Notes on African art, history and diasporas within.

What is African time? Or perhaps we should ask instead, "What time is Africa's?"

Is it now? Has it passed? Where, and when, is African art history? In his 1984 book Art History in Africa, the venerable historian of Central Africa, Jan Vansina, famously chided his colleagues for being too "shallow" when it came to studying the art of the continent. Again, at the landmark 1987 symposium at the National Museum of African Art, African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline, Henry Drewal also noted that history was perhaps the most neglected aspect of the study of African art. Almost two decades later, how has this situation changed? In what follows I highlight some of the more strident issues relating to the continued neglect of the historical study of African art, and I suggest a method for addressing the problem by considering visual objects in, and as, diasporas.

African Art, Period.

Traditional, canonical, classical African art: These are terms that have more often referred to a geography for African objects (the African continent) than to a history of art. Where most other fields of art historical inquiry are arranged around discrete periods, for instance pre-Columbian, Roman, nineteenth century French, or Post '45 art, African art history has tended to be associated more with a dual sense of place: peripheral in the academy and continental on the map. This position for African art among art historians is held tenuously and at the expense of any well-developed notion of time. Why should this be, since among our colleagues in the discipline of history proper, much of the groundwork has already been done to establish significant periodization for great state-building traditions in ancient, medieval, and early-modern eras in places like old Mali, Great Zimbabwe, Aksum and Abyssinia, Morocco, the lower Congo, and elsewhere? To be sure, for some regions the historical record is not as clear, and if the objective is to develop a history based on objects in Western museum collections, the difficulty is great. But, as Jean-Loup Amselle has shown (1997), studies that link the regional after-effects of historical states in areas more recently populated by small-scale societies may open up a new view of the character of African history. His approach may also help us fill in otherwise blank spaces on the art historical map. Studies of the histories of voluntary and forced migrations and the visual cultures they have made may also be useful in this regard. (1)

African art historians face formidable challenges when it comes to documentation of the past. These are compounded by the perennial problem that, in the public view, Africa's deep past is conflated with its recent past. As John Picton has shown (1994), most traditional African art in museums today was made, and subsequently taken abroad, during the height of the colonial period--from roughly 1880 to 1960--and yet this art is still spoken of as representing "precolonial" experience (Fig. 1). Major museum exhibitions of African art continue to label objects either with vague dates like "17th to 19th century," or with no date at all, and instead insert the name of an ethnic group that 150 years ago likely did not exist as such. Even the recent textbook published by Abrams and Prentice Hall, A History of Art in Africa (Visona et al. 2000), does not succeed entirely in avoiding an anachronistic framework for describing discrete ethnic groups and their unique "tribal styles" in the present, even though to its credit it does precede each regional discussion with an historical overview. Scholars of Africa face additional pressures. The history part of African art has been sidelined repeatedly by those invested either monetarily or emotionally in a timeless view of Africa. Whether it is to cash in on the high-end market for "primitive" art (what the auction house Sotheby's calls "Important Tribal Art"), or to promote a redemptive view of a continent where racialized and utopic forms of essential "blackness" are defined as rhythm, earthiness, primitive joy, communalism, and "soul"--either way, the historically dynamic aspect of African art is set aside.

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By now it is old news that the presence of Africa and its art in the modern era was elided by the euphemistically termed "ethnographic present." But it is just as significant for us as practicing historians that Africa's past has also been compressed into a point outside of time, shunted into a place that is always "history" but that has no history. If neither the historical aspects of the contemporary world nor the historical processes of the past have been central to the concerns of our researchers, what, for the record, is "African time?"

Toward History

Twenty years ago Johannes Fabian's book Time and the Other (1983) argued that, in the academy, Africa and other non-Western areas were not assigned coeval status with Europe, even when the testimonies collected by anthropologists pertained in large measure to the present moment of the interview (Fig. 2). Much of the foundational fieldwork on traditional African art, since at least the 1930s, was also done at the same moment and in the same countries where the early African modernist artists were working. Until recently, little acknowledgement of the coeval aspect of the modernists and traditionalists was given in the standard texts on African art. Rather than being understood, as they should be, as occurring within a multivalent continuum of contemporaneity, the traditional and the modern have been constructed discursively by African art scholars as islands apart. This situation is slowly beginning to change, with Simon Ottenberg's work on artists at Nsukka (1997) and the earlier Africa Explores exhibition at the Museum for African Art (1991) as brave expressions of a new direction in scholarship. Other scholars of Ottenberg's generation who were in Africa in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, and who were acquainted with the studio artists of the day, have among them an invaluable archive on African modernists that is still mostly invisible to the public.

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Perhaps I have exaggerated the continuity between the public misperceptions about Africa and its historical art (fueled as they are by the stereotyping tendencies of the media) and the work that scholars do. In fact, in one form or another and often using different terms, the question of time has a long and contentious history in the discipline of African art history. A number of major scholars in our field have knocked up against the problem of ahistoricism. Too many, it must be also be said, have later fallen back into its comforting hands. It has been against great odds that the scholarship of many of the more prominent writers in our field over the last several decades has continually tried to break the hold of the popular model for art in Africa. A short list of this type of writing might begin with Rend Bravmann's work on art in African borderlands (1973) and the special issue of African Arts dedicated to borderland sculpture (Visona et al. 1987). It would include Sidney Kasfir's deconstruction of the one-tribe-one-style paradigm (1984, 1988), writing by Christraud Geary on art patronage in the Cameroon grasslands (1988), Kathy Cumow on Afro-Portuguese ivories (1990), Patrick McNaughton's speculations about horizontal masks (1991, 1992), Mary Nooter Roberts and Alien Roberts on the Luba complex (1996), and Victoria Rovine's examination of the cross-cultural shift in markets and meaning for bogolan cloth (2001). Zoe Strother's writing on Central African masquerades on the colonial-era terror (1998), Mary Jo Arnoldi on time and theatre in Mali (1994), and Peter Probst's subtle navigation of spirit, representation, and identity in photographs and masks of zinyau in Malawi (2001) are exemplary of the kind of work that takes recent history and the circulation of images into account. Suzanne Blier's current research on identity and violence in the early city-state of Ile-Ife and Steven Nelson's book (forthcoming) on the invention and reinvention of Mousgoum architecture also hold great promise. Let us not forget, either, Benetta Jules-Rosette's pioneering research on the semiotics of tourist art (1984), Christopher Steiner's revelations about the international trade in West African art (1994), and of course the life's work of Robert Faris Thompson, which has traced the aesthetic currents of the Black Atlantic. Boris Wastiau's ExitCongoMuseum, at Tervuren in 2000, consolidated the best of these approaches. There are others, too many to name here, but worth special mention, especially as they go directly to the heart of the matter, are John Picton's critique of the recent invention and holistic application of the term "Yoruba" (1994) and Andrew Apter's (1991) rethinking of Melville Herskovits's idea of syncretism as something that applies as much to the supposedly "pure cultural categories" in West Africa as it does to the experience of Africans in the New World.

Given this roll-call of prominent works, I find it frustrating that area scholars today continue to use so-called ethnic names like "Yoruba" with little qualification, despite the knowledge that they are recent terms, invented during the colonial and nationalist eras, and that they include what were once (and in some areas still are) multiplicities of peoples, languages, beliefs, and customs. The trouble is not that we do not know how to deconstruct the categories. We still go back into the classroom and teach our African art survey classes with the old, colonial-type tribal areas maps, because for the most part we think we still lack a coherent system that is any better.

There are many routes around this impasse. One way is to capitalize on the gains made by the authors I have cited to expand the idea of the geography of Africa, and thus to think beyond the idea of African art existing in a place outside of history. Those of us in the business of producing scholarship on African art are used to seeking original social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts of African art objects as a means to uncovering their true local relevance, so as to share these insights with our readers and students. I would like to argue instead that this desire for context take diaspora as its object. It would enable both an opening up of the idea of the place of Africa, and a broader definition of the material object as a site of distribution of immaterial images. Thinking diaspora in this way can be a means to address the "history" part of African art that has all too often been swept under the exotic carpet of the ethnographic present.

I would like to propose a different kind of conceptual map, one that links African cultures historically within the continent and also manifests the locations outside of Africa where African people have been sown-through the lands of others for hundreds of years. Such a map would include locations where significant numbers of African objects have been placed in museums and private collections over the centuries. Such a map would also highlight the diasporas of European, and Arab, and other foreign persons, objects, and ideas from elsewhere that have moved through the continent. Perhaps such a map, if all marked up at once, would be too densely drawn to be readable, too tangled a palimpsest to be used in a coffee table catalogue. But at least in abstract, this new conceptual map would help us visualize how African art objects and images of and from Africa have histories parallel to (but not identical to) Africa's many historic diasporas of people.

Diaspora and Embodiment

What would it mean to consider African art objects as diasporic, as sown-through other cultures, and what would it mean to view these objects, in their very materiality, as performing diaspora? These questions may begin to be addressed by linking the studies of "borderlands" by Bravmann, Kasfir, and others, with the processual theory of value proposed by Igor Kopytoff in his influential essay on "the cultural biography of things" (1986). Kopytoff used a discussion of commoditization as process in Africa and in the West to demonstrate how radical shifts in valuation may occur when persons or things move into new cultural contexts. He demonstrated, too, that even persons may be devalued to the status of mere objects or "things" (through slavery), but later revalued as "human." Following Kopytoff, I would argue that seeing objects as surrogate bodies, like persons with biographies, can be insightful for historical work. David Freedberg (1989) has also shown that the popular understanding of images has often conflated pictures with the presence of real human bodies. His examples, mostly of Western art and Western audiences, demonstrate how human bodies have been read as signs, and images (even abstract ones) have been treated fetishistically, as if they were human actors.

That said, we should heed Steiner's (2001:211) admonition that "a hasty reading of Kopytoff's model ... gives too much authority to objects and not enough to those who imbue objects with meaning." Steiner's caution follows W.J.T. Mitchell (1996) who considers the "power of images" perspective to be overrated. Pictures, he claims, "want," that is, they "lack" power, since, like subalterns, blacks, and women (those are his words, not mine) they cannot represent themselves. For him the personified or "subjectivized" object is an "incurable symptom" that cannot be overcome, but may be better understood. I find Mitchell's argument to be somewhat self-contradicting, since if certain people (Mitchell's "subalterns") can be so disempowered that their social status is the same as objects unable to represent themselves, cannot pictures or other objects conversely be overvalued as if they were human? In my own view, even though animists and slave owners may in certain instances not distinguish (as I would) between their people and their material things, these should be recognized as limit cases for the construction of human or material value. This does not change the fact that material objects perform as sites of cultural mediation between people--the anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998) would call such objects "agents"--even when there is no great crisis of human value at stake. (2) Interestingly, despite his own critique of the over-personification of objects, Steiner, too, embraces a model based on studies of human exile and migration (Steiner 2001:212).

The point of intersection between the "borders" and "biographies" approaches is where identity, meaning, and worth for persons and things are made (and remade) in the interstices and vicissitudes of exchange, migration, and culture contact. In order to better name this mobile site of connection, I have adopted, mostly for its metaphorical and evocative aspects, the term "diaspora." I would like to suggest further that art objects, and material and visual culture objects generally, are not just moved from place to place--they could also be said to situate the movement of images and ideas in their form. Visual culture objects are sites, they are the nexus of makers and viewers in a repeated and changing manner across the chains of history and semiosis. Objects are thus themselves diasporic in the sense that they may hybridize their subjects, and their beholders, in differing configurations of meaning and affect, according to historical and cultural context. Visual culture objects are the places where ideas about the self are sown-through the look of another.

It is worth recalling some of the more striking characteristics of diasporas: They often represent a historic and traumatic migration, or series of migrations, into the lands of another, which later coalesce into communities self-defined in resistant relation to the host country. As such, peoples in diaspora become like signs of some elsewhere and some other time for the mainstream culture in the host country. As a result they too, in a sense, misrepresent the homeland as a mythic and homogenous locale, lost beyond time. Nostalgia for this homeland-made-mythic and the experience of displacement within the host culture can be a powerful nexus for personal and collective identity. Another, more affirmative, and equally paradoxical characteristic of diasporas is that they often have a profound influence on their host culture, even while becoming in most respects assimilated to it. African art and its reproduced image in catalogues, photographs, and other mechanically reproduced forms has been used to represent African people abroad in a manner resonant with the experience of African people in diaspora.

Diasporas and Images

African art's histories are diasporas of images. More than the collectable visual material objects themselves, Africa's images and images of Africa inhabit bodies and things, whether as objects in our imagination, in our museums, in photographic reproduction, or in works of art. Along similar lines, Hans Belting, a senior scholar of medieval and modern art, has recently joined the call for a new kind of history of the visual, a new approach to iconology based on rethinking the relation of the "body" to the "image," and one that also encompasses non-Western art. For Belting,</p> <pre> Images [as opposed to media and bodies] are neither on the wall (or on the screen) nor in the head

alone. They do not exist by themselves, but they happen; they take place whether they are moving images (where this is so obvious) or not (Belting 2005:302). </pre> <p>Images, in this view, inhabit a series of bodies and objects, and the situation of images has everything to do with the power to name and the politics of the body. Belting's concluding examples include art from modern India, pre-Columbian Mexico, and colonial Africa. If these examples are meant as more than just a gestural flourish, it is encouraging, because it means that scholars of Western art are beginning to see the centrality of thinking specifically about art from other parts of the world for the formulation of a new kind of art history. But we will have to wait and see what kinds of real commitments to the study of images from Africa will come from the flattening out of distinctions between art and non-art that derive from the academic shift in interest to "visual culture." (3) In the present academic climate there seem to be fewer places for African art, not more. In the meantime, this "new" idea of the politics of images inhabiting bodies and media is bound to be a familiar one for those who already study African art.

Images Abroad

The later life of African art objects in museums in Europe and America (and even in Africa) has had a paradoxical impact and a correlative history to that of Africa's historic diasporas of people. Images of Africa and images from Africa, like diasporic bodies as subjects and sites of representation, have moved from continent to continent and back again. Especially in their movement and revaluation from domestic, ritual, or locally defined aesthetic object to "art" object in the sense of the modernist Western art gallery or museum, African art has historically followed a trajectory of renaming and status alteration uncannily similar to the changing status of African persons in diaspora. Wyatt MacGaffey's comments on African art in the West could, for instance, easily be reworded to describe the history of the transatlantic slave trade:</p> <pre> The process by which an African object becomes art includes removing it from its context of origin to the accompaniment of varying sorts and degrees of violence. Besides the literal violence of theft, confiscation, and the like, we must include

violence done to the object itself, which is often stripped of its accoutrements, varnished or even remodeled. In the past it has also usually been stripped of its name, identity, local significance, and function (MacGaffey 1998:224). </pre> <p>I would add its relation to history is also stripped. MacGaffey continues:</p> <pre> In exchange for what it has lost, the African object is given a new

context and a new identity. Its first lodging in Europe would have been an ethnographic museum ... where its function was precisely to exemplify not art but the contrast between primitive cultures and those capable of producing art. It was renamed as a fetish, fertility figure, or ancestor figure, and presented as a characteristic cultural product of a "tribe" ... For an artifact [such as this] to become art, a further stripping and re-identification is necessary, abandoning not only the indigenous context but also the anthropological narrative (ibid., 225). (4) </pre> <p>MacGaffey has cautioned that revaluations like these do not only work in one direction. The nkisi, the generic Congo-area power object that MacGaffey has studied, today epitomizes the image of "African art" in the context of the twentieth century art museum. This is so, even though the type best known abroad, the nkonde or "hunter" that is often punctured by nails and holds its hands in a confrontational gesture, was developed in the context of the traumatic encounter with European exploration, commerce, and Christian missions over the course of four hundred years. Older types of minkisi, those made into spirit paquets or pots, are known to have been made as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Portuguese were first engaged with the Kingdom of Kongo. Later figurated forms may have incorporated some of the naturalism seen in Baroque images of saints, like the Iberian reliquary busts with glass monstrances in their bellies that today adorn the former African missions headquarters of the Society of Jesus, at St. Roque church in Lisbon (Fig. 3). (5) The earliest extant examples of this type of cross-over art may be the two seventeenth century female busts in the Pigorini museum, Rome, attributed by Bassani to "the master of Bamba Ngo" (Bassani 2000:157-9, 269-75). Even the idea of piercing with nails may be derived from crucifixes brought to the Congo area by Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries. By the late nineteenth century, nail-embedded wooden figures were already being made for sealing oaths and hunting miscreants, and their use intensified in response to the kinds of social upheaval that resulted from the rapacious exploitation of the Congo region under Belgian and French rule. Today, along with a small number of other types, the nkisi nkonde represents the generic and ahistorical idea of a "traditional African art" for museum audiences around the world.

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It is worth recalling a cliche of art scholars today: Modernist artists in Europe, and their ideas of modernity, were marked from the onset by the encounter with various forms of African and other non-Western art, what Hal Foster has called the primitivist "unconscious of modern art" (Foster 1986). MacGaffey cites one striking example: Paul Gauguin's purchase of two "Loango minkisi" at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, which he cleaned up, painted, and signed with the initials "P.Go." (MacGaffey 1998:323). The two sculptures attributed to Gauguin are illustrated on page 10 of a 1989 catalogue by the Fondation Olfert Dapper titled Objets Interdits. It is claimed that the artist visited the mock Loango artisan village set up for the Universale on the Esplanade des Invalides. If the attribution is correct, the style of Gauguin's minkisi may be derived from the type of art-for-export that was sold to European visitors on the Congo-Loango coast from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century. (6) This is a type of African art whose style and date parallels its modern counterparts in Europe.

Perhaps these sculptures were not purchased, but were copies made by Gauguin of things seen at the Universale? In either case it is revealing that one of the pieces seems to be done up in "black face," its supposedly "negro" features exaggerated by the hand and brush of the French artist (Fig. 4). If my speculation is accurate, in addition to projecting their own fantasy image about the black body onto African objects, Europe's modernists (or at least Gauguin) accidentally used modern tourist art (or otherwise cleaned-up, altered, unfinished, or second-rate forms of African art) as their model of the "primitive." Modernist primitivism would then have to be re-understood as not simply rooted in a desire to emulate an image of Africa, but as a movement whose desire for alterity was based on objects that themselves had been made by African artists in response to European interests in Africa. Loango sculpture for export and modernist primitivism are contemporaneous examples of cross-cultural translation. They are poignant examples of how art can be a site for historical processes of identification (or misidentification), exchange, diffusion, and alterity.

Through a long series of transvaluations, the African ritual "fetishes," once considered as arbiters of disputes between persons and as objects that contained spiritual substance, were removed and turned into commodities through the symbolic violence of the colonial era, and they were stripped of their original value and their primary status as manifestations of social relations. They came to hide colonial social relations in their form, similar to the process Karl Marx referred to, in the Grundrisse (1861), as "the fetishism of commodities." They ultimately became new kinds of idols in the modernist and museum context, and they were used to misrepresent their place of origin as fixed and outside of history. (7)

Each step of this process of objects being sown-through local and then foreign cultures and interpolated across time could be characterized as diasporic. Attention to the diaspora-like nature of the processes of cultural decontextualization and revaluation gives back life to the objects, not in the sense of retrieving a holistic anthropology of original context, but rather as a means to reassert the (too often absent) history part of African art history and to explore the "origin" as a geographically and semantically mobile focal point. From this perspective on how to interpret art, the object can be understood as an encounter in any given moment, and if tracked over time the same object (or its reproduced image) can represent a history of encounters.

Diaspora at Home

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has written provocatively, in a recent issue of African Affairs, that the term "diaspora" as it is currently applied in Black Studies has fallen into the general hegemonic terrain of American cultural studies. This idea of an African diaspora is part of the broader circulation and dominance of American popular culture and American academia overseas (including in Africa) as commodities. Thus, in the flood of publications on the subject that have successfully entered the market in recent years, "African Diaspora" has mostly referred to the Anglophone, Atlantic, and American worlds and is characterized predominantly by discourses of "blackness" and race derived from the North American experience (Zeleza 2005). Consideration of other aspects of Africa and its migration history have been structurally excluded from mainstream formulations of "diaspora." Other ways that "race" has been constructed, over the course of Africa's long history, have also been elided. One classic anthology, for instance, Joseph Harris's Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (1993), contains only two essays, across five hundred pages and twenty-five articles, whose main concern is not the experience of African Americans: J.O. Hunwick's "African Slaves in the Mediterranean World: A Neglected Aspect of the African Diaspora" and Joseph E. Harris's own "Africans in Asian History."

For Zeleza, the black American diaspora, though the most visible and influential today, is only one of the five major historical streams of forced and voluntary human migration from the continent, including the intra-African, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and so-called new global diasporas. (8) It may be valuable to follow Zeleza's cue and to consider the special importance of studies that take intra-African diasporas as their means to explore African history. He defines an intra-African diaspora as not just any community that has migrated, but confines the term to "communities that have constituted themselves, or are constituted by their host societies, as diasporas within historical memory," such as the Hausa, Dioula, and Nguni (Fig. 5), and the refugees from Yoruba wars of the nineteenth century (Zeleza 2005:45). His definition includes types of migration that were less traumatic than those conventionally associated with the term "diaspora." Within this wider definition, I would include other prominent examples such as those called Saro, Oromo, Pende, Chokwe (Fig. 6), and Khoi/San peoples, the "Vili" traders and artisans who dominated the Congo coastal trade around Loango before the turn of the twentieth century, and even smaller-scale instances such as communities from Arochukwu dispersed across southeastern Nigeria, who performed masquerades like Ekeleke for the appeasement of their host villages (Bentor 2002; see also Bentor's article in this issue). There are examples like these for every region and era in Africa.

Even long before the modern era (to which Zeleza's examples apply) one might look to the Bantu dispersal into East and Southern Africa, or the populating of the Swahili coast, or the peopling of the Nile, Niger, and Maghreb shores after the dessication of the Sahara as diasporic phenomena that had tremendous historical significance. By recognizing the centrality of these movements over time and the movement of objects even where human populations have not followed in great numbers, the field of art historical inquiry can be opened past its old borders based on geography, tribal identification, and fixed ethnic custom.

Paul Zeleza's views on contemporary African diasporas are also of interest, especially as they help complicate our perspective on what is today called contemporary African art. On the global exhibition circuit, many, if not most, of the African artists included in representative exhibitions of contemporary African art are actually living in the "new" diasporas in Europe and North America. Zeleza claims the new diasporas face challenges different from those of historic diasporas:</p>

<pre> They have to negotiate relations with the historic diasporas themselves and also with not just "Africa," but with their particular

countries of origin, and sometimes the countries of transmigration ... They are able to retain ties to Africa in ways that were not possible for earlier generations of the African diasporas (Zeleza 2005:56). </pre> <p>I think this resonates as much with the common assessment of modernist art from Africa as it has circulated abroad as it does with the case of modern artists from Africa who have traveled abroad. Of both the question is repeatedly asked: "What do you have to do with the traditional Africa that I know (from art in museums in the West)?" Interestingly, the only essay that is not primarily concerned with the Americas in the other wise quite thorough anthology by Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali Mazrui (1999) is Nkiru Nzegwu's "The Concept of Modernity in Contemporary African Art." It would seem that diaspora and modernist art are similarly points of intersection.

Some Conclusions

Brent Hayes Edwards (2003), in his review of the use of the term "diaspora" in black cultural studies, has urged a return to Stuart Hall's (1980) concept of diaspora as "articulation," and he has added further nuance by merging this with Leopold Senghor's notion of decalage (gap/wedge). In my reading of Edwards, the idea of diaspora retains a certain materiality: as a voicing and a pivot point, a connector, and also a wedge or gap between peoples and moments in space and time. As such, the "articulation" of diaspora is an intervention, a "difference ... that allows movement" (Edwards 2003:15), but it retains the possibility of a critical stance in relation to essentialist ideas of nation, ethnicity, and race. Though my own interest is more centered on the African continent, I find Edwards's return to Hall encouraging, since foregrounding diaspora in this manner expresses and describes kinds of connectivity, while also allowing a more personal, historically rooted, and politically conscious approach to the complicating flows of images that move around dominance from a world history perspective. Here I am in sympathy with Documenta 11 director Okwui Enwezor, who has urged that "diaspora" should not be "an equivocal term that excludes African artists." He has argued that using diaspora in a discourse centered on the African continent "short-circuits an essentialist reading of 'African' as embedded in a timeless warp of precolonial ... traditions" (Enwezor 1997:63). His interest is current international studio art, but I think Enwezor's comment may be usefully applied to art from the continent from earlier periods as well.

Visual objects, including African visual objects, are placeholders for (the sowing-through of) the image of another. The place they situate may be the gap between memory and ritual performance, or between African histories and the new audiences for African art objects elsewhere. This place, this gap, these objects move and represent like diasporas. Whether or not you agree that the terminology of "diaspora" is appropriate for the greater historicizing of art from Africa, I think it is important that scholars continue to focus on the articulations between people, cultures, and time that African art objects perform. Because doing so opens up the horizon of history for African art studies.

[This article was accepted for publication in October 2005.]

Given space constraints determined by the editors, this exploratory essay cannot be exhaustive. It is based on a talk originally given at the ACASA triennial in Boston in 2004 and adapted for the Emerging Scholarship hi African Art symposium at Columbia University in 2005. I am grateful to Susan Vogel for the opportunity to present this material, and for the audience interventions made possible at the Columbia symposium. In particular I was struck by pointed comments made by Lisa Aronson, about the difficulty of an African art history before the modern era, and I hope that my speculative notes here may point to new solutions to this old and intractable problem. My gratitude to Barbara Blackmun, Hollis Clayson, Sylvester Ogbechie, Susan Vogel, and Boris Wastiau for their comments on earlier drafts. Ideas published previously in Peffer (2005) are developed further in the present essay.

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(1.) For example, Hunwick and Powell 2002, Jayasuriya and Pankhurst 2003.

(2.) For other approaches to the idea of objects as cultural intermediaries, see Hay 1999, and Holsbeke 1996.

(3.) For earlier statements in support of a shift from art history proper to Visual Culture studies, see Bryson, Holly, and Moxey 1994.

(4.) What MacGaffey describes is wonderfully portrayed in Susan Vogel's video Fang, An Epic Journey (Prince Street Pictures, 2001).

(5.) My gratitude to Liam Brockey, personal communication, for sharing his thoughts on the reliquaries at St. Roque church, and his essay (Brockey forthcoming), "Tangled Threads: World History through a Portugese Lens."

(6.) See Kathy Curnow's notes on a Viii "Carved Elephant Tusk" in Beumers and Koloss 1992:312.

(7.) See Steiner 1994:162-4; and MacGaffey 1994; see also Foster 1986:193. On the modern museum as "temple," see Duncan 1995. Gonseth 2002 is a good recent anthology that theorizes the legacy of anthropological collections. For the historiography of the term "fetish" see Pietz 1986 and Mitchell 1986.

(8.) See also Koser 2003.