The Ecole de Dakar: pan-Africanism in paint and textile.

At a time when African-art historians are increasingly addressing contemporary African arts, efforts to reexamine the contributions of pioneering artists, patrons, and cultural activists who operated during the immediate post-Independence period are of utmost importance. One such early artistic matrix was that surrounding the Ecole de Dakar, which played a critical role in defining modern art and the persona of the modern artist in Senegal. This article addresses the structural, ideological, and discursive parameters of this government-sponsored canon and re-evaluates its iconography, suggesting alternative interpretations of its productions as deliberate and creative deformations of European primitivist practices.

The history of cultural production in post-Independence Senegal is intricately linked to the narrative and criticism surrounding the philosophy of Negritude. While many historians and critics have focused upon the poetry and prose of this movement, few have given the same attention to the visual arts that flourished at the same time. (1) When considered at all, these works have been derided as mimetic, often aesthetic dross, more the result of a colonized mindset than an innovative, indigenous response to and engagement with cross-cultural notions of Africanness. This lacuna has resulted in a partial telling of the history of the period, relegating to obscurity the crucial point at which theory was put into visual practice.

During his presidency, Leopold Sedar Senghor envisioned culture as central to the critical process of nation building. (2) Consequently, he saw the artist as a representative of and advocate for a new nation (Senghor 1989:20). His policies were informed by a firm commitment to Negritude. By the time Senghor assumed power in 1960, this philosophy, born out of the confluences of colonial experience and anticolonial agitation throughout the Black Atlantic, had been the focus of debate for several decades. Its roots lay in 1930s Paris, where black students from the French colonies, African Americans, and others caught in oppressive political and cultural systems fostered a discourse on racial awareness to carry them into the era of decolonization.

As one of Negritude's primary advocates, Senghor, while a student and then a young deputy in Paris, sought to re-ignite pride in African cultural subjectivity and to engineer a philosophy to which all blacks, in Africa and throughout its Diaspora, could look to revitalize their shared "soul." His writings on Negritude and African aesthetics judiciously mixed scholarship on African histories, myths, religions, and languages with partly remembered and partly invented or reconstructed notions of authentic Africa. Senghor wrote of a "Negritude of the sources" by which he referred to an assumed set of precolonial conditions when Africans lived in harmony, in what he nostalgically labeled "the kingdom of childhood." As such, he set about delineating the values, social institutions, epistemologies, and aesthetics of "traditional" Africa to which he believed a shared ame negre was inextricably linked. (3) This nostalgia was tempered by a more instrumentalist approach that envisioned Negritude as a useful paradigm with which to achieve modernization agendas and contemporary political agendas. In fact he insisted that "we could not go back to our former condition ... to be really ourselves, we had to embody Negro African culture in twentieth century realities ... to enable our negritude to be, instead of a museum piece, the efficient instrument of liberation ..." (in Kesteloot 1991:1002-3).

The strength and significance of these revelations and pronouncements, advanced by Senghor and colleagues such as Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Alioune Diop, and Etienne Lero, have been somewhat tempered by the potency of later critiques of Negritude's essentialist claims. (4) Senghor's formulations of africanite, which drew heavily upon European anthropological, evolutionist, and primitivist models to characterize racial and cultural authenticity, coupled with his insistence upon the "emotive" and "rhythmic" qualities of this reclaimed "Africanness," led many to dismiss his philosophical writings as reductivist, misguided, and ultimately self-primitivizing. However, these first debates represent significant attempts to form a cohesive voice with which to counteract the travails of colonialism, and they gave birth to a rich written and visual history. (5)

Senghor's concerns with African identity, with political, cultural, and economic freedom, and with modernity helped to create within post-Independence Senegal a kind of "art-culture system," (6) and with it, a new aesthetic of africanite, that became known as the Ecole de Dakar. The new president encouraged artists to craft a distinctive visual vocabulary through which to share and celebrate a newfound sense of and belief in Africanness. This aesthetic was to be centered on recognizable pan-African motifs--masks, carved statues, and incised combs--ironically, all conventional signs of "l'art primitif," highly valued by European primitivist collectors (Fig. 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Remarkably, twenty-five percent of the state's budget was allocated to the Ministry of Culture to build museums, art schools, presses, theaters, archives, and workshops for the emerging generation of young artists. The Ecole de Dakar was primarily associated with the teaching mechanisms and visual arts of the government-endowed art academy and textile manufacture. For the visual arts, the Senegalese state also hosted annual salons, sponsored internationally traveling exhibitions, and provided a generous system of bursaries and civil service positions (at the secondary schools, Ministries of Culture and Education, and art academies).

So strong was the rhetoric surrounding these visual productions that few critics questioned either the visual coherence of the Ecole or the directness of the links between Negritude philosophy and the school's visual forms. Interpretations of this Ecole have tended to emphasize how the ideological tenets of Negritude determined its iconographic parameters and how the formal characteristics of European modernism informed its stylistic attributes. By employing a highly reductivist approach that elides Negritude's "failures" with those of the visual arts, these critiques have neglected the negotiable and subjective aspects of the artistic process.

I wish to complicate the narrative of the Ecole de Dakar and to broaden the interpretation of its legacy. The artworks grouped therein did not always follow a strictly prescribed artistic vision, and the visual artists who chose to engage with the philosophy of Negritude were not necessarily governmental dupes but rather actors who shaped what could at times be a highly syncretic post-Independence vision. As part of the process of envisioning a nationalist profile, they attempted to contest and re-articulate what Stuart Hall has called the "relations of representation" between Africa and Europe (Hall 1996:442).

The most important aspect of the Ecole de Dakar was that as an "art-culture-system" it represented a world of power, money, and discourse on the arts, which helped to spark the first debates in post-Independence Senegal on the role played by the artist and art in the invention of the modern nation-state and the emancipated African. Within the social, discursive, and institutional space carved out by Senghor's patronage, artists addressed notions of identity, traditionalism, and authenticity through a visual lexicon that drew upon diverse cultural and artistic sources.

Taking Negritude as its language of exchange, Senghorian cultural policy sought to overlay the complexities of Senegalese colonial history, post-Independence socioeconomic concerns, and political rivalries with a unifying discourse on identity. Most accounts of the art history of this period focus only upon the overwhelming influence of Negritude without acknowledging the very real political strife occurring beneath the veneer of festivity and unity. The first years of Senghorian rule were marked by riots, student and unionist strikes, bans of rival political parties, and imprisonment of opposition leaders (most notably Mamadou Dia and Cheikh Anta Diop). The establishment of a cohesive sense of nationhood, emblematized in the visual arts, acted as a distraction from the messy process of building a nation out of a state. (7)

Furthermore, from the outset, opposition politicians, members of the intelligentsia, and students expressed distrust and disillusionment with the metanarrative of Negritude, which they regarded as a deliberate mystification of social and economic problems and a denial of neocolonial realities. A sizable number of visual artists working in the decade after Independence also questioned the ability of a state-driven aesthetic to capture the material circumstances of Senegalese nationhood and to satisfy the manifold possibilities of postcolonial creativity. (8)

A look at the accounts of the Ecole de Dakar, from reviews of exhibitions in the media to writings in scholarly journals and catalogues, indicates a continuing struggle over terminology and an effort to understand the artworks' relationship to more familiar modernist forms. In one of the first lengthy reports on post-Independence Senegalese artistic production, French artist Bernard Pataux, then director of Dakar's Ecole Nationale des Arts, noted:

   The Africa theme is found not only
   in a variety of subjects, but also in
   several styles which elude description,
   as the words available are too
   vague and refer to non-African criteria.
   We would be reducing the
   unknown to the known if we were
   to base our judgment on the fact
   that Senegalese artists use social
   and material elements, which they
   have borrowed from a Western
   socio-cultural context. In other
   words, the artist classified as an
   expressionist could as well be
   referred to as a formalist. We can
   therefore only speak of Senegalese
   art in broad generalizations.

   (Pataux 1974:56)

Scholars must now avoid such broad generalizations, bearing in mind that Senegalese artists' utilization of modernist forms may and should be acknowledged. These artworks need not be seen as afterthoughts or stragglers in the history of modern arts--forms born from the aping of mastery--but rather as "creative misinterpretations," to use William Rubin's term for the process of cultural translation that occurred with the appropriation of "primitive" arts by European modernists (Rubin 1984), or, as what Houston Baker Jr. has called in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, deliberate "deformations of mastery" (Baker 1987:49-52). An approach that moves beyond a simple explanation of mimicry not only complicates the creations of Senegalese artists but also highlights the workings of modernism itself, encouraging a long overdue "political genealogy of primitivism" (Foster 1985:198).

One can concede the centrality of hybridization in the works of Senegal's artists, during Senghor's time and today, without then fetishizing creolite, simply by emphasizing the historical material circumstances wherein artists chose to follow these creative paths. Only by acknowledging these practices can one begin to measure the successes and failures of this creolized aesthetic (and the philosophy that informed it). In so doing, art historians may also be able to open up a useful dialogue with centers of modernism and postmodernism outside the former metropolitan world and to take more serious note of the complexities that have long existed within it.

The Ecole de Dakar: An Art World Takes Shape

The institutionalization of Negritude's tenets was most noticeable within the workings of the fine arts academy throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1960 Senghor established the Ecole des Arts du Senegal. In the ensuing years art educational facilities would change format, name, and location regularly, resulting, at various dates, in a separate music conservatory, school of dance, school of architecture and urban design, tapestry center, and drama academy. (9)

The instruction in the visual arts department in the new Ecole des Arts was initially divided between two of Senegal's most successful artists, Papa Ibra Tall and Iba N'Diaye, both of whom had been trained in art schools in France and had acquired international recognition. Tall, a strong supporter of Negritude ideas, returned from France in 1960 to create the Section de Recherches en Arts Plastiques Negres (Section for Research in Black Plastic Arts). In a 1994 interview, (10) he explained how he came to pursue an aesthetic informed by the spirit of Negritude writings:

   At the time it was a question of creating,
   for myself, an artistic language
   that seemed to me to belong
   to Africa and to Senegal. I was inspired
   by the theory of Negritude
   that back then, you must recall, was
   unique. Wole Soyinka didn't yet
   exist and the other theoreticians of
   the day were economic theoreticians--Nkrumah
   had an economic
   theory, not cultural. So, those of us
   who wanted to create something
   autonomous, belonging to and reflecting
   just us, had little to inspire
   us but Negritude.... What interested
   me in finding a kind of authenticity
   was not to create pure decoration
   but to create a language of visual
   forms which defined me for myself.

In his teachings, Tall placed particular emphasis upon the use of "identifiable" African subject matter and encouraged what he believed to be the natural artistic creativity of the African artist (Ebong 1991:204). In this respect, his views regarding the African's lyrical and innate connection with rhythm, emotion, and symbolism echoed those of Senghor. (11) One can also draw parallels between Tall's beliefs in African artistic expressivity and those espoused by European art mentors and teachers, such as Romain Desfoss6s and Frank McEwen, working in other parts of the African continent.

Tall fashioned this new language and identity by playing generously with universalisms and particularisms, often narrating tales of local cultural heroes with a pan-African visual vocabulary, using European oils or dyed, imported wool. His search for a unique voice and authenticity did not simply rely upon a return to sources, but indicated an understanding of how a carefully constructed, polyvalent visual language could help him affect broader representations of Africa.

Tall succeeded in developing a style for which he became well known (Fig. 2). His compositions reveal the hand of a skilled draftsman. They are characterized by flowing, sinuous lines which radiate outward, producing both a strong sense of modeling and, through their meticulous application, an exquisite delicacy. His tapestries (Fig. 3), like those of fellow designers such as Bacary Dibme, Badara Camara, and Ibou Diouf (Figs. 4-6), were executed in monumental scale. (12)

[FIGURES 2-6 OMITTED]

In 1965, at the behest of President Senghor, Tall founded a tapestry school known as Manufacture Senegalaise des Arts Decoratifs (MSAD), in the town of Thies (Fig. 7). (13) He cited two factors to explain the keen interest in tapestry and the consequent founding of the Thies workshop (personal communication, 1994). First, he and Senghor agreed that the practice of easel painting, imported from Europe, would take some time to mature. The implication here is that despite the importation of materials, looms, and techniques from the Gobelin manufacturers in Aubusson, France, the process of weaving was inherently African in its practice. Second, Tall claimed that an emphasis on decorative, monumental arts such as tapestry, mural work, and mosaics would ensure the participation of the artist in the dream of African socialism. (14)

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

In 1959 Iba N'Diaye returned from studying and working in France to found the fine arts department at the art school. His section modeled itself on a European art academy: students learned to draw from live and plaster models, studied the laws of perspective, worked in oils and gouaches, and read Western and African art history. (13) In contrast to Tall, N'Diaye adamantly believed in the importance of technical training over the search for an innate "Africanness" and "authentic" aesthetic. For him, authenticity came from attention to skill and materials and from sincerity in practice, as was evident in the advice he gave to his students:

   Notably to my young colleagues, I
   would give several words of advice:
   be on guard against those who
   insist that you must be "Africans"
   before being painters or sculptors,
   for those who, in the name of
   authenticity ... continue to want to
   preserve you in an exotic garden.
   We are not born more talented than
   others, the majority of us do not
   come from traditional artistic families,
   but rather we are sons of
   African cities, which were created,
   for the most part, in the colonial
   era, and were crucibles of an original
   culture, in which ... foreign or
   indigenous cultural contributions
   dominate.... you have a very great
   responsibility: to make our profession
   legitimate in the eyes of our fellow
   countrymen, and in those of
   men from all the continents, making
   us masters of techniques which
   alone will permit us to renew ourselves
   and to give us the courage to
   advance the iconographic themes of
   contemporary Africa ...

   (N'Diaye 1978; my translation)

N'Diaye's comments indicate a wariness of the fictions inherent in the European modernist cult of the self-taught, innate artist-genius. Moreover, they make clear his understanding of the European practices of exoticizing the native (and supposedly naive) artisan and the penchant for eliding the works of children, the insane, the untrained, and the Other under the rubric of the "primitive."

N'Diaye's compositions were strikingly different from those of Tall and his colleagues at the art academy. They could be moody, executed in an agitated thick impasto, or whimsical and painterly, in muted gouaches or watercolors. He was straightforward about his involvement with School of Paris formulations, even while he frequently drew his subject matter from memories of life in Saint Louis, Senegal (N'Diaye n.d.:110). Despite the wealth of talent and experience Iba N'Diaye could contribute to the new school in Senegal the bias shown toward Tall's Negritude-inspired department was such that he decided to return to France, where he has lived since 1967.

In 1960 President Senghor invited the French mathematician and amateur artist Pierre Lods to contribute his teaching skills and ideas to Tall's department. (16) Lods had established the well-known Poto-Poto school of painting in 1951 in Brazzaville, in the former French Congo. When Tall left his teaching post and N'Diaye retumed to France, Lods became the key personality at the art school. (17) Like Tall he favored a laissez-faire teaching approach, preferring not to impose European models on what he saw to be an African artist's "innate sense of composition, of rhythm, and of color harmony...." (Mount 1973:85). The works produced under his tutelage often depicted elongated, schematized figures in sharply defined movement. Painted in strong contrasting colors or in subtle shades of brown and ochers, these forms were situated within idyllic landscapes or market and village scenes. Masks also frequently made their appearance in these flat, highly decorative compositions.

In 1966 Senghor created an extravagant forum, the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres, from which to launch these emerging cultural productions onto the world stage. (18) Through this festival, he sought to affirm Senegal's place in the cultural vanguard and to advocate a pan-African renaissance. (19) Senghor was quick to present an image of a civilized and forward-looking host nation to an international gathering of powerful states whose foreign aid he actively courted. Relying on lofty humanist tones, the rhetoric of this event stressed the unity, potential and richness of the "Negro" world. (20)

However, this presentation of pan-African unity and post-Independence euphoria required a sanitization of Dakarois life and a careful culling of cultural elements deemed suitable for foreign consumption. It was, by all accounts, an elitist event. Senegalese troops cleared the streets of beggars, lepers, and undesirables, cordoned off poverty-stricken areas, and closed down the university to avoid disruptions by student agitators (N'Diaye 1971:49). And while the occasion drew rave reviews from most foreign visitors, it became clear only three years later, at the Pan-African Festival in Algiers, that the Negritude-focused artistic agenda in Dakar would no longer do. In fact, at Algiers, participants called for the demise of Negritude and the birth of national consciousness and arts. The poetic pan-Africanism of Senghorian cultural politics was regarded as a symptom of the colonial psychological condition and a distraction from the political matters at hand. (21)

It was at this historical juncture, in the midst of a burgeoning nationalist rhetoric and a climate of post-Independence celebration, that art critics began to speak of an Ecole de Dakar. Despite indications of dissent, Senghor embraced the euphoric climate surrounding the 1966 Festival and continued to expand the "art-culture system" by promoting "his" artists beyond the shores of Senegal. In the early 1970s he set up a special commission within the Ministry of Culture to administer traveling exhibits of Senegalese arts abroad. The farther Senghor extended his program for the arts and continued a rhetoric espousing the virtues of Negritude, the more the work of the visual artists became associated with his philosophy, his writings (poetic or theoretical), and his political agenda.

Pierre Bourdieu's "field of production" model helps us understand the dynamics within and parameters demarcating a given art system. He defines a "field of cultural production" as "a structured space with its own laws of functioning and its own relations of force" in which agents compete for resources and interests by utilizing diverse forms of capital (i.e., symbolic, cultural, economic) (Bourdieu 1993:6). His paradigm mirrors frameworks proposed by other scholars such as Arthur Danto's or Howard Becker's "art worlds" or Lawrence Alloway's "art network" (Danto 1964; Alloway 1984; Becker 1982).

While the "field" or "art world" under Senghorian rule contained many of the elements present in the European and American art systems--such as a strong academy, fairly consistent access to exhibition venues, regular patronage, and exegetical writings to accompany the artworks--the actual terrain of practice was highly centralized. Symbolic and economic powers were concentrated in the state apparatus, which acted as primary consumer, patron, collector, dealer, curator, and historian/critic.

However, as is evident in many speeches made during his presidency, the rhetoric of the primary patron and the discourse on arts that Senghor fostered seemed to honor a negotiated and contested arena, autonomy for artists, and a free debate on identity and artistry. In this way, the art world was a "space of possibles" and "struggles" in which individuals could hone their own sense of artistic personality, stature, and practice (Bourdieu 1993). This space to maneuver within the art network enabled artists to apprentice with sous verre (reverse-glass) painters or with woodcarvers, to paint praises to Allah and Islam on the fronts of local buses, and to produce works independent of the Ecole's tenets within their studios.

Yet the arts infrastructure was essentially export oriented, promoting an image of the nation and its aesthetic abroad. It provided a larger Senegalese public with little guidance or incentive to acquire the kind of cultural capital needed to develop an active consumer or patron class for these new arts. For all of its promotion of the Ecole de Dakar, this "field of production" did not lead to a vibrant market at home. Private patronage was scarce and was dominated by expatriates and a small bourgeoisie. Independent, indigenously run galleries did not exist at this time, nor was there a lively, critical, public debate on the merits and meanings of these works.

By pointing out the restricted nature of this field, I do not wish to suggest that every art world aspire to be a copy of the European or American system. There is no particular reason why that system should be considered an ideal although it regards itself as the mainstream. In fact, its reliance upon the commodity fetishism of the global marketplace certainly creates its own set of restrictive circumstances. (22) This analysis merely serves to illuminate a contradiction between the rhetoric and reality of the Senghorian art world.

Cher Enfants or Enfants Terribles

As the term Ecole de Dakar gained currency, it glossed over the realities of the individuals confined within it. Not surprisingly, many critics dubbed the artists of this period as "pawns" of a powerful ideologue and state (Pataux 1974; Ebong 1991; Kennedy & Mark 1992). In their view, this generation of "Negritude painters" evinced little creativity or talent and instead was "satisfied with an elevated `appreciation' supported by poetic `criticism'" (Axt & Sy 1989:129).

Certainly, in Senghorian Senegal, the Ecole de Dakar and the tenets it supposedly upheld were the surest game in town. As Wole Soyinka reminds us, "... one of the unfortunate by-products of Negritude [was] the abysmal angst of low achievement" (1976:131). The mixed talents of its artists and the varying quality and focus of the works under its umbrella have made the school difficult to assess. However, the assumption that all involved in it were somehow "infected with professionalism" (Axt & Sy 1989:118) and insincere in or ill suited for their artistic pursuits ignores the possibility that individuals such as Papa Ibra Tall Alioune Badiane, and Ibou Diouf were true believers in the tenets of Negritude as well as talented artists. As part of their engagement with the political, philosophical, and social debates of their day these artists set about reclaiming and reinventing traditions and sensibilities that colonialism "distorts, disfigures, and destroys" (Fanon 1968:210). Analyses of their pursuits have often failed to take into account the strength of emotional and psychological factors at play in the immediate post-Independence period as well as the cogency of broader discussions of political and economic pan-Africanism, socialism, and Third Worldism.

Senghor's system, which provided artists with fame and fortune, had invented not only an artistic canon but also a new social category with its own discourse, forms of capital, and power relations. Within this burgeoning "art world," the figure of the artist assumed a variety of contradictory roles and definitions: ambassador in the international arena; seer, documentarian, and representative within the new national space; "court lap-dog" (Senghor 1995c:227); and the quintessential modernist cursed and misunderstood male genius. (23) Many artists struggled to make their new career understandable to their families, for whom the life of a painter or sculptor, showing in galleries at home and internationally, was not a familiar or accepted notion. The obligations of family, which required every member to contribute to a shared income, were difficult to meet when works sold irregularly. Furthermore, given the persistence of a caste system, the manual labor that was central to an artist's work was often difficult for noncaste families to accept. (24)

Senghor frequently likened Senegalese modern artists and others to griots, the caste of oral historians and praise singers active in many parts of west Africa. In Senegal griot traditions are still an extremely important part of the social, ritual, and artistic frameworks (LeyMarie 1978:207). However, the network of obligations and customs surrounding the caste has, in fact, little to do with the social space carved out for the modern artist under Senghor's patronage. Nor, for that matter, could an easy equation be made between the status of these painters and tapestry makers and the caste occupations of wood carvers, leather workers, jewelry makers or blacksmiths. The significant scholarship on ethnoaesthetics and the roles of indigenous artists stands in contrast to the Senghorian vision of the artist figure who by virtue of his modernity was to be unencumbered (one might also say alienated) by "traditional" constraints and yet dedicated to making the riches of the past relevant to the future of his nation and modern Africa. (25)

The web of fictions surrounding the image of the modernist artist does not, in a sense, seem anomalous in the Senegalese milieu, if one understands the nature of the Negritude project as one which "simply and faithfully takes categories, concepts, schema and systems from the West and runs them into African entities" (V.Y. Mudimbe quoted in Diawara 1990:193). This reading of Negritude highlights the irony of Senghor's project, which sought to revalorize African traditions and systems of thought but which essentially engaged in an intimate dialogue with France. Its existence was necessarily brought about and defined by the colonial paradigm. "Its reference points took far too much coloring from European ideas even while its Messiahs pronounced themselves fanatically African" (Soyinka 1976:127).

The Ecole de Dakar: An Exercise in Strategic Essentialism?

Like the philosophy with which it was identified, the Senegalese art world existed in a realm divorced from the lives of ordinary citizens. While some of its more profound and socially minded practitioners may have envisioned an earnest connection with the Senegalese populace, its ideologue (although a self-proclaimed African socialist) situated the arts in a sublime position. (26) In fact, Senghor argued that it was because of this exalted nature that the arts, and culture more generally, could guide the nation in its path toward development.

Attempts at defining the Ecole de Dakar have raised as many questions as answers. For the Ghanaian art historian Kojo Fosu, in his lengthy survey of contemporary African artistry (1986:132-42), the style of the school reflected the formal influences of one mentor, Papa Ibra Tall and he cited Tall's students--Bouboucar Coulibal, Abdoulaye N'Diaye, Khalifa Gueye, Theodore Diouf, and Moussa Samb--as its members (Figs. 8, 9, 10, 11). He failed to recognize, however, that the noticeable affinities between works at the tapestry center may also have been the result of the properties and limitations of the medium itself, whose technology would only allow for very flat images shaped through large tracts of solid colors. The weaving process could not achieve the subtleties of the painted or sketched models; the sense of depth, volume, color gradations, and textured brushstrokes was altered in the translation process.

[FIGURES 8-11 OMITTED]

Still other authors wrote a history of the school and its canon as a story about the teachings of Pierre Lods. This argument compared the works of Poto-Poto painters such as Francois Thango and Zigoma with those of Dakar painters such as Ousmane Faye and Ansoumana Diedhiou. (27)

While one can see a certain cohesion between the works of Tall and his students, or, in some cases, between the painters of the Poto-Poto school and the "Lodsians" in Dakar, the two theories do not always relate visually. Furthermore, the artistic and personal rivalry between Lods and Tall would suggest that neither would support a characterization of this school that grouped the works of their respective students together.

What is now probably the most widely known and well-argued account of the Ecole de Dakar can be found in an essay by Ima Ebong in the catalogue to the exhibition "Africa Explores" (1991). In her interpretation she sought to identify the key formal elements of the school claiming that its artists "attempted to find a balance between complete abstraction and African motifs" and that the result of this process was "a form of semi-abstraction" (Ebong 1991:202).

Although Ebong's narrative was not a "primitivist" reading of these arts, it did choose to focus primarily upon works that explicitly utilized visual tropes of Africa. The selected paintings and tapestries, by Amadou Seck (Fig. 12), Bouboucar Coulibaly, Ibou Diouf, and Bacary Dieme, all contain forms of sculpture, masks, incised combs, or the like, and they certainly speak to one aspect of the artistry from this period. But the author's characterization of a highly structured art world necessarily called for these illustrations, allowing only a few other possibilities by Samba Balde (Fig. 13), Cherif Thiam, and Papa Ibra Tall to suggest a wider terrain of practice. Notwithstanding the brevity of the article and the general audience to which it was addressed, it still seemed a normative approach to the subject at hand.

[FIGURES 12-13 OMITTED]

Like any school, the one in Dakar was uneven in its quality, vision, talent, and production. But as the works of Papa Ibra Tall, Abdoulaye N'Diaye, and Ibou Diouf would attest, all its productions cannot be simply dismissed as "semi-abstract" translations of "traditional" forms; rather, in a variety of cases, they should be recognized as innovative creations, strategically playing with essentialist motifs and utilizing techniques and materials from European modernism to tell the tales of important pan-ethnic or religious cultural heroes and historical and political events of Senegal's past (Fig. 14). (28) Other artworks commented upon spiritual and ritual forces at work in local systems of belief.

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

In other words, many of the works of this period practiced a more subtle mining of "traditional" motifs than has been assumed, often skillfully fusing disparate forms and traditions together from local as well as more distant sources to celebrate the diverse history of Senegal's peoples (Figs. 15, 16, 17). Furthermore, the use of terms such as "abstraction" to interpret these forms is problematic, as it immediately situates them within a European modernist hermeneutical framework. Scholars and critics then have little incentive to investigate the formal or iconographic elements, not to mention the cultural meaning that may be attributed to notions of abstraction. In fact, that overarching concept, if left unqualified or unproblematized, diminishes the hybrid and cross-cultural nature of these creations. The existence or recognition of "an endless play of abstract forms and patterns" (Ebong 1991:209) could be as much the result of a complicated process of syncretization as a formulaic, derivative practice.

[FIGURES 15-17 OMITTED]

Ebong continued her definition of the Ecole by utilizing a historical time-frame as a marker:

   The term "Ecole de Dakar" refers to
   the first generation of Senegalese
   painters, who made their public
   de but at the exhibition Tendances et
   confrontations, organized by Iba
   N'Diaye for the first World Festival
   of Pan-African Arts, held in Dakar
   in 1966.... A wider definition of the
   "Ecole de Dakar" would take into
   account certain artists of the same
   generation who were not included in
   the exhibition.... as well as younger
   artists, born in the late 1940s and
   starting to exhibit in the 1970s, who
   were trained at the Ecole Nationale
   des Beaux Arts, in many cases by
   members of the first generation.

   (Ebong 1991:202)

Such a wide definition allows critics, of past and present, to throw the net of Negritude over as many fish as they desire. Thus, the definition covers artists like Amadou Sow, who experiments with schematic imagery on colored Plexiglas without reference to masks or sculpted figures, and Amadou Ba, whose stark, earth-toned narratives of life among the Peul feature lean, elegant figures of man and animal; both artists were members of the first generation trained at the Ecole des Arts. The net also encompasses the works of Alpha Wouallid Diallo, who creates searing, realistic portrayals of historical events and personalities (Figs. 18, 19).

[FIGURES 18-19 OMITTED]

The most useful part of Ebong's definition came toward the end of the analysis, when she acknowledged that these artists "were linked by their cosmopolitanism, and their participation in local and international art institutions, rather than by any consciously unified stylistic program or theoretical position.... "She admitted that "this ambiguous aesthetic convention has often allowed for highly individual formal solutions" (Ebong 1991:202) (Fig. 20).

[FIGURE 20 OMITTED]

Senghor himself repeatedly noted that Negritude was more a theme than a style. Perhaps that characterization works best in our understanding of an Ecole de Dakar whose definition lies somewhere amid the celebratory nationalist rhetoric of the post-Independence era, the accompanying interest and belief in the wealth of pan-African heritage, and the creation of a highly centralized, elitist art world that gave artists the opportunity, support, and, in some cases, inspiration to pursue their work. Rather than mire ourselves in a debate about style and influences, we need to focus on what the criticism surrounding the Ecole de Dakar can tell us about the consequences of Senghor's new politics of representation. Did the aesthetic engendered by the functioning of this art world serve to delineate a viable artistic vocabulary a coherent sense of postcolonial identity, a revised relationship between European and African cultures, or a new africanite?

An Unmistakable Africanite

Eager to categorize the arts emerging from Senegal most of the commentators preceding Ebong, who were usually writing in response to traveling exhibitions, gladly adopted the term Ecole de Dakar with little investigation of either its actual contours or its relationship to the complexities and subtleties of Negritude. (29) Many of these writings displayed, in fact, what James Clifford has described as a "disquieting quality of modernism: its taste for appropriating or redeeming otherness, for constituting non-Western arts in its own image, for discovering universal, ahistorical `human' capacities ..." (Clifford 1988:193).

Broadly speaking, the reviews took their cue from the recitations of the president himself, emphasizing such qualities as the rhythmical sense of design and composition, the closeness to nature (seen in the use of either bright, warm, "tropical" colors or earth tones), and the choice of pan-African themes (Fig. 21). Some argued that the emphasis on pan-African rather than local motifs reflected artistic or cultural lacunae in Senegal, perhaps the result of adherence to Islam or of scarce environmental resources. In other words, because the Senegalese were not "art-producing peoples" like their neighbors to the east and south, they had to borrow from other art traditions (Mount 1973; Fosu 1986; Kennedy & Mark 1992; Pataux 1974).

[FIGURE 21 OMITTED]

Attempts to situate this Ecole within a broader framework presented a predictable spectrum of views. Sometimes modernism's hegemony over the politics of representation and its claims to universality served as the measure for the artworks' success. At other times, writers tried to discern and praise the existence of separate, recognizable African traits within an "adopted" European modernist paradigm, thereby acknowledging an inherent hybridity. Finally, there were those who sought to preserve the "authentic" and "pure" African character of these works, maintaining that "the work of most Senegalese artists is so unmistakably African in style, form, composition, and color that it is difficult to point to influences from the West" (Kennedy & Mark 1992:105).

All of these approaches shared an obvious tension in reconciling readings of mimicry with evidence that the invented artistic language and notions of africanite presented by many Ecole de Dakar productions were based upon European primitivist ideas of Africa. The charges of mimicry can be understood as part of longstanding modernist approaches to the "primitive." Hal Foster has reminded us that "... the primitive is a modern problem, a crisis in cultural identity, which the West moves to resolve: hence the modernist construction of `primitivism,' the fetishistic recognition-and-disavowal of the primitive difference" (1985:204). In order to uphold this notion of difference, the "primitive" has been situated, spatially and temporally, apart from Europe. This paradigm envisions "primitive" cultures as bounded and closed entities, spaces within which pure and unchanging artistic traditions flourished.

The notion of Europe as the center and the norm, and the "primitive" as its dialectical, peripheral Other, was endemic to colonial predicaments. Within this paradigm, modernists alone were able to appropriate artistic forms (like raw materials) from the periphery without jeopardizing their monopoly on originality (the irony, of course, being that modernism was an inherently derivative and syncretic cultural system). Western gatekeepers thus controlled the axis of appropriation. Any non-Western artist whose creations were believed to be the result of appropriations from Western sources was deemed a mimic with a colonized mind--one who was blindly producing derivative artworks.

Highlighting the paradoxical nature of the Negritude project, Michael Lambert asked, "How do Negritude writers return to a land which existed only in the collective imagination of the West?" (1993:250). One could also ask, Why did so many Ecole de Dakar artists choose to manufacture their own Otherness (Appiah 1992:253)? (30)

In the poetry of Negritude, this reclamation of an imaginary Africa meant the privileging of rural, village life, local myths and heroes, and efforts to recapture the rhythms and lilt of the drumming and dancing of tradition. As mentioned above, for the visual arts, the "traditional" objects chosen to represent a pan-African heritage were those preferred by the European "primitive" art market and modern artists. The reclamation and re-articulation of these motifs "was not preceded by any profound effort to enter into [this] African system of values" (Soyinka 1976:127) and resulted in an indiscriminate mixing and matching of disparate artistic traditions (in the same manner as modernist primitivism).

Pataux guides us toward reconsidering the disturbing relationship between European primitivism and the Ecole de Dakar, claiming that the artists "are torn between European academism and a certain `primitivism,' and they are not sure if this primitivism is authentic or whether they are inventing it to meet our expectations" (1974:59). This relationship must be seen, however, as more than simply a question of borrowing formal strategies or motifs from European primitivism. It was also a deliberate engagement with a complex field of ideas about the "primitive." These works were inevitably implicated in a political struggle that was only occasionally directly addressed in their choice of iconography.

Since Robert Goldwater's study, first published in 1938, the most significant scholarship on primitivism in modern arts accompanied the 1984 MOMA exhibition" `Primitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern," curated by William Rubin. Rubin's account of the encounter between "primitive" arts and modern masters is typical of art histories that are still being written on the period of early modernism: it celebrates only the genius of the European male masters who "discovered" and therefore legitimized Africa's arts.

Critiques of this exhibition may be found in abundance elsewhere (McEvilley 1984; Torgovnick 1990; Price 1989; Clifford 1988; Manning 1985). Hal Foster's reading of the situation helps expose the political underpinnings of primitivism. He asserts that in Rubin's show, "... the imperialist precondition of primitivism was suppressed, and `primitivism,' a metonym of imperialism, served as its disavowal" (Foster 1985:183). He regards Rubin's use of a neologism like affinity-ism as a kind of rearguard movement which desperately seeks to maintain the prominence, authority, and claims to universalism of the modernist grand narrative in the face of postcolonial assertions of a "new cultural politics of difference" (West 1990:19-36). As Foster states, "... if evolutionism subordinated the primitive to western history, affinity-ism recoups it under the sign of western universality" (1985:189).

So if primitivism acted as a disguise, displacement, or even an excuse for colonialism (Foster 1985:197), it follows that to understand the Ecole de Dakar's flirtations with modernist tropes of Africa, the dynamics of the colonial moment need our attention. In his look at colonial India, Ashis Nandy suggested that one must move beyond the conventional interpretations of colonialism as a simple division between oppressor and oppressed. Instead, it must be treated as a site of shared conflict, consciousness, and emotion, involving and affecting all parties. He insisted, "Agency is never the monopoly of one player, for both are locked in a dyadic relationship" (Nandy 1983:xv). Nandy's views are indicative of recent scholarship on the colonial and postcolonial condition. These hegemonic systems were often contradictory and varied in nature, espousing European liberal discourses while instituting them in the colonies through illiberal means. These discrepancies undermined the authority and identity of the colonizer and cleared a space for the colonized to strategically and subversively engage with these discourses. As Nandy posited, "The perversity of colonialism is thus measured not just in terms of the extreme exploitation of the other, but also in the contortion and constrictions of the self that were necessary to enforce such a relationship" (Nandy 1983:7). The imported metropolitan discourse thus became ambivalent, hybrid, and double-accented (Bhabha 1984).

The cultural products of the colonial and postcolonial period are therefore perhaps best understood as hybrids, the results of encounters, co-options, and manipulations of the Other's discursive, political, and aesthetic frameworks. (31) To consider processes of cultural mixing, appropriation, and contestation within the Diaspora, cultural critic Kobena Mercer has utilized the model of language advocated by Mikhail Bakhtin in his Dialogic Imagination (1981). Bakhtin emphasizes the way linguistic codes can be shared, borrowed, and reconfigured in a never-ending power game. The contest over tropes of traditional Africa and measures of authenticity in postcolonial arts and politics can be thought of in a similar manner. Thus, in the colonial period in Senegal one that was marked by French indecision about assimilationist or associative policies, the oppressed and the oppressor shared linguistic codes and operated within a common discursive universe. Within the neocolonialist frameworks, which nurtured the revaluative efforts of Senghor and colleagues, forms of cultural primitivism similarly played with master codes and assumptions. (32)

Recognizing the potential revolutionary consequences of what Mercer has called the "social multiaccentuality of the sign" (1994:255), one can see how those involved within Negritude in the post/neocolonial period, through literary or visual means, could intentionally play with Western notions of primitivism to give a new accent to signs of traditional Africa and, in the process, unmask the imperialist genealogy of modernist primitivism.

What some may dismiss as a naive, unmediated quoting could also be interpreted as evidence of "a resistant operation, by which the other [in this case, the African artist] might appropriate forms of the modern capitalist west and fragment them with indigenous ones in a reflexive, critical montage of synthetic contradictions" (Foster 1985:201). The Ecole and its main patron challenged the relations of representation on several fronts. First, African art's direct influence upon the development of European modernism was quite openly celebrated in Senghor's speeches and by artists working beneath him (many artists today continue to make this point). (33) Second, in his writings on an esthetique negro-africaine and elsewhere, the president struck at the heart of the modernist movement, co-opting the quintessential modernist, Pablo Picasso, to act as a model for Ecole de Dakar artists. In a piece called "Picasso en Nigritie," Senghor (1995b) pointed to the painter's ability to combine a respect for his roots in Andalusia with opportunities to learn and borrow from a diverse array of sources. In so doing, Senghor spoke of this modern icon not simply as a master but as a fellow artist whose lessons "his" artists could heed. Similarly, in his comments at a colloquium on African Art and Universal Civilization (1975), Papa Ibra Tall candidly discussed the process of imagining a new aesthetic built, ironically, upon European conceptions of Africa:

   Perhaps in a negative sense we benefited
   from a very special situation.
   When we started our research we
   were already cut off from our past,
   and we didn't find ourselves, for
   example, in the situation of Europe,
   where there were official notions of
   a museum aesthetic; without the
   importance given by the West to
   Negro art, we would not have given
   it such importance. Colonial intervention
   meant that we were cut off
   from our past; I believe that because
   we haven't fashioned masks that we
   are incapable of really feeling them.
   We can decide to refashion them but
   it would never be the same as those
   in the collections. Therefore we enjoy
   a situation, which permits us to
   be revolutionaries.

   (Tall 1975:98-99; my translation)

Tall's willingness to come to terms with the modes of valuing "primitive" arts within the art-culture systems of the West makes it all the more clear that the processes of mimicry, appropriation, and resulting hybridities in his works were intentional and ironic in nature.

The artists of the Ecole de Dakar witnessed and contributed to a special period in Senegal's post-Independence history, and in world history, more generally, when hope for new freedoms and universal brotherhood animated the political awareness of many previously subjugated populations. Moreover, the revolutionary potential ascribed to art encouraged Senegalese artists, for the first time, to pursue their craft in the service of their new nation. In this context, perhaps one can read the works of the Ecole de Dakar artists as efforts toward a "strategic essentialism"--a necessary invention of shared traditions and identity at the historical juncture of decolonization and self-determination.

This re-evaluation does not seek to deny the elitist or, indeed, self-primitivizing character of the project, which was closely determined by the ideals of Enlightenment and modern European capitalist structures. Nor should it ignore, for that matter, the variable quality of the artworks and the artists associated with it. One must also acknowledge the stultifying effects that the institutionalization of Negritude had upon the formation of a distinctive field of cultural production in Senegal. Yet it is also true that the artists involved deserve credit for greater agency and historical awareness than they have heretofore been accorded, and that the subversive characteristics of the hybrid cultural products they created must be given more weight.

The Ecole de Dakar gains importance in the study of arts in Senegal not so much because it enables one easily to group individuals by their participation in a particular aesthetic (as there are clearly many ideas of this aesthetic) but because it identifies a realm of officialdom and a rhetoric of identity and of art which instilled a particularly strong image of Senegalese arts at home and abroad. It has since become, in the collective memory and consciousness of artists working in Senegal a label that connotes a variety of things--government interference in the arts; images of the artist as worker, spoiled child, or ambassador; a hierarchy of the arts and a set relationship among them; and a dated idea of how to express one's "Africanness." This "invented tradition" continues today to serve as a measure with which to define oneself in Senegalese art history. In reflecting on a "second generation's" attitudes toward the earlier Negritude-inspired forms, one artist, whose work was at one time considered a part of the Ecole de Dakar, spoke of a group of artists

   ... who are currently making a
   timid foray on the international
   level and who want to be critical
   regarding a certain image of Negritude,
   not as a pure and simple
   rejection, but rather as a recognition
   of it as a historical phenomenon,
   and adding something else to it
   because this generation asserts that
   the cultural identity of a people
   cannot be nourished only by tradition:
   it must be also oriented
   toward the future.

   (ZULU M'Baye 1988;
   my translation)

Interestingly, later challenges to the certitudes of Negritude and the related structures of the Senghorian art world would find artists confronting many of the same issues of cultural particularism, notions of traditionalism and authenticity, and engagements with European modernist ideas that had occupied their predecessors (Harney 1996; Deliss 1995; Ebong 1991). However, while most would seek subtler strategies in defining the relations between their artistic practice and shifting conceptions of identity, they would find that the interpretation of their works within a broader international art arena remained largely colored by primitivist and Eurocentric concerns.

[This article was accepted for publication in December 2001.]

(1.) See especially Kesteloot (1991), Moore (1965), Adotevi (1972), Soyinka (1976). The lack of research on the visual arts can only be explained as a result of the biases in the developing field of African art history; at the time, scholars were more concerned with documenting so-called traditional arts, seen to be rapidly disappearing. Moreover, many approached the visual arts of Africa through the lens of Western art historical paradigms, employing modernist assumptions about the nature of "primitive" arts. Both views privileged wooden carvings, sculptures, masks, and the like over some of the more ephemeral and personal arts practiced by Senegal's peoples until the advent of the academy painting school. Practices such as embroidery, weaving, dyeing, jewelry making (filigree), and painting of niominka pirogues (fishing boats) and cars rapides were not seen as art forms, only as examples of material culture. As a result, the Senegalese region was perceived as a non-art producing region. John Mack disputes the bias underlying this assumption as it applies to studies of arts from eastern Africa (1995:118).

(2.) Senghor spoke of the importance of the artist in the decolonization process: "Paradoxical as this may seem, writers and artists must and do play a most important role in the struggle for decolonization. It is up to them to remind politicians that politics and administration are but one aspect of culture, and that cultural colonialism, in the shape of assimilation, is the worst of all" (in Kesteloot 1991:291).

(3.) The complexities of the debates surrounding Negritude philosophy, by its primary proponents and their critics, are too broad to address in an article of this scope. However, for a deeper discussion of Senghor's brand of Negritude and his interpretations of an aesthdtique ndgro-africaine, see Clifford's "Tell about Your Trip: Michel Leiris' (Clifford 1988:173), Harney (2002), and Senghor (1964).

(4.) For example, see Fanon (1968), Soyinka (1988), Mudimbe (1988), Adotevi (1972), Towa (1971).

(5.) Recent scholarship by Okwui Enwezor et al. for "The Short Century" exhibition represents the most concerted effort to bring these important histories and debates to a broader museum public. See Enwezor (2001).

(6.) I borrow this term from the writings of James Clifford in which he speaks of the cultural practices, exchange systems, and taxonomic shifts which have marked the collecting of "tribal" artifacts in the West. His identification of a broad "ideological and institutional system," in which cultural productions and meanings circulate, provides a guideline for assessing the art network erected during the Senghorian period in Senegal, which had its own ideas of art, artist, modernity, and Africanity (Clifford 1988:215-51).

(7.) E. Gellner (1983), Partha Chatterjee (1986), Eric Hobsbawn (1990), Smith (1988), and others discuss the difference between a nation and a state, the latter being a consensus on community and the former being an internationally recognized territory. The problem of differentiation was particularly acute in Africa, where arbitrary political boundaries drawn at Independence usually bore little or no relationship to pre-existing "nations."

(8.) The suspicions of Negritude's opponents were also fueled by the slow Africanization policies adopted by the Senghorian government, which left many administrative posts in the cultural, economic, and policy-oriented areas within the hands of French civil servants (cooperants) (Cruise O'Brien 1972).

(9.) 1958-1961 Maison des Arts (MA) 1961-1971 Ecole des Arts du Senegal (EAS) 1971-1977 Institut National des Arts du Senegal (INAS) 1977-present Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts (ENBA)

(10.) Interview with the author, Thies, Senegal, 1994. Additional personal communications with Tall cited in this article derive from this interview and have been translated by the author.

(11.) Tall's views, like Senghor's, satisfied modernist tastes in that they spoke to both the bent in primitivism to return to nature and the emphasis in psychoanalysis on the unconscious and the rawness of creativity.

(12.) The striking juxtaposition of bold colors and generous use of pictorial space enhance the grandness of works by Tall such as Judu bu rafet (1978) or Couple royale (1965). In both, the richness of dyed wool seems to suit the folkloric, celebratory subject matter. In the former, the silhouetted figures occupy a striated world, punctuated by repeating spheres. Our attention is drawn to the textured forms of local beaded headdresses, elaborately plaited hairstyles, and finely detailed jewelry. The inclusion of a horse, rearing a head adorned with regalia, alludes to the proud history of the Wolof cavalry and their fight against French expansion. In the latter work, Tall accentuates the presence and status of a royal couple, who pose in a stiff, formal fashion before the viewer. Bedecked in refined boubous, whose folds billow out toward the confines of the composition's frame and are embellished with fine filigree goldwork, Tail's figures occupy a world of riches and tradition.

(13.) This new institution took the tapestry-making school in Aubusson, France, as its model but used what Tall believed to be authentic African themes, colors, and designs (Fosu 1986:150-53). The styles of its creations were at first strikingly similar to his own, producing highly decorative, intricate, brightly colored rhythmical patternings and stylized figures, all occupying a shallow space. As monumental works, they were positioned to be the ultimate embodiments of an esthetique negro-africaine and served, therefore, as the flagships of the Ecole de Dakar. It was in the production, consumption, interpretation, and distribution of these objects that one saw most clearly Senghor's art world in motion. Like students at the Ecole des Arts, most of those at the tapestry school were supported by state bursaries during their studies and found employment in schools or government ministries upon completion. In addition to the presidential office, the government ministries served as the primary consumers of these works, hanging them in their departments and public buildings or presenting them as state gifts to foreign embassies in Senegal, visiting dignitaries, and foreign governments. Initially Tall sent four young students to train in France at the weaving workshops of Aubusson and Beauvais, and he imported dyed wool from Belgium and Holland and looms from France (Axt & Sy 1989:69). The Manufacture began weaving on basse-lisse looms and in 1979 added eight haute-lisse looms to its workshop.

(14.) It is ironic that the original reason for choosing the form of tapestry was to ensure the artist the role as a "cultural worker" in the development process, because these productions were used by the state as gifts to foreign governments or as decor in government offices. They did little to enhance the lives of the average Senegalese citizen. The average cost of tapestries is approximately 400,000 CFA (4,000 French francs)--well beyond the means of most Senegalese. One must surely also consider that Senghor's and Tall's familiarity with the art historical traditions in France, which produced tapestries and wall hangings to serve as visual advocates for nationalist and monarchist authority, may have played a part in their decision to anchor the new aesthetic in a tapestry workshop.

(15.) Originally from Saint Louis, Senegal, where he began his artistic career by creating posters for the local Cinema Vox, N'Diaye went to study fine arts in both Montpellier and at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. He then apprenticed in the sculpture studios of Zadkine and Coutin.

(16.) His teachings influenced a whole generation of Senegalese artists. Those listed as Lods's disciples include, among others, Amadou Ba, Ansoumana Diedhiou, Ibou Diouf, Ousmane Faye, Mohammadou M'Baye (later called ZULU), brothers Seni and Kre M'Baye, Modou Niang, Maodo Niang, Madema Gueye, Ousseyou Ly, Seynabou Sakho, Amadou Sow, and Cherif Thiam. There was, in fact, a diversity of expression among these so-called disciples. Despite Lods's death in 1988, his influence continues to reverberate in the artistic community of Dakar. For many years he also held a separate atelier at his home, where he supported numbers of young artists (ZULU M'Baye, interview with the author, Dakar, 1994).

(17.) The successes of Senghor's "field of cultural production" are best understood when they are placed within the context of artistic training systems throughout the African continent. As Grace Stanislaus noted in her catalogue on contemporary artists: "The history of twentieth century African art is intricately connected to the influence and patronage of Europeans. With rare exception, the formal and informal art schools and experimental workshops were established by Europeans ..." (Stanislaus 1990:23).

(18.) The Festival, which ran from April 1 to 24, 1966, was a joint venture between UNESCO, the Society for African Cultures (which received funds from the French Ministries of Culture and Cooperation), and the Senegalese government.

(19.) In addition to numerous dance, drama, and musical performances, many of which were held at the new national theater, Theatre Daniel Sorano, the ceremonies featured two visual art exhibitions. One was of "traditional" arts from the Senegalese state collection, augmented by large loans from Africa and abroad; the other, "Tendances et confrontations," presented contemporary arts chosen by a jury of critics appointed by Iba N'Diaye (Gaudibert 1991:155). The accompanying symposium was academically focused, concerned primarily with finding the best ways to study African arts and cultures. See Premier festival mondial des arts negres (1966).

(20.) It should be noted that the 1966 festival was not, as many in Senegal would have one believe, the first of its kind. It was preceded in Paris by the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, and a Second Congress in Rome in 1959 (both organized by the Society for African Culture/Presence Africaine). Also, it was preceded on the African continent by the First International Congress on African Culture, held in 1962 at the Rhodes National Gallery in Zimbabwe, under the leadership of Frank McEwen (Sultan 1993:8). In that same year, Ghana hosted the First International Congress of Africanists (Accra, December 11-18, 1962), which featured panels on literature, history, and visual and musical arts among others (Bown & Crowder 1964).

(21.) One of the most vocal critics, Stanislaus Spero Adotevi, then a Dahomean student who would later become the minister of culture and youth, declared, "Negritude is a vague and ineffective ideology. There is no place in Africa for a literature that lies outside revolutionary combat. Negritude is dead" (Jules-Rosette 1998:71).

(22.) The American/European system cannot be characterized as simply a slave to market measures, however, as there are substantial government patronage programs also at work.

(23.) See Donald Cuspit's writings for a summary of the myths surrounding the avant-garde artist-figure (Cuspit 1993:2). Moreover, writings on art by feminists and social historians have been especially important in tracing the historical development of myths of the male-artist genius. They have located the beginnings of modern ideas of the artist in the nineteenth century with the rise of capitalist market structures, urbanization, and industrialization.

(24.) For more discussion on the relationship between caste and artistry in Senegal see Thomas McEvilley's interview with sculptor Moustapha Dime on the occasion of the Venice Biennale (McEvilley 1993). See also Elizabeth Harney (2002).

(25.) I refer here to studies in ethnoaesthetics conducted by Patrick McNaughton (1979) and James Fernandez (1971).

(26.) "Art is none other than the primeval activity of Homo sapiens who, by making life known through the image-symbol, uses rhythm to intensify it and, by glorifying it in this way, gives it an eternal quality" (Senghor 1995a:225).

(27.) For a broad description of the oeuvre of Ecole de Dakar artists, see Kennedy (1992:97-107). And for brief discussion of the Poto-Poto school with good illustrations, see Setagaya Art Museum (1995).

(28.) For example, Abdoulaye N'Diaye's enormous tapestry Bamba and Lat Dior (1973) (Fig. 8) depicts a famous meeting between the founder of the Mouride Muslim brotherhood in Senegal, Amadou Bamba, and the man considered one of the last great Wolof warriors, Lat Dior. The meeting's importance lies in the alliance sealed between Wolof followers of the warrior and the burgeoning Mouride brotherhood. Dior died in the battle of Dekkile immediately after the meeting, and his death heralded a new stage in French rule and a growth of the Mouride brotherhood, which provided a space for solace and the continuing assertion of non-French customs for many of Dior's followers (Samb 1964:45). N'Diaye placed the holy man in the center of his composition, taking his cues from the only extant photograph of Bamba, which showed him swathed in a white kaftan. There is an extensive literature on Amadou Bamba and the Mouride brotherhood; see Behrman (1970), Cruise O'Brien (1971), Copans (1972), Dumont (1975).

Similarly, in one of his tapestry designs, Amadou Ly depicts Wolof philosopher, Kocc Barma, another local cultural hero in the fight against French colonization. The popularity and power of these figures are based not simply on their evocation of the glories of a past age, when the ceddo, Wolof cavalry, ruled much of the Cap-Vert area, but also on their value as symbols of a distinctive Senegalese mode of resistance.

(29.) Notable Senegalese artists such as the novelist Cheikh Kane and the filmmaker Ousmane Sembene provided some early criticism of Negritude, its contributions to cultural nationalism, and the aesthetic it engendered. Frantz Fanon (1968) also wrote of the pursuits of the post-Independence visual artist, whom he saw as mistakenly relying only on the past as a source for legitimate cultural forms while ignoring the realities of the postcolonial nation.

(30.) Anthony Appiah suggests that the promotion of Negritude and other "identity-defining" movements brought out a particular phenomenon: "We see the way in which an ideology of disinterested aesthetic value--the `baptism' of `negro art' as `aesthetic'--meshes with the international commodification of African expressive culture; a commodification which requires, by the logic of the space-clearing gesture, the manufacture of otherness" (1992:253).

(31.) Cultural theorists Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock, among others, have investigated the problematic definitions and usages of the terms "postcolonialism" and "hybridity" in a highly instructive special issue of the journal Social Text (no. 48, 1996).

(32.) "The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes `one's own' only when ... the speaker appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation the word does not exist in a neutral or impersonal language ... but rather it exists in other people's mouths, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one's own" (Bahktin 1981:293-94).

(33.) "... it took Rimbaud to identify with Negritude, Picasso to be stirred by a baoule mask, and Apollinaire to sing of wooden fetishes before western European art could accept, after some two and a half thousand years, the relinquishing of physeos mimesis, the imitation of nature. To a large extent, negro art is to blame--a fortunate and, in any case, productive burden of guilt--if western artists now draw their inspiration, like Bazaine, from the `most obscure labour of instinct and sensitivity' ..." (Senghor 1995a:225).

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ELIZABETH HARNEY is curator of contemporary arts at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. Her book on Negritude and Senegalese modernism is forthcoming from Duke University Press.