Le Musee Cannibale.

Le Musee Cannibale Edited by Marc-Olivier Gonseth, Jacques Hainard, and Roland Kaehr Musee d'Ethnographie, Neuchatel, 2002. 304 pp., 2 b/w photos. CHF 25.00 softcover.

Unpacking Europe Towards a Critical Reading Edited by Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2001. 468 pp., approx. 40 b/w & 75 color photos. EUR 38.50 softcover.

Images and Empires Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa Edited by Paul Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin The University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002. 396 pp., 79 b/w photos, map. $60 hardcover, $24.95 softcover.

Artificial Africas Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization Ruth Mayer University Press of New England for Dartmouth College, Hanover and London, 2002. 400 pp., 16 b/w illustrations. $60 hardcover, $24.95 softcover.

In the late 1930s Bronislaw Malinowski issued what remains a provocative yet largely unanswered call for greater inclusiveness in African Studies. The great anthropologist had just visited his doctoral student Audrey Richards at her research site among Bemba people of what is now northeastern Zambia, and having surveyed this historically peculiar colonial scene (see Herbert 2002; Schumaker 2001), he urged Africanists to develop a holistic ethnography that would include European missionaries and administrators, settlers (primarily European, but one should add Indians, Lebanese, Omanis, and other expatriates), and more casual European visitors along with the African subjects of most scholarly work of the day. Only then could one grasp the on-the-ground cultural complexities of what is now called the "colonial moment." Others have repeated or echoed Malinowski's call, and George Brooks's Eurafricans in Western Africa (2003), Johannes Fabian's Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (2000), and Eugenia Herbert's Twilight on the Zambezi (2002) are brilliant examples of how productive such broadened views can be in understanding the oft-unnerving and sometimes bizarre intersubjectivities of African colonial life.

While seeking a clearer understanding of European and other expatriate contributions to the shifting "scapes" of African colonial life (cf. Appadurai 1996), others have called for closer attention to how colonizers were viewed, understood, resisted, assisted, and exploited by colonized Africans. Bogumil Jewsiewicki stands out among those who have attempted to capture African perspectives through oral narratives, written histories, visual accounts, and other sources. Scholars "have obscured the invention of a West in the African imagination," Jewsiewicki wrote in Susan Vogel's Africa Explores, "for the West resists appropriation by other cultures; it has never agreed that cultural exchange goes in both directions" (1991:139).

Again, recent works such as Lyn Schumaker's Africanizing Anthropology (2001) and Johannes Fabian's "Africa's Belgium" (2001) illustrate the fruitfulness of investigating just such African imaginings and retorts; but a painting by Cheri Samba reproduced in Jewsiewicki's Mami Wata: La peinture urbain au Congo (2003:196-97) illustrates the point more succinctly. Titled Cheri Samba corrige l'historien Bogumil Jewsiewicki (1997), it depicts the artist dressed in a smart plaid jacket and reflective dark glasses confidently facing the viewer, his brow slightly furrowed. Jewsiewicki is seated in the weaker position with his back to the viewer, intently looking at Samba through ordinary eyeglasses (which he did not wear at the time). The cover of Jewsiewicki's earlier book, Cheri Samba: The Hybridity of an Art (1995), floats between the two men, while a text written along both sides of the painting voices Samba's arguments with several of the historian's interpretations of his work and life more generally. As Jewsiewicki notes, Samba was flattered by the book--a copy of which Jewsiewicki gave him personally--but also found it to be a "menace to his autonomy," and so he responded in a painting, knowing that "this maneuver would permit him to bring the exchange [between the two men] back to a field where he knew he would be the winner" (p. 194; see Meier 2003 for a review of another recent Jewsiewicki book about contemporary Congolese painting).

Each of the works glimpsed in this review approaches representation of and by Africans in its own ways, given the different circumstances the authors of each consider; but all four books share a sense that it is high time for Africanist scholars to use lenses both wide enough to include all players--African and European--while narrow enough to avoid essentialism. Le musee cannibale and Unpacking Europe are bookends around such issues and approaches. The one investigates how museums exhibiting African materials have "consumed" and "digested" the peoples they have sought to represent, while the other deconstructs the pretensions of Western observers sufficiently arrogant--again following Jewsiewicki--to "never agree ... that cultural exchange goes in both directions." Images and Empires and Artificial Africas may also be paired, for they offer detailed case studies of how Africa has been and still is invented through visual and narrative imagery. The former leaves readers with a sense of the promise of African agency, however, while the latter is fraught with dark despair.

Le musee cannibale is a project of the Musee d'Ethnographie de Neuchatel, surely one of the most progressive institutions of its sort. The editors' intention to stir things up begins with the book's cover, which shows a Punu mask from Gabon with a gleaming meat cleaver--presumably the instrument of choice among curator cannibals--wedged in the center of its forehead. Shuddering museum conservators must hope the image was digitally composed! One can guess that this particular mask was chosen for the cover because of a history of curious Orientalist interpretations of and the monetary value arbitrarily assigned to Punu sculpture, making its desecration shockingly surreal; but upon closer scrutiny, the face appears to be sticking out its tongue, leaving one to wonder where such an enigmatic joke will lead.

In their introduction the editors, who are curators at Neuchatel, ruminate on Jean Jamin's provocation, "[S]hould ethnographic museums be burned?" (p. 10). While they are not yet ready to torch their own institution, the curator-editors affirm that "the ethnographic museum is no longer the indispensable laboratory for field research that it was into the 1960s.... These days it tends to freeze forms, juxtapose styles, [and] present aspects of alterity.... Because of competition with other media trucking in exoticism, the museum is only able to reach the broad public by betting on the esthetic nature of masterpieces legitimized by provenance" (p. 9). For the past twenty years Neuchatel staff have eschewed such banalities through deconstructive exhibitions like "Le musee cannibale," which gave rise to a workshop and the present volume. The editors throw down this gauntlet: if, as a wholly symbolic practice (that may never have existed, as William Arens has suggested [1979]), cannibalism leads to " 'appropriation of the virtues of the dead,' 'the intensification of a family's spirit,' 'restoration of community integrity,' 'acquisition of new aptitudes or identities,'" and is "'a reglemented and collective form,' 'a trap of phantasms of otherness,' [and] 'a way to read the other,' ... aren't these commentaries equally applicable to museum practice?" (pp. 12-13).

Fifteen strong essays constitute Le musee cannibale's "texpo'--the volume's self-explanatory neologism. Nelia Dias (Anthropology, Universidade de Lisboa) offers a philological examination of the phrase "Je suis au Louvre" that appeared on a poster from 2000 depicting a Oceanic sculpture announcing its seeming acquiescence to finally being taken to and seen in France's most hallowed halls. Dias wonders what such odd imagery says about cultural appropriation, when objects like the celebrated figures of Kings Guezo, Glele and Behanzin seized by the French have long been held captive despite requests for their return by the national museums of the Republic of Benin (p. 22). In essays on related themes, Elise Dubuc (postdoc, Universite Laval) reflects upon how objects representing "plundered identities" will be exhibited at Quai Branly, the ethnographic museum presently under construction in Paris, while Serge Bahuchet (Ethnobiology, Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris) reviews the curious history of juxtaposing natural and human objects at the Musee de l'Homme.

A scathing view of his own "gluttonous" museum is offered by Boris Wastiau, a curator at the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium. The thousands of "representative" objects on view at the MRAC offer viewers meanings given to rather than derived from such evocative things. "Don't burn down the ethnographic museum yet," Wastiau cries, for "it has never existed!" (p. 89). He then introduces his own "ExitCongoMuseum" exhibition of 2000-2001, held just before the Tervuren museum closed for renovation. When it reopens, will staff consider how the destructively patronizing principles so long enshrined at the MRAC continue to contribute to the anarchy of today's Congo?

In a typically stimulating piece, Jean-Claude Muller (Anthropology, Universite de Montreal) wonders what constitutes the arbitrary "museum quality" of objects that determines their chances for acquisition and, once possessed, for their ever emerging from the "cemetery" of the museum reserve. How might the" 'artistocrats' of contemporary arts" consider objects from "traditionally ethnographicized populations" that incorporate, say, plastic as a deliberate reference to the artists' "modernity," when such innovation may strike the ethno-hip as "decadent" and "kitsch" (pp. 117-19)? Somewhat similarly, Annette Viel (Museology, Canadian Parks) comments upon how value has been "swallowed" (still the cannibal topos) in the recent history of Western museums. But in acerbically asking whether one ought to exhibit African art at all, Jean-Loup Amselle (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) ups the ante. Have Africans escaped from "an esthetic of domination"--or indeed, can they (p. 148)? In a related vein, Michel Thevoz (former curator, Collection de l'art brut, Lausanne) notes the increasing autonomy of Western museum aesthetics, leaving non-Western art "anemic," "denatured," and "vanishing into its own simulation" (p. 242).

Other questions are raised that are pertinent to the study of African arts. Can "ethnographic objects" become patrimony or matrimony (the latter referring to inheritance rather than marriage)? muse Jean Davallon (Museology, Universite d'Avignon) and Ellen Hertz (Anthropology, Universite de Neuchatel). Has the ethnographic museum become "an apprentice of aphanisis" (p. 252)? This psychoanalytic term suggesting the loss of desire is explored by Henri-Pierre Jeudy (Sociology, CNRS) in seemingly unlikely museum contexts. And if "the theatricality of the museum reflects that of memory" (p. 271), as Octave Debary (Ethnology, CNRS) asserts, then how and why are absence, forgetfulness, and the distanced loss of desire so integral to the museum enterprise? Put another way, why do so many museums continue to "make us sad," as James Boon has written, through their "fragments wrested front their pasts and elsewheres ... exhibited ... to yield ... aphorisms of coincidence" (1991:256)?

While the scholars of Le musee cannibale attack the pretenses of ethnographic museums, the twenty writers and twenty-two artists of Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading deconstruct broader presumptions. Unpacking Europe is a lengthy and engaging book, attractively designed and beautifully illustrated, that accompanied a Rotterdam exhibition organized to celebrate that city's designation as Cultural Capital of Europe in 2001. That a Sudanese art historian (Salah Hassan) and a Pakistani artist (Iftikhar Dadi) should be invited to curate such a major exhibition on such a touchy topic for such a signal occasion bespeaks a welcome postcolonial shift away from Eurocentrism. Indeed, the editors' charge is to wonder just "How European is Europe?" (although here the neglect of Lewis and Wigen's Myth of Continents [1997] is unfortunate), as they seek to "show Europe as 'the other'"--a task of critical reversals all the more important in our upside-down post-9/11 world (p. 12).

Essays by Leslie Adelson, Martin Bernal, Susan Buck-Morss, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rey Chow, Vasanthi Dass, Okwui Enwezor, Natalie Melas, Naoki Sakai, Ted Swedenburg, and Slavoj Zizek have been published elsewhere. Their topics range from "Hegel and Haiti" (Buck-Morss) to "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism'" (Zizek), from "When Whiteness Feminizes" (Chow) to a "Transglobal Islamic Underground" (Swedenburg), and it is useful to have such works assembled here. Most of these essays do not address issues specific to the study of African arts, but they do provide background and intellectual tools of value to the study of cultural processes anywhere.

Brief (often too brief) original essays either concerning Africa or that may be easily applied to African issues include that by Fatima El-Tayeb (a historian living in Amsterdam), who considers early-twentieth-century German national identity. "What exactly is 'German blood'?" in these earlier times, she wonders (p. 73), and what, the reader will add, are the consequences of such notions for a Germany now inhabited by guest laborers, including many of African descent? What can such arcane notions of "biological" identity bring to an understanding of genocide in Rwanda, Burundi, and the not-yet-democratic republic of the Congo?

In a brilliant riff called "Horror's Difference," Irit Rogoff (Art History and Visual Culture, University of London) reflects on the "willful puzzlement" of those who seem unable to determine social models sufficient to understand the evils of twentieth and twentyfirst-century holocausts, ethnic cleansing, and warlord driven butchery. Such indifference allows one to shift the gaze to "cleaner" wars (e.g., Gulf I and II or Afghanistan from a U.S. perspective) and other subjects less terrifying because they are farther removed from any witness to chaos. Rogoff wishes to consider how "difference" is so motive a concept for dismissing the pain of those geographically or culturally distant--shades of Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), a must-read for those aghast at how Africa is so persistently made a metaphor for hopelessness by the media. Rogoff's "horror" conjures European, American, Middle Eastern, and Asian hearts of darkness that for millennia have dismissed Africans as the most "different" of people, and conveniently so, as Valentin Mudimbe (1988) has taught us to understand.

As his contribution to the unpacking of Europe, Ali Mazrui (Global Cultural Studies, SUNY-Binghamton) re-imagines the supposed "universals" of Euro-American dominance. He writes of hegemony and homogeny, especially as the globalizing forces so named affect Islam in Africa and elsewhere; but then he turns his attention to "empirical relativism," comparing, for example, the failure of the slave-holding American Founding Fathers to adhere to their own principle that all men are created equal, when African societies of the same period such as those of Gikuyu in Kenya and Tiv in Nigeria had neither slaves nor castes and were therefore "more egalitarian than the liberal West" (p. 102).

A similar turnaround is proposed in the works of the South African artist Willem Boshoff exhibited in Unpacking Europe, as presented by Johan Snyman (Philosophy, Johannesburg). In his installations Writing in the Sand and Circle of Knowledge, Boshoff combines words from Zulu and other South African languages with English suffixes like "-ology" and "-ism" so as to effect what Snyman calls a "double alienation" and thus (in Boshoff's words) "reverse the dominance and power of privileged tongues" (p. 308). Snyman holds that the "frustration" of "international intellectual world travelers ... is only relieved when a speaker of a 'lesser' language comes to their rescue." Most Zulu-speakers have mastered English, but the opposite is rarely true, so that "the Zulu is able to patronize and indulge the helpless English speaker. This informal 'entente cordiale' creates a chance for people who are unlikely to talk to one another to share things in an amicable way" (pp. 308-9).

Johannes Phokela (introduced by Bruce Haines, a curator in London) and Yinka Shonibare (presented by Nancy Hynes, an art critic in London) also address how infrequently such interethnic relations are pursued through the arts, for both artists produce "doppelgangers of ... Old Masters" while they "query illusions of aesthetic purity and notions of cultural authenticity" (Haines on Phokela, p. 380). A well-known conundrum marks the two men's work, for each wishes to transcend the ghettoizing implicit in the phrase "African artist," while both engage the politics of being just that, especially as they live as persons of African descent in Europe. Phokela resists "coffee table compendiums of African art" (p. 382) through the Dali-esque absurdity of works like Land of Cockaigne (illustrated in Unpacking Europe, p. 383), in which a robust female figure with hair in cornrows kneels in a fountain and lactates into the mouths of reclining persons of European heritage. Similarly, Shonibare's more familiar works (see the cover of African Arts, Autumn 2001) often "ethnicize in unexpected places" (p. 396).

Installations by Susan Hefuna, "a child of Egyptian-German parents," are more gently reflective works as presented by Leonhard Emmerling (curator at the Krefelder Kunstmuseen). An early version of Hefuna's large Grid was so appreciated at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town that it was put on permanent display at that city's National History Museum (pp. 344-45). Lattice-Eke structures based on handmade containers commonly used in Egyptian marketplaces encourage visitors to deposit "objects, letters, messages--their wishes and memories, their dreams, longings and sufferings." As The Grid is filled, it "safeguards the personal histories of people whose identities will never be known" (p. 345), not only because of the chaotic collage so accumulated, but because the exhibition's visitors are likely to be ignored in "official" accounts of what "matters" in national discourse.

Rachid Koraichi takes a still more spiritual approach to the perplexities of identity, as described by Maryline Lostia (a Parisian writer). Koraichi pays homage to the study of "the mysteriousness of letters" by Ibn Arabi, inscribing pottery with fragments of the medieval Sufi master's verse. The aesthetic Koraichi yearns for quickly leaves behind superficial beauty (zahir) in a quest for the secrets (batin) of the world of angelic grace about which Ibn Arabi wrote so eloquently. "Upon viewing these works [of Koraichi], the spectator loses him/herself in a dance in which the rapture of signs defies the mediums that support them" (pp. 356-67). A moving description is offered of how the artist worked for months with potters in Jerba, Tunisia, to create twenty-one jars following local styles. Koraichi then painted the jars with Ibn Arabi's verses, but just as their firing was completed, torrents from a violent storm swept away the ateliers, kilns, and just-finished works, leaving only a few scattered shards. The artist "serenely embraced" what others might have found a disaster, for "the letter does not perish ...: it is immortal and unfailingly reborn" (p. 358). Lostia's evocative writing about Koraichi is of a sort rarely found yet greatly needed in the study of Islamic and, indeed, all African arts.

To conclude, both Le musee cannibale and Unpacking Europe provide a great deal of intellectual grist and expressive sparkle. Readers will take courage from the authors" and artists' brave efforts to challenge age-old--but especially colonial--definitions of who represents whom. Indeed, these compendia prove and celebrate how study of African expression is proceeding along exciting new avenues.

The broad sweep of Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa includes intriguing juxtapositions that challenge methodological and theoretical paradigms for studying the emerging field of African visual culture. As recently reiterated by one of its chief promoters, Nicholas Mirzoeff (who also occasionally writes about Africa) "visual culture is the study of the hypervisuality of contemporary everyday life and its genealogies" (cited in "A Conversation with Nicholas Mirzoeff," 2003:7). Mirzoeff is refer ring specifically to Western notions of visuality--that is, culturally constructed ways o seeing, as "modern life takes place onscreen" (1999:1). As important as it is to grasp the impact of new and future visual technologies in and on the West, and as equally instructive as it is to understand how these technologies are adopted and adapted by contemporary Africans, it is essential to grant a plural to the phrase, "visual cultures." Through such a seemingly simple adjustment, access is opened to the plurality of modernisms that many scholars seek to understand these days (e.g., Appadurai 1996), as well as to the development and, sometimes, vitiation, of visual strategies and tactics over time (see Nelson 2000).

All the essays in Images and Empires are strong, and indeed, it is one of the most uniformly excellent collections I have read in recent years. That the papers do not form a cohesive whole bespeaks the great cultural variation of Africa and the ways that visual cultures arise from and affect many different aspects of everyday life.

In writing of "empires of the visual" created in colonial Africa, Paul Landau reminds us that "if photography became a concrete tool of empire, it is also true that the apparent meaning of particular photographs is a slippery matter" (p. 142). Landau notes how photography was used as an early tool of surveillance by colonial authorities and how mug shots attached to official documents such as laisser-passers might establish narrow but "truthful" identifies, but they also contributed to how Africans understood the nature of photographic representation more broadly. Landau also offers a useful view of how "the technologies and, we might add, the metaphors "of the got and the camera ... evolved in lockstep" as pictures were "shot" and souvenir "trophies" taken (p. 147). These are far from innocent metaphors, in other words.

Timothy Burke (History, Swarthmore College) shares some of Landau's reasoning as he tells of "the relationship between visual representation and colonial hegemony" (p. 49) in the Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) of the early 1900s. Burke portrays the modernity of the period as reflected onscreen but immediately posits a contrast between how European and African viewers were anxious about movies seen early in the colonial period that made "the unreal or impossible into truth." He asks, "If cinema could ... powerfully reproduce the Russian Revolution ... could it not depict something that to African audiences might suggest (and thus help create) a remade social order?" (p. 43). Such fears were shared throughout Africa after World War I, when the vet administrators who had recruited men into Allied African brigades essential to the defeat of Germany became frightened that the acquired skills of European warfare might lead to insurrections when the soldiers returned to their homelands. In the next decade or two, indirect rule would be imposed, and African expression frequently turned from whatever remained of precolonial practice to new arts to cope with increasing colonial hegemony.

Hudita Mustafa (Anthropology, Emery University) offers a striking reflection upon the place of contemporary Senegalese photography in what she terms a "sartorial ecumene." "If African women have been subjugated through colonial regimes of visuality, they now actively position themselves through photography" (pp. 178, 182). More specifically, Mustafa considers how Senegalese women "reframe ... the feminine body" while "subverting the male colonial gaze" with "their own version of cultural sophistication" (pp. 173, 177). "In the sartorial ecumene, the photograph is both an image of a performance," to fire degree that women decide their poses, clothing, and backdrops, "and an object with its own trajectory," as photos are collected and exchanged among women friends in "circuits ... peripheral to ... men" (p. 179).

Though a jarring juxtaposition to topics such as these latter, "Graves as Sites and Signs in the Colonial Eastern Cape" by David Bunn (Art History, University of the Witswatersrand) is one of the most engaging essays in images and Empires. Predicated upon how, "as every elegiac poet knows, tombs are not mute" (p. 57), the piece joins recent research on public monuments as lieux de memoire; aspects of Nnamdi Elleh's Architecture and Power in Africa (2002 come to mind. "For Victorian mourners [of European heritage], death appears to have been more bearable if it ... had an inscriptional effect, as though, ideally, the loss ... should be marked on the landscape" (p. 76). In the Eastern Cape there resulted a contest between colonizers and colonized over burial practices that included the creation of what Bunn calls "trophy graves,' where the body of the chief [of a group in conflict with colonial authorities] was captured for the purposes of symbolic reburial in a manner calling to mind the superiority of white administration" (p. 79).

Cartoons and comic strips present yet other expressive domains that are garnering increasing attention these days, witness the recent work of Massimo Repetti and his colleagues the dynamic Italian journal Africa e Mediterraneo and their 2002 exhibition of contemporary African comics at the Museo Nazionale di Ravenna. For Images and Empires, Nancy Rose Hunt and Tejumola Olaniyan consider cartoons and comic strips in colonial and anticolonial discourses c the Belgian Congo and Nigeria, respectively. Early Congolese comics illustrated "predicaments of mimicry in the colony" (p. 102), an as an example of how insidious this could be Hunt presents the underside of Tintin, the much translated, reprinted, and beloved comic-book hero created by Georges Remi, a.k.a. Herge. Tintin au Congo is the only one of Herge's many albums never translated into English, and it is the hardest to find because of its "elemental ... racialized humor" that begins with "its caricatured representation of the black body," "cannibal humor," and "contradictory pairings" such as a dark-skinned and large-lipped Congolese named Snowball (p. 91). In afterthought, Herge is said to have been embarrassed by Tintin au Congo, yet ironically the booklet has become a collector's item among Congolese themselves, cherished for its didactic lessons about how Belgians once "understood" and (mis)treated the African subjects of their colony (p. 96).

There is a great deal more to Hunt's superb paper, including discussion of the comics of Mongo Sise and Barly Baruti from the 1990s, that is sure to add to the growing interest in African visual satire. So will Olaniyan's discussion of Nigerian cartoons portraying a colonial "world turned upside down" by Europeans presuming to be the masters of Africans in the latters' own countries (p. 128). Akinola Lasekan (1916-74) and other Nigerian cartoonists contributed to protonationalist polemic from the 1940s until independence. Readers of Images and Empires will gain a vivid view of how humbling political cartoons could be to the pretentious--whether European or African--and as a consequence, the degree to which both colonial authorities and elite Nigerians sought to suppress "mud-wrestling ... in the cartoon pages of the popular press" (p. 134).

Finally, Robert Gordon (Anthropology, University of Vermont) and Pippa Skotnes (artist and Director, Michaelis School of Fine Arts, Cape Town) consider ways that "Bushmen" have been "captured on film" and in museum exhibitions including Skotnes's famously stirring "Miscast." Paula Ben-Amos Girshick (Anthropology, Indiana University) reveals how late-nineteenth-century art of Benin (Nigeria) "expresses the unraveling of Benin hegemony" by portraying "a mixture of enchantment with [British] material culture combined with ... [its] ridicule" (p. 285). Henry Drewal (Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison) reprises his writing about chromolithographs depicting a nineteenth-century Samoan snake charmer performing in a German circus as the basis for images of Mami Wata, goddess of west African capitalism; Catherine Hodeir (a historian in Paris) reviews her consideration of how French colonial expositions demonstrate that "Africa was the aphrodisiac of the unknown" (p. 233); and Eric Gable (Anthropology, Mary Washington College) pursues his studies of the aesthetics of the Manjaco-Portuguese encounter in Guinea-Bissau. Deborah Kaspin (now a freelance Africanist writer elegantly sums up these and the other contributions to Images and Empires, urging future writers "to seek the sites and signs of African social imaginaries, and to write them into historiography alongside the mythologies that underpinned Western imperial expansion" (p. 334).

Ruth Mayer's Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization echoes many of these same sentiments and research agendas but offers a distinctly disheartening vision. While more interested in movie scripts and written literature than visual imagery, she offers useful insights for the study of African arts as she ponders how "stereotyping images ... enact difference" (p. 8). She begins with the declaration that "Africa is an artificial entity, invented and conceived by colonialism.... At least in one respect the gigantic project of colonialism did work: forcing most diverse regions, traditions, and cultures in Africa into one symbolic system" (p. 1).

Among her varied subjects, Mayer considers "ape-men and man-apes" in the "adventure imperialism" of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan series as updated in the 1984 film Greystoke. When "Tarzan goes Disney," children are once again--as almost always--presented with an "Africa without Africans" (p. 62). "Imperialist nostalgia" is further reflected in the 1980s film Out of Africa, which made "racial domination seem [as] innocent and pure" (p. 132, citing Renato Rosaldo) as a Banana Republic advertisement is meant to be. Mayer also considers the sinister novelty and spectacular difference accorded fashion super models of African descent when presented as "savage desert creatures, as most famously performed by Peter Beard with his 'discovery' Iman and topped off in the 1997 Ralph Lauren campaign featuring Naomi Campbell in full Masai regalia" (pp. 145-46). More benign "alternative Africas" are addressed through a number of films such as Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Haile Gerima's Sankofa and through the work of the installation artists Carrie Mac Weems and Keith Piper. With regard to the "illustrated" works of these latter artists, the University Press of New England should be chastised for publishing photos of such astoundingly poor quality (pp. 245, 253).

"Afropessimism" (p. 181) is both confronted and engaged in by Mayer, who finds a nadir in a last chapter on African "blackness" as a "virus" that is both "hypermodern and highly versatile" (p. 258). For example, Wolfgang Petersen's film Outbreak plays upon the paralyzing fear of dangerous diseases lurking in the imagined paradises of Africa (p. 261), and one is reminded of recent alarm concerning "monkey pox" as transmitted to archetypically cute prairie dogs by a single Gambian pouched rat Virus allusions run riot in Captain Africa, the American comic-book creation of Dwayne Ferguson (not to be confused with a Nigerian comic of the same title). In a fantastic fusion of "pan-African utopia" and "high-tech futurism," Captain Africa confronts "LifeScope" in the album Bite of the Scarab (1994). LifeScope is "an exploitative pharmaceutical enterprise" that "covers for a vampirish cult intent on draining Africa and the rest of the world of blood willpower, and life" (p. 267). The "metaphoricity" of HIV / AIDS is implied, and Captain Africa can overcome the evil antagonist Southerland who personifies South Africa's bloody history, Mayer asserts, only by becoming a vampire himself. African freedom is thus conflated with contamination (p. 272), reminding one of Luise White's incisive (but here ignored) treatise Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (2000).

These morbid thoughts allow Mayer to conclude her book with a brief consideration of Ismael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Darius James's Negrophobia (1992) as "viral discourses" on U.S. race relations (p. 281). Diaspora becomes a "'pandemic" throbbing with "'infectious' rhythms" (pp. 277 and 286, citing Barbara Browning) as dire phobias surface again and again (p. 290). James is "obsessed with the very workings of the symbolic system of contact and communication, translation and trickery" that informs colonial and later imperialist writing, but as stereotypes "make meaning ... their very volatility and arbitrariness may well be used against the tempting pull of ideological simplification and closure" (pp. 293, 303). At best, this seems a distressingly weak antidote to such perilous "viral discourses."

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