Foreword
1. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1960), 46. Translation by author.
2. Maryse Condé, “Négritude Césairienne, Négritude Senghorienne,” Revue de littérature comparée 48, no. 3–4 (June–December 1974): 411–12, 418; and Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 82.
3. Césaire, Cahier d’un retour, 44, 47.
4. Ibid., 47.
5. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
6. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Quill, 1967).
Chapter 1
1. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1984), 147.
2. Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers, 1950–1980, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Books, 1984), 339–45.
3. Tom Phelps, interview by Ike Okafor-Newsum, Cincinnati, winter 2003.
4. Tom Phelps, interview by Ike Okafor-Newsum, Cincinnati, June 28, 1998.
5. Life, “When a French Jury Turns Down U.S. Artists Turmoil Rules the Left Bank,” July 13, 1953, 115.
6. Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 116, 115. The Americans (including Harris) were vindicated when a jury of Swedish, French, and American experts selected paintings by thirty-one artists that were later exhibited at a Paris Left Bank gallery. (The initial, all-French jury had included the all-powerful Jean Cassou, director of the Paris Museum of Modern Art; René Huyghe, art professor at the College of France; and Édouard Goerg, president of the Society of French Painters and Engravers.) Life, “When a French Jury Turns Down U.S. Artists.”
7. In the mid-1800s, Cincinnati’s Robert S. Duncanson, one of the nation’s celebrated artists, captured in his landscapes the majestic beauty of the Ohio River Valley. Duncanson’s career as a painter, and James Presley Ball’s Great Daguerrean Gallery, the only black gallery of its magnitude in the United States, made Cincinnati an important location in the development of African American fine artists. Ball, an accomplished photographer, displayed over 180 pictures in his gallery, including photographs of Duncanson’s landscape paintings, which were purchased by art lovers who could not afford a painted landscape. See Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 73. “Ball’s Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States (1855), a hand-painted photographic panorama 600 yards (540 m) long, on which Robert S. Duncanson and other African American painters worked, was accompanied by a pamphlet in which Ball expressed his anti-slavery sentiments by showing not only Africa and the slave trade but also landscape as representing nature used for capital gain. Advertised in the Liberator, the Pictorial Tour was assured attendance when it traveled around the country. Large audiences for such exhibitions raised the public stature of the artists.” Patton, African-American Art, 73.
During this period, dignified images of African Americans were nominal and for the most part limited to abolitionist propaganda: newspapers, pamphlets, coins, medallions, posters, and book covers. As Sharon Patton observes, “The black person was humanized and not intimidating. Portrayal as victim was very common.” Patton, African American Art, 75. This image of the African American was intended to stir sympathy in the viewer.
Portraiture and landscape painting were the dominant expressions of the time. Black artists were commissioned by white sympathizers to paint famous individuals and family portraits. Portrait paintings, of which these white sympathizers were often the subject, earned the early black artists a comfortable living and sometimes trips abroad to study their art and pursue a professional career. The more dignified images of black people competed in an uneven contest with negative stereotypical images of African Americans made popular by the American theater.
Rather than develop a particular racial expression, black artists attempted to assimilate the dominant trend in the art world of the mid- and late 1800s, that of landscape painting. This was a form of expression that embodied the romantic ideals of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the political ideology of Manifest Destiny, with little consequence for the artist, whose racial identity was usually unknown. Even today, in the twenty-first century, many people still believe that Duncanson was a white artist. Landscape painting created for the black artist an assimilable category.
Afrocentric expression appeared later in the century in work such as Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Banjo Lesson (1893). The Philadelphia native’s first solo exhibition took place in Cincinnati in the 1890s. Like Duncanson, Tanner achieved international acclaim. While Tanner’s painting was a sign of hope for the black image in fine art, he did not make this his focus, choosing rather to paint biblical subject matter. It was not until the Negro Renaissance of the roaring 1920s that black imagery was celebrated by African American artists and sections of the public. The Great Depression of the 1930s diminished the social momentum of the renaissance, which had its impact mainly in Harlem and Chicago. In most of the nation, there was a cultural vacuum in the fine arts, and this was exactly the situation in Cincinnati during the 1940s and 1950s. The works of Sharon Patton (1998), Samella Lewis (2003), Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson (1993), among others, have documented this history.
8. Jimi Jones, interview by Ike Okafor-Newsum, Cincinnati, August 1, 1998.
9. Ken Leslie, interview by Ike Okafor-Newsum, Cincinnati, June 28, 1998.
10. Phelps, interview, 1998.
11. Phelps, interview, 2003.
Chapter 2
1. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 135.
2. Maureen Bloomfield, “On Lookout Mountain,” review of Muntu: The Neo-Ancestralists’ Works in Mixed Media, Arts Consortium, Cincinnati, October 31–December 7, 1991, Art Academy News, February 1992, 6.
3. The Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), which took place in Nigeria in 1977, was an attempt on the part of black artists internationally to articulate the cultural unity and continuity of African peoples in Africa and the black diaspora. Its predecessor, the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres held in Dakar in 1966, was a central location for Négritude and the arts. Between the two world wars, the three poets Langston Hughes, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Nicolás Guillén emerged as important literary figures. The movements they represented in the United States and in the Francophone and Afro-Latin nations emphasized hybridity and African heritage in religiosity, dance, music, literature, and oral tradition. Many of the intellectuals at the forefront of these cultural movements were influenced by Western modernists’ romantic incantations that would later be challenged in the 1960s and beyond.
4. One of those sentimental ideals, espoused by groups like the Republic of New Africa and others, was a romantic embrace of the traditional patriarchal West African family structure, which invested decision-making in the men. This prescribed marginality drew criticism from black feminists and cultural workers like Michelle Wallace, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, and others. For a full discussion of this criticism, especially as related to black women’s literature, see Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
5. Tunde Adeleke, The Case against Afrocentrism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 16.
6. See Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); Tunde Adeleke, Without Regard to Race: The Other Martin Robison Delany (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003); Tunde Adeleke, The Utility of Africa in the Black American Struggle: A Paradigmatic Analysis (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2004); and Adeleke, The Case against Afrocentrism.
7. Adeleke, The Case against Afrocentrism, 16.
8. Matthew Holden Jr., The Politics of the Black “Nation” (New York: Chandler, 1973).
9. Kinshasha Conwill, “Feeling at Home with Vernacular African-American Art,” in Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South, ed. Elisa Urbanelli (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 54–61.
10. The following details concerning Mixed Media, Grid, and the later formation of the Neo-Ancestralist core group are drawn from interviews with Tom Phelps, June 28, 1998, and Jimi Jones, August 1, 1998, in Cincinnati.
11. William Bennett was secretary of the Department of Education during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Dinesh D’Souza is the author of Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991); Allan Bloom is the author of The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
12. Ken Leslie, “On Being an Artist Who Happens to Be Black in Cincinnati,” Art Consortium News (Cincinnati), Fall 1992, 8.
13. Robert V. Rozelle, Alvia J. Wardlaw, and Maureen A. McKenna, eds., Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1989).
14. Ipori Lasana, “The Neo-Ancestralists,” Fine Arts Fund, Smaller Arts Spotlight section, Arts Services Office of the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Art, accessed October 27, 1998 (website discontinued).
15. The music of the Last Boppers is a fusion of diverse styles and cultures. They are a product of the same impulse that led to the Neo-Ancestralist art movement. The name of the group was coined by Jack Walker. The founding members of the group were Heru Lasana (flute and spoken word), Ralph Lacharity (percussion and spoken word), Jack Walker (flute, saxophone, and percussion), Roi Kwame Bernard (congas), and Ken Leslie (trumpet). Current members of the Last Boppers are Abdullah Raheem (piano), Ron Lloyd (flute), Charles Okiba (percussion), Marvin Harper (drums), Greg Jones (bass), and the remaining two founding members, Kwame Bernard and Ken Leslie.
16. Until 2005, the City of Cincinnati, through its Fine Arts Fund, supported both the Linn Street Arts Consortium and its gallery and museum at Union Terminal. What was unique about the Linn Street location was that it was a multidisciplinary facility offering a venue for theater and dance productions as well as exhibit and studio space for the visual arts. Both facilities catered mainly to Cincinnati’s African American community.
17. Camara Achebe Nicholes blends Rastafarianism with the Neo-Ancestralist impulse. His media are poetry and collage.
18. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994).
19. Mark Helbling, “‘One Ever Feels His Two-Ness’: W. E. B. Du Bois, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Franz Boas,” in The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 19–41.
20. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “The Lesson of Leo Frobenius,” in Leo Frobenius on African History, Art, and Culture: An Anthology, ed. Eike Haberland (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2007), ix.
21. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
22. Michael J. C. Echeruo. “Negritude and History: Senghor’s Argument with Frobenius,” Research in African Literatures 24, no. 4 (1993): 1–13.
23. János Riesz, “Senghor and the Germans,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 4 (2002): 35.
24. Leo Frobenius, Kulturgeschichte Afrikas: Prolegomena zu einer historischen Gestaltlehre (Zurich: Phaidon, 1933), 14ff., quoted in János Riesz, “Senghor and the Germans,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 4 (2002): 30.
25. Rowland Abiodun, “Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase,” African Arts 27, no. 3 (1994): 71.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Lasana, “The Neo-Ancestralists.”
29. Muntu is a Kiswahili word for one’s humanity, a singular person; Bantu refers to many people. In its modern usage, Muntu also means soul (also utu).
30. Jenny Young, “Is Roman Johnson Ready to Paint Again?,” The Other Paper (Columbus), March 6–12, 2003, 16.
31. Bloomfield, “On Lookout Mountain,” 6.
32. Both attended Cincinnati’s now defunct Gephardt Art School and in the early stage of their careers concentrated in portraiture. O’Neal later added ceramics to his repertoire, and Harris later included photography in his mixed-media work.
33. John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres: Art with the Community, dir. Paul Tschinkel (Inner Tube Video, 2000), DVD.
34. Phelps, interview, 2003.
Chapter 3
1. Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color (San Francisco: n.p., 1967–1968).
2. Richard J. Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 125.
3. Ken Leslie, “The Shrines of Life,” review of Reflections # 1, exhibition by Tom Phelps, Cincinnati Herald Contributor, November 10, 2001, 3.
4. Ibid.
5. Powell, Black Art, 96–98.
6. Phelps, interview, 2003.
7. Ibid.
8. Just as the space of the gallery can call into question what counts as art, so can it render visible what is often invisible, as demonstrated by Jennifer A. González in the introduction to her 2008 publication, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art. She relates that in a 1992 performance, installation artist Fred Wilson arranged to meet several docents to tour his installation at the Whitney Museum in New York. He disappeared only to reappear in the installation dressed as one of the security guards. The docents who had moments before spoken with him now walked past him without recognizing him. He then revealed himself to them, demonstrating “the race-specific framing effect of the museum where single ‘black’ bodies are visible if they appear in works of art, or in the midst of a generally ‘white’ museum-going public, but are effectively invisible as part of the staff.” Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 1.
9. The statistics provided here were compiled by the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless based on the Cincinnati/Hamilton County Continuum of Care for the Homeless Demographic Report of 2006 and several other sources from the same year. According to the coalition, in 2004, Cincinnati was named the fourth “meanest” city in the nation toward the homeless because of its laws against homeless individuals.
10. Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, at http://cincihomeless.org/, accessed July 14, 2014.
11. Conwill, “Feeling at Home with Vernacular African-American Art,” 57–58.
12. Paul Arnett, “Facing X Tradition,” in Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2, Once That River Starts to Flow, ed. Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2001), 2.
13. Theophus Smith, “Working the Spirits: The Will-to-Transformation,” in Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2, Once That River Starts to Flow, ed. Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2001), 46.
14. Regenia A. Perry, “African Art and African-American Folk Art: A Stylistic and Spiritual Kinship,” in Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art, ed. Robert V. Rozelle, Alvia J. Wardlaw, and Maureen A. McKenna (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1989), 35.
15. Arnett, “Facing X Tradition,” 21.
16. Phelps, interview, 2003. In 1967, Thomas Kent’s wife, Mary Kent, along with her sister, Francis Ice, Bernadine Houston, and Mary Ball, opened Cincinnati’s first African-centered apparel shop, the Thatched Roof, in the Avondale area. The store moved to the Walnut Hills area in 1971. Mary Kent is credited with donating artifacts from her southern homestead to the National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, Ohio. Some of these artifacts are displayed in the museum’s permanent installation exhibit.
17. Paul Arnett, “Introduction to Other Rivers,” in Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 1, The Tree Gave the Dove a Leaf, ed. Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2000), xx.
18. The CAC’s Vital Visions program is a multilayered arts experience, pairing nationally known artists, CAC docents, and students from “at risk” schools in Cincinnati.
19. Harris, Colored Pictures; Patton, African-American Art; and K. Sue Jewell, Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy (New York: Routledge, 1992).
20. Powell, Black Art, 182.
21. Kenneth W. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
22. Maria Heung, “‘What’s the Matter with Sarah Jane?’: Daughters and Mothers in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life,” in Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director, ed. Lucy Fischer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 309–10.
23. Leslie, interview, 1998.
24. Reginald Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 70.
25. Demetrius L. Eudell, “Black Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in A Companion to American Cultural History, ed. Karen Halttunen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 99.
26. Powell, Black Art, 152.
27. The Egungun masquerade is a ritual performance that uses the Egungun mask/attire. The performer assumes the spirit of the ancestor whom the mask represents.
28. Phelps, interview, 2003.
29. Ibid.
30. Phelps, conversation with the artist, n.d.
31. Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; repr., New York: Harper Collins, 2005).
32. Phelps, interview, 1998.
33. Ibid.
34. In addition to the racial phobia revealed by the criminal justice system’s focus on urban crack use, the aggressive prosecution of suburban/rural working-class whites running methamphetamine labs only magnifies the social class disparity.
35. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905; repr., Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); The Birth of a Nation, dir. D. W. Griffith (David. W. Griffith Corporation, 1915), film.
36. See works by Samuel George Morton, especially Crania Americana: A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839); and more recently Arthur R. Jensen.
37. Patricio Chávez, “Multi-Correct Politically Cultural,” in Centro Cultural de la Raza, La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), 5.
Chapter 4
1. The ideologues of the Black Arts movement strongly advocated that black art must come from the black community and that the black artist must return to that community expressions and images that speak directly to its needs and aspirations. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” Tulane Drama Review 12, no. 4 (1968): 29–39. They believed that the products of the black artist must be functional, collective, and committed. That which the artist takes from the community must be returned to that community in a way even more beautiful than its original form. Maulana Karenga, “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function,” in Black Poets and Prophets, ed. W. King and E. Anthony (New York: Mentor Press, 1972), 174–80. During the era known as the Black Arts movement, Africa was seen as the primordial source of an American black aesthetic. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, some visual artists, such as John Biggers and Thomas Feeling, pointed the way to Africa, and a myriad of African American artists followed them in the 1960s and 1970s. The first World Festival of Negro Art, held in Dakar in 1966, and the Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), held in Lagos in 1977, provided forums for the largest exposure to date of traditional and contemporary African American art presented on the African continent. Edmund Barry Gaither, “Heritage Reclaimed: An Historical Perspective and Chronology,” in Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art, ed. Robert V. Rozelle, Alvia J. Wardlaw, and Maureen A. McKenna (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1989), 17–34.
2. Holden, The Politics of the Black “Nation.”
3. Gaither, “Heritage Reclaimed,” 18.
4. Lowery Stokes Sims, “Self-Taught and Trained Artists: An Evolving Relationship,” in Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2, Once That River Starts to Flow, ed. Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2001), 92.
5. Ibid., 92.
6. Patton, African-American Art, 66; and Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris, Astonishment and Power (Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art and the Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 74.
7. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 122–23.
8. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994).
9. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 393.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 394.
12. We wish to emphasize art and art artifacts as visual signaling objects and as codified communication similar to signaling with handheld flags.
13. We are not suggesting that all art by black American artists has racial content, but, like the painting above, there are hundreds of examples: Meta Warrick Fuller’s Ethiopia Awakening, 1914; Palmer Hayden’s Fétiche et Fleurs, 1926; Hale Woodruff’s Afro Emblems, 1950; Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (I Am a Man), 1988, to name a few.
14. James Porter, art historian at Howard University and author of Modern Negro Art (New York: Dryden, 1943). Alain Locke, philosopher, Rhodes Scholar, professor at Howard University, and editor of the New Negro: An Interpretation (1925; repr., Boston: Athenaeum, 1968).
15. George S. Schuyler, literary artist, journalist, conservative, and advocate of assimilationist views; author of the essay “The Negro-Art Hokum,” which appeared in the Nation on June 16, 1926.
16. Jeffrey Allen Tucker, A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 11. Here, Tucker refers to a comment about Kwame Anthony Appiah in Ross Posnock’s Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). In its original context, Tucker states that Posnock “cites Appiah’s desire to escape authenticating ‘scripts’ as representative of ‘the desire of black creative intellectuals for options other than race responsibility.’”
17. Paul Gilroy, “It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At … The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification,” Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture 13 (Winter 1991): 3–16.
18. Paul Gilroy, preface to Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Routledge, 2004), xiii.
19. MacGaffey and Harris, Astonishment and Power, 132.
20. Judith McWillie, “Tradition and Transformations: Vernacular Art from the Afro-Atlantic South,” in Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures, ed. Richard H. King and Helen Taylor (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 198.
21. MacGaffey and Harris, Astonishment and Power, 146.
22. McWillie, “Tradition and Transformations,” 193.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342–43.
26. Ibid., 343.
27. Gary Alan Fine, introduction to Everyday Genius (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4. At the end of his remark, Fine offers a judgment as to who theorizes and who doesn’t—a problematic I will leave the reader to ponder. He goes on to say that a developed theory is “a phenomenon one does not find in art worlds that are labeled by outsiders of the community of artists, such as self-taught art.”
28. By “outsider art” we mean art that is outside the hegemonic imagination, that is to say, beyond the stylistic expectations of mainstream society that prefers, as I note earlier, the kind of art displayed in magazines, department store showrooms, and trendy galleries, or the “masterpieces” of Europe.
29. According to Gary Alan Fine, “[t]he identity of the artist is how the field is labeled”; thus, self-taught art, women’s art, and Native American art are examples of identity art. Whether this is desirable or not, “it reflects how the field is conceptualized and how boundaries are drawn.” Fine, introduction to Everyday Genius, 4.
30. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Larry Winston Collins has known the Neo-Ancestralists (Phelps, Leslie, and Jones) for several years. He is a graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design and the Maryland Institute College of Art and currently serves on the faculty of the Fine Art Department of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.
31. By “colonial experience” I do not refer only to the occupation of African land by outsiders, namely, Europeans; I also mean the cultural and psychological domination of African/black people by a European worldview.
32. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 160.
33. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 392.
34. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 4.
35. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 392.
Chapter 5
1. Christopher A. Yates, “Black History, Culture Seen from Four Angles,” Columbus Dispatch, September 21, 2003, F5.
2. In using this terminology, I hope to capture how, through the introduction of European languages via colonialism, the high culture of European nations is imposed on the colonized.
3. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967).
4. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 267.
5. H. E. Newsum and Olayiwola Abegunrin, United States Foreign Policy toward Southern Africa: Andrew Young and Beyond (London: Macmillan, 1987), 40.
6. Spiral’s lone female member was Emma Amos; the female members of AfriCobra were Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Carolyn Lawrence. Patton, African American Art, 185; Powell, Black Art, 145.
7. Lasana, “The Neo-Ancestralists.”
8. Yates, “Black History, Culture Seen from Four Angles,” F5.
9. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 130.
10. Ibid., 6.
11. Under the titles “Notes on The Riot Series” and “Spirituality: Notes on the Fallen Men Series,” this and following comments were provided by Jimi Jones for the program brochure for the Bloods exhibit (fig 5.1). Limited supplies of the brochure were distributed at the artists’ reception, Sunday, September 21, 2003.
12. Jimi Jones, “Notes on The Riot Series,” in Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art, brochure (Columbus, OH: Shot Tower Gallery, 2003), n.p.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ken Leslie, “Urban Cosmology,” in Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art, brochure (Columbus, OH: Shot Tower Gallery, 2003), n.p.
16. Leslie, interview, 1998.
17. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 34.
18. Moyo Okediji, The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 110.
19. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 43.
20. Tom Phelps, “Irons/Ironing Boards,” in Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art, brochure (Columbus, OH: Shot Tower Gallery, 2003), n.p.
21. Tom Phelps, telephone interview, October 30, 2005.
22. Phelps, “Irons/Ironing Boards.”
23. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 299.
24. The Color Purple, dir. Steven Spielberg (Universal City, CA: Amblin Entertainment, 1985), film.
25. Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat,” in Literature: A Pocket Anthology, 4th ed., ed. R. S. Gwynn (London: Longman, 2008), 242–53.
26. Pinky, directed by Elia Kazan (Century City, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1949), film.
27. Simone Drake, “Craig Brewer and Kara Walker: Sexing the Difference and Rebuilding the South,” Souls 11, no. 3 (2009): 243.
28. Ibid., 244.
29. Ibid., 243.
30. Bonnie Thornton Dill, “‘The Means to Put My Children Through’: Child-Rearing Goals and Strategies among Black Female Domestic Servants,” in The Black Woman, ed. La Frances Rodgers-Rose (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980), 108.
31. Ibid.
32. In her study of twenty-six female domestic workers, Bonnie Thornton Dill found that “most … did not want their children to work in domestic service. Their hopes were centered upon ‘better’ jobs for their children: jobs with status, income, security, and comfort.” Ibid., 109.
33. Ross W. Jamieson, “The Essence of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies in the Early Modern World,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 2 (2001): 284.
34. Out of the Crossfire, Inc., http://www.outofthecrossfire.org (site discontinued).
35. Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Dudley Randall, and Robert Hayden. Aneb Kgositsile is also a Broadside poet, and she continues her work as an artist and social activist in Detroit.
36. Aneb Kgositsile, Shrines (Chicago: Third World Press, 2004).
37. Minkisi are also containers of spiritual/ancestral powers (bakisi), such as “wooden figures [nkondi; plural minkondi], clay pots, large snail shells, and bundles wrapped in raffia cloth” (MacGaffey and Harris, Astonishment and Power, 61). These objects can be thought of as portable graves, since like graves they also function as portals providing access to the power of particular spirits (bakisi) and ancestors.
38. The Bakongo world of the dead is called Kalunga (which also refers to the demarcation between the worlds of the living and the dead).
39. MacGaffey and Harris, Astonishment and Power, 110.
40. Seashells are also the sign of Mbumba Maza, the Bakongo nkisi of water. Mbumba is a generic term for minkisi, and maza is water. Ibid., 71.
41. Ibid., 61.
42. Ibid., 95.
43. Ibid.
44. The first time I publically displayed the Bakongo Chic: Red Hat, Red Shoes installation in a warehouse gallery in downtown Columbus in 2002, just months after my mother’s death, I worried about how my father would respond to this and other memorials I had constructed dedicated to my mother’s memory. Friends who had also lost their mothers, who witnessed the piece, were moved to tears. I did not know how my father would react to the public display of my mother’s personal belongings. What I knew was that they were married fifty-four years and that he missed her very much. Then, as a year later at the Bloods exhibition, my father’s reaction was stoic and without comment.
45. Daughters of the Dust, dir. Julie Dash (New York: Kino International, 1991), film.
46. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” in The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 71.
47. Powell, Black Art, 140; Patton, African-American Art, 201.
48. Richard Schur, “Post-Soul Aesthetics in Contemporary African American Art,” African American Review 41, no. 9 (2007): 643.
49. Yates, “Black History, Culture Seen from Four Angles,” F5.
50. Ike Okafor-Newsum, “Curator’s Notes,” in Bloods: The Neo-Ancestral Impulse in African American Art, brochure (Columbus, OH: Shot Tower Gallery, 2003), n.p.
51. Abiodun, “Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics,” 71.
Conclusion
1. These ideas have been inspired by Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), specifically his commentary on Mao Zedong’s On Literature and Art. Mao’s ideas about art were couched in his commitment to socialism and the creation of an anticapitalist, classless society, and therefore privileged the interests of the working class.
Appendix
1. Nubia Kai, “AFRICOBRA Universal Aesthetics,” in AfriCobra: The First Twenty Years, Nexus Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta: Nexus Contemporary Art Center, 1990), 8.
2. Lasana, “The Neo-Ancestralists.”