesthetic changes under globalization are overwhelmingly biased toward literature, and particularly toward the novel. I have chosen to avoid the conventional “film-and-literature” approach, which highlights either thematic close-reading or adaptation, and of which there are some excellent critiques and compendia (Dovey 2009; Ray 2001; Naremore 2000). The filmmakers featured here are connected with African cinema, but I place their work in a broader context by discussing generic changes in the context of institutional issues such as cultural mobility, expatriation, and commodification. I am not aware of debates on globalization in the field of film and cinema studies that compare with what is available in literary studies, although Chuck Tryon’s Reinventing Cinemaattempts a preliminary but fruitful exploration of how new media are (2009) changing the notion of cinema. Also, the “Changing Profession” section of the 2007 special issue of PMLAtitled “Remapping Genre” focuses on the relationships between technology and generic changes by considering the database as the genre of the twenty-first century (Folsom 2007), including five responses to Ed Folsom’s essay and his own final response. In order to address the central question of the status of artistic works in the context of expatriation and globalized media, I draw on the notion of exilic and diasporic filmmaking that the Iranian-born scholar Hamid Naficy develops inThe Accented Cinema(2001). Third, I make artistic figures central to my analysis. I demonstrate that artists, cultural