1. Petrine Archer-Straw “Whose Theory? Whose Primitivism?” Society For The Humanities Graduate Workshop, November 2005
2. This definition is taken from the dictionary provided by Microsoft Word 2001.
3. I use the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ in spite of their reductive qualities. White is used to describe people of European origin, while the more politicized term ‘black’ speaks to those of African and African-diaspora origin who since the 1960s have used the term as a means of oppositional self-definition.
4. These referents come from the Oxford Dictionary and correspond to ‘black –hearted’, ‘black-comedy’, ‘black-mark’, ‘black –art’ respectively. The list of associations is long, see: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Oxford, 1984
5. In biblical ethnography, Ham is the father of the nations Cush, Mizraim, Phut, and Canaan. Historically, these nations have been represented as black or mixed race and descendents of these nations have been referred to as Hamites; is a racially ambiguous and contested term. Ham’s image was increasingly blackened and undermined by Jewish and later Christian interpretations of the ‘Curse of Ham’, recorded in the Book of Genesis 9:20 – 27.The "Land of Ham" is a designation for Egypt in the Psalms.
6. The depiction of Black satyrs in Greek pottery is well documented but rarely examined in the context of representation and race.
7. See for example Paul Guaguin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching, or Manet’s Olympia.
8. Edward Said, Orientalism, London, 1978
9. Glyne Griffith, Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel, University Press, Jamaica, 1996.
10. Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, London, 2001
11. This study acknowledges the difficulties of using terms like ‘west’ and ‘western’ because of their complexity and use in describing a range of contradictory elements. They are shifting labels that have been heavily burdened and abused in recent times. In this study as well as Negrophilia, the term ‘West’ is considered a ‘geo-political construct that implies shared social and racial values’ related to the modern world system and ‘centers’ of power. It is a descriptor used interchangeably with the term ‘white’ albeit in an similarly reductive manner.
12. This is not to deny the legacy of black thinkers such as Du Bois, Cesaire, Fanon, etc or to undermine the important recent work of Hall, Gilroy, Appiah, Gates, West, et al of which I am enormously respectful.
13. Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham: Duke University Press), 1992
14. griot (gre-o, gre’o, gre’ot) n.: A storyteller in western Africa who perpetuates the oral tradition and history of a village or family
15. Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilisation, 1974
16. Yosef ben-Jochannan, Black Man of the Nile, 1970, 1972 & 1989
17. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 1988.
In this ground-breaking work Bernal shows just how this retreat from blackness impacted Europe and its racial and spiritual belief throughout the long march of history. In his controversial series of books, he focuses on Greek cultural borrowings from Egypt and Levant in the 2nd millennium BC. Through a comparison of what he calls the Ancient and Aryan models,he demonstrates how one usurped the other and how western Egyptologists and scientists since the 1830’s, have systematically denied the scientific and cultural influences that Egypt had on Greece and as a consequence on notions of Western civilization. He also considers how this ‘whitewashing’ of western history although gradual up to the time of the Enlightenment peaked in the 19th century with the work of Karl Otfreid Muller and the Aryan Model. Bernal links its eventual erasure to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe into the 20th century. See also: Martin Bernal, Black
18. Hortense Spillers interviewed by Tim Hasslett for the Black Cultural Archive website collective in Ithaca, NY, Febraury 4, 1998 see: http://www.blackculturalstudies.org/spillers/spillers_intvw.html, p.3 0f 20
Athena Writes Back, 2002, that is a response to his detractors. Bernal’s theories however, merely parallel those of many black scholars such as Yosef ben Jochanen and Cheikh Anta Diop, who have consistently documented this history of racial degradation maintaining that Europe’s perception of Africa completed an about face on race after the middle ages as a justification for slavery. Reinforced by 19th century pseudo-scientific theories of race, Africa could be viewed as a pagan continent, inhabited by barbaric and child-like heathens with no civilization. Christianity, along with colonization was employed as part of a civilizing mission to bring salvation to that continent. This of course has impacted perceptions of Africa and black culture and has served to undermine the contribution of Africans to world history.
20. For a discussion on creolisation, especially as it relates to a post modern context and the arts see: Okwui Enwezor (ed.) et al. Creolite and Creolisation, Documenta, Platform 11, Kassel, 2002
21. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993, p. 335
22. The seminal work that referenced the Caribbean in this regard is Kamau Braithwaite’s The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica: 1770-1830, 1971.
23. The term ‘calallooo’ that represent this process of hybridization has become a useful postmodern metaphor, popularized all the more by a journal of the same name that “…African-American and African literary journal, publishes original works and critical studies of black artists and writers worldwide. The journal offers a rich mixture of fiction, poetry, plays, critical essays, interviews, and visual art from the African diaspora…’ for this journals website see: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~public/callaloo/home/about.htm . The term ‘calalloo’ is also the name of Trinidad artist Peter Minshall’s carnival production company.
24. Op.cit.,Benitez Rojo, Repeating Island, 1996
26. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 1993.
27. Richard Cavendish, A History of Magic, 1977, p. 48
28. For a convincing account of this transition see: Benjamin Braude, “Michelangelo and the Curse of Ham: From a Typology of Jew-Hatred to a Genealogy of Racism” in Writing Race across the Atlantic World: 1492-1763, Gary Taylor, Phil Beidler, ed. New York, Palgrave Academic Publishing, 2002
29. Fetishism : visualising power and desire / edited by Anthony Shelton. (exh.cat.)
London : The South Bank Centre ; Brighton : The Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums ; London : In association with Lund Humphries, 1995.
30. Ladislas Bugner (Ed.)The Image of the Black in Western Art, Menil Foundation, 1977
31. William Rubin (Ed), Primitivism: Affinities of the Tribal and Modern, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984
32. Centre Pompidou, (ex.cat.) Magiciens de la Terre, 1989.
The Menil Foundation’s major archival project lasting more than 15 years and resulting in a significant visual survey was an important gesture. Its lavishly illustrated four volumes, extensively documented the image of the black from pre-history to the present. But for all its rigorous scholarship, the conservative restraint employed in evaluating these images made the publication a useful rather than revolutionary tool in the documenting of black visual history.
This landmark was the first of its type to explore the relationship of Europe’s avant-garde artists to the art and thinking of other cultures particularly Africa and Oceania. Curated by William Rubin, this exhibition tried to show the way in which modern artists had been inspired by artifacts from other cultures by placing them in direct relationship to one another and demonstrating their likenesses. The curator’s unwillingness to discuss the artist’s relationship to these works in terms of colonial exploitation and cultural borrowing significantly undermined the shows affirmation of art from other cultures. The furor the exhibition provoked, set in motion a whole discourse about contemporary responses to talking about and displaying objects from other cultures that continues today.
As a response to MOMA’s Primitivism exhibition, the Centre Pompidou tackled the thorny issues of modernism’s relationship to art of other cultures by curating this exhibition. Conscious of MOMA’s heavy handedness and anxious to deal with other cultures more sensitively, its curators under the leadership of Jean-Hubert Martin and Andre Magnin undertook a world tour selecting what they viewed to be the best of contemporary art from other cultures. This boldly contemporary exhibition showcased modern art from a range of black countries under the general label of ‘magic’ and went some way to challenge the perception that art from other cultures could no longer be relegated to a timeless and anonymous past. Yet, for all its critical acclaim and aesthetic originality, Magiciens de la Terre failed politically on a number of counts. Firstly its manner of selection that involved curators scouring the world for artists and artifacts, established an ‘us and them’ relationship that still smacked of colonial superiority and surveillance. Next, the bringing together of this vast exhibition echoed the grand empire
exhibitions of the past but now in post-modern contemporary guise, and finally the overarching theme of magician of the world served to reinforce old stereotypes about black people, mysticism and magic that had characterized European exoticism.
33. Henry Loius Gates, Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, 1988
34. Black skin, white masks / Frantz Fanon ; translated by Charles Lam Markmann, 1986.
In spite my exhortation to move beyond Fanon, I am personally indebted to his scholarship for an understanding of my own work and my being.