Twelfth triennial symposium on African art, St. Thomas: a Broadened Scope - first word

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by Eli Bentor

The Triennial Symposium on African Art, organized by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), is the main forum bringing together scholars, educators, museum professionals, and artists whose focus is the visual and performance arts of Africa. Holding the Triennial in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands last spring (April 25-29) highlighted the broadening scope of our discipline, and scheduling it to coincide with Carnival emphasized the total experience of African art. It also meant that the official program, whose committee I chaired, faced tough competition from exciting festival events. Yet most panels were very well attended.

We had forty-two panels, about the same number as for the previous meeting in New Orleans. However, because we decided to end the symposium early on Saturday to enable participants to attend the Adult Parade, we had to schedule five concurrent panels at each session, as opposed to the four in New Orleans (1998) and New York (1995) and only two in Iowa (1992). The intimacy of past gatherings was sacrificed for the sake of the greater diversity of themes and concerns. Luckily the resort-like venue meant that there was ample opportunity for friendly interaction.

At previous Triennials many panels were focused on a specific ethnic group or geographical region. The meeting in St Thomas included only one ethnic-based panel. The shift to topics with a broad geographical or temporal scope signals a more mature phase in the development of our discipline, one that incorporates a comparative perspective that has often been lacking in the study of African art.

The Caribbean location called for an examination of the larger geographical distribution of African and African-derived artistic traditions. The conference theme, "Transitions, Passages and Confluences: Exploring the Arts of Africa and the Diaspora," emphasized the dynamic nature of these traditions and unified the various threads that ran through the numerous panels. The African presence in the arts of the New World is not a new concern, but it had never been featured so prominently at a meeting organized by ACASA, whose focus has been on the African continent. Topics ranged from "Yoruba Influences in African Diaspora Art" to "Atlantic Rim Performance Arts," the latter a sequence of three panels organized by John Nunley and Robert Nicholls. Several presentations from that group, as well as those of the panel "Crosstalk: Cultural and Artistic Influences across the Atlantic" (chaired by Michael D. Harris), moved beyond the familiar discussion of African "retentions" to exploration of an exciting arena of exchanges, where Caribbean and African American cultural practices are just as likely to influence the arts of the African continent as African elements are to appear in the New World. For example, John Collins of the University of Ghana demonstrated that Caribbean musical influences are of considerable historical depth in west Africa.

A number of panels dealing with Caribbean topics drew considerable participation from scholars residing in the Caribbean who had not participated in previous ACASA symposiums. They introduced the "regular" Triennial audience to many new topics, including the history of Calypso, the art of Rastafarians, and contemporary Caribbean art.

I was encouraged by the scarcity of a previously dominant paradigm in the study of the African American cultural relationship with Africa: the essentialist "mindless retention" approach that denies agency to artists in the New World. Clearly it is no longer sufficient to point to a formal or other affinity between an African American art form and an African one to prove a derivation. Instead, a growing number of studies focus on the very deliberate and often strategic use of African heritage in the art of African American and Caribbean artists. Betty Rodriguez-Feo examined the influence of Cuba's Angolan adventure on the perception of Africa in Cuban art. Contributors to Mikelle Smith OmariTunkara's panel discussed "Art, Identity, and Agency in Africa and the Diaspora." Krista Thompson and Jacqueline Francis's panel, "Travelers to the Stream: African-American Artist-Travelers to the Caribbean, 1930-1960," summed up much of this discussion by examining a number of these artists who hoped to draw inspiration from what they saw as the Caribbean's "Africanity."

Beyond the question of historical connections and directions of influences, the opportunity to examine African, Caribbean, and African American artistic expressions in one setting allowed a discussion of issues that had not yet been rigorously examined. To me, that was the most exciting aspect of working on the program and of the meeting itself. Adding an African Diaspora or Caribbean paper to a continent-based panel proposal provided a wider comparative perspective and brought up new questions and methods of investigation that may have been discussed in one area and not in another. For example, for years Caribbean-art specialists have examined the problems involved in using cultural heritage in the service of tourism, and the impact of government policies on art and culture. These issues are quite new to the discussion of the African continent. A panel organized by a group of South African scholars examined "Craft/Art Projects in Africa, the Caribbean and Other Localities of the African Diaspora: Remedy or Malady?" Sidney Kasfir organized two panels titled "Over Here and Back There: Global Approaches to Understanding Locality." Papers in Matthew Christensen and L. Lloys Frates's panel, "Public Visual Culture and Collective Memory in Africa and the African Diaspora," focused on murals of Sierra Leone, contemporary Jamaican art, hotel art in Ethiopia, popular art in Mozambique, and the African Burial Ground in New York City.