THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. Lena Dallywater

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#3, JUNE-AUGUST/2018

Lena Dallywater is currently the academic coordinator of the Leibniz Science Campus “Eastern Europe – Global Area” (EEGA), a network of 8 institutions in the Leipzig-Halle-Jena science region. Dallywater was formerly Programme Coordinator at the Global and European Studies Institute and the Centre for Area Studies. Her research interests include African American Intellectual History, African Intellectual History, African Philosophy, Black Radical Tradition, Black Arts Movement, Black Consciousness Movement, Afrocentrism, Aesthetics and Global and Transnational History. At present, her research focuses on “Intellectual conceptualizations of Black and African aesthetics since 1956”.

Brotherwise Dispatch - How did you become interested in working on a comparative study entitled “Black Fire: Conceptualizations of Black liberation and engaged views of African and Black aesthetics in the USA and South Africa”?

Lena Dallywater - Shahid, thank you for the opportunity to reply to this question. I am delighted to be in conversation with The Brotherwise Dispatch about conceptualizations of Black liberation and alternative framings of aesthetics. Please allow me to start with a short note regarding the title of this interview: The Brotherwise Dispatch vs. Lena Dallywater. During my studies I was encouraged to encounter textual sources with attention for wording and terminology and it is striking that “versus” (meaning “against”, “opposite to” or “in contrast with”) has been chosen for this interview. Indeed, I do not see myself, or my research project, in counteraction or opposition to The Brotherwise Dispatch. The word “versus” suggests a choice between two different, even opposing options. This could be perceived as being intellectually misleading. I find it telling that your own essay entitled Emancipatory Aesthetics in the Raw (2014), engages with the ideas of radical Black thinkers like LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), cultural theorists like Alain Locke and intellectuals analyzing colonialism and decolonization, such as philosopher and writer Frantz Fanon. Inspiration is also taken from the work of scholars from the German critical tradition, such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. Similar schools of thought have shaped my education in aesthetics (in my case as sub-discipline of Cultural Philosophy), and secondly Global Studies, a rather new field of study in the place where I was educated, namely Leipzig (Germany). I will return to this point later. Beforehand, I would like to remark that choosing “versus” as a headline for this conversation is secondly interesting as an observation as such, as, in my opinion the field of “aesthetics” is marked by ongoing competition and contestation. “Versus”, originating in the Latin term for “turned so as to face something” may hence be the best starting point for my elaborations on aesthetics and the Black radical imagination. It leads us directly to the central point of my study: the many activist-intellectuals in various settings who “turned so as to face” dominant canons and practices of art and literary criticism in the mid-20th century.

Returning to your question on how I became interested in working on a comparative study on conceptualizations of Black and African aesthetics, I would like to start with some observations on trends in European academia: In the research of globalisation there is arguably an increasing interest in the history and significance of the African diaspora, the global dispersal of peoples, and individuals of African descent, who were responsible for the emergence of Pan-African ideologies. The role of Africans in broad interregional and intercontinental networks has increasingly been discussed, I would attest, but the influence and perspectives of African actors in global networks of art production and art assessment is still only latterly gaining research focus. Recently, studies and curatorial projects have focused on the position of contemporary African artists, and art production that is labelled “African” within the competitive structures of the global art market. Similarly, curatorial practices of both anthropological as well as art museums have been scrutinized. The spheres of art and literary criticism, which are occupied with ‘aesthetics’ and the role of conceptualisations of “Black” and “African” aesthetics, are still widely unknown. Several authors have dedicated their work to the cultural movement of ‘Négritude’ and its prominent proponent Léopold Sédar Senghor. His famous essay L’Esthétique negro-africaine (1956) naturally features in my study too. But, when starting my project, I felt that much more is to be known about the question of what it means for art and aesthetics if artists and/or audiences are Black. My general interest in aesthetics is however rooted in my own undergraduate studies.

When I took my first courses in philosophy, I was taught that there were five branches of the discipline: logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics; the latter having its own professorship within the Cultural Philosophy section of my study program. In classes about the coming into being of the branch of philosophy known as “aesthetics”, I learned about eighteenth century philosophers and their endeavor to define what is art as well as the changes that occurred in the age of the Enlightenment. I studied authors from Kant to Adorno, Fichte to Lukacs and Derrida, and all those prominent names which would be assembled in a traditional “Introduction to Aesthetics”, as it is to be found in humanities libraries almost all around the world (desk studies in South Africa, Cameroon, USA, France, Norway and Germany and interviews with scholars from Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and Nigeria at least suggest this). In virtually all textbooks and philosophical treatise it stood as an unquestioned fact that the history of aesthetics started in 1753 with German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten who coined the term to describe “the science of sensory cognition”. The term introduced by Baumgarten can be considered an undertaking to claim epistemological relevance for sensual perception. He defines aesthetics “as the theory of the liberal arts, as inferior cognition, as the art of beautiful thinking and as the art of thinking analogous to reason”. Subsequent generations of philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th century affirmed as well as questioned this definition. But all so-called classical aesthetic theories, for example by Schelling, Kant, Schiller, or Hegel, are originated in a similar context, stemming from a distinct historical period in Western Europe, mainly the German Enlightenment. Referencing this “starting point”, the European academic mainstream includes practices of and reflections on art, handcrafts, beauty, taste and the sensual perception of the world into the sphere of aesthetics. It is this version of history that I became interested in when I started my educational pathway and intellectual journey.

BD - In that study of aesthetics and the Black radical imagination, how did you overcome what you clearly recognize as “the many pitfalls of essentialization”?

LD - Already in 1993, the British cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy asserted that the polarization between essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of black identity has become unhelpful. Similarly, Beninese philosopher Paulin J. Hountondji (in 1996) raised the question what it is to be an African and suggested to dismantle myths of Africanity and to reduce the concept of Africa to its primal simplicity in order to reveal the extreme complexity of the intellectual, cultural, political and social life of the continent. He added that Africans should not merely carry on disciplines as shaped in Europe but must reinvent them: “Such reinvention implies a sharply critical awareness of the ideological limits and the theoretical and methodological shortcomings of former practices”. I would contend that this holds true for European scholars as well. I follow the philosopher’s opinion that it is necessary to “get rid of all sorts of essentialist and particularist doctrines born of a hundred years of Africanism” and that philosophy in the proper sense must consist of critical evaluation that challenges the assumptions and categorizations that have been employed in the marginalization of Africa. Overcoming the “silent dependence on a Western episteme” that V. Y. Mudimbe described in his groundbreaking book The Invention of Africa (1988) is a necessity for all scholars today. In the mid-20th century, this valid ambition led to, what postcolonial scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty in her essay Under Western Eyes (1984), introduced as “strategic essentialism”. In times of political change, especially during processes of decolonization and postcolonial nation building, ‘inventions’ of shared national traditions and identities through museums, art academies and universities, can be interpreted as the former. But, secondly, these new, counter-hegemonic modes of interpretation of one’s own past and identity also led to instances of self-culturalization that were found to have been counterproductive in the long run and individual artists and intellectuals have repeatedly distanced themselves from those state-initiated cultural politics. Recently new alternative platforms are established in African countries that question both hegemonic national representations, and Western art history; they are ‘new spaces’ for the production, representation and reflection of cultural knowledge. These developments inspire my study. Similarly, new research projects, like Becoming Black. Creating identity in the African Diaspora (2004) by Michelle M. Wright critically interrogate the concept of Blackness and examine the European and American invention of the Black Other. Those studies with a larger comparative impetus are also an inspiration for my own approach. Still, a focus on the “post-“ of allegedly essentializing conceptualizations, on exchange, migration and the process of creating identities does not seem to provide a conclusive solution to the problem.

I affirm that overcoming the pitfalls of essentialization can be achieved by multi-perspectivity. In my specific study I try to achieve this with a multi-sided (and multi-sited) approach to the debate, portraying biographies and ideas from scholars with backgrounds in Cameroon, Burkina Faso, England, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, the United States, Germany and so forth. None of these individual stories and attempts to grasp the meaning of art in its African and African diaspora contexts is rated in content or ambition but depicted and compared.

BD - What do you mean by the necessity to “go beyond dominant assumptions of the importance of geographical locations to understand anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggles”?

LD - With this sentence I want to elude to the fact that the narrative of a “center” and a periphery” of world history and politics has been dominant in the social sciences for a long time. But, it has increasingly been challenged and countered by approaches that emphasize the multi-polarity of the new world order. In the last ten years, historians began to open up to encounters across borders and entanglements between far-flung parts of the world. Now a lively research on transnational, transregional, world and global history topics exists. Indeed, connectivity has become a category for describing and explaining the past, of individual societies as well as of large-scale processes playing out at different places in certain fields. However, as I would hold regarding the state of the art that is the basis for my study, this is only partially true in the realm of philosophy. Secondly, it is only half-true with regard to Africa – due to the uniqueness that is ascribed to the continent’s history in both derogatory and over-simplified narratives of Western scholars as well as in affirmative and similarly plain approaches by their African colleagues. Thus, even though full of variety, the state of research (in my opinion) is lacking an additional perspective that takes seriously multi-perspectivity and African agency.

You rightly point out that in my study I wish to avoid falling into the trap of classifying intellectual positions in relation to their geographical location. Simultaneously though I aim at explaining why spatial configurations of power and the situatedness of individual and collective actors in a certain place and space are still of importance. Empirical studies concentrating not on ideas but on the actors formulating them are important to grasp transnational interactions and entanglements, to show the connection of ‘aesthetics’ with processes of globalization and transnationalization, and to improve the current state of the art. By looking on individual pathways and approaches on the actors’ level, it also becomes clear that shared features in the debates do not depend so much on national provenance and geographical location, but on a shared position of marginality in a hegemonic discourse on arts, culture, and aesthetics. A case in point is the recent example Indian Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock raising this issue. Focusing on individual intellectuals also reveals how actors were struggling to adjust themselves to particular constructions of Africanity that they were confronted with in the different settings, at times even resisting them. I contend that, to understand the complex picture of anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggles, we need to start our research on the micro-level. Sweeping generalizations will not take us further in the study of alternative framings of Black and African aesthetics and their role(s) in the struggle for autonomy and self-determination.

BD - In what sense were aesthetic visions of Africa and Blackness shared by Black liberation movements in both the Black Arts Movement in the United States and the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, even while simultaneously informing their respectively diverse trajectories of emancipatory praxis?

LD - In my paper “Black Fire” – Conceptualizations of Black liberation and engaged views of African and Black aesthetics in the USA and South Africa I point out that though different sets of racialized categories and conceptualizations of belonging emerged in the two contexts, main arguments for the necessity of alternative aesthetics which challenge dominant Western (imperial) canons were broadly the same. The essay shows that the social composition and positioning of groups of intellectuals and activists in South Africa and the USA were different and, partially as a result thereof, their approach towards the written and visual arts and their role in the struggle also differ. However, next to the (comparable, yet different) forms of suppression through white supremacy, the conviction which inspired and motivated activists, intellectuals and artists in both settings is the basic belief that a unique experience produces unique cultural artefacts and needs a unique (Black/African) way of judging and analyzing those artefacts. In line with my answer to the previous question on the assumed importance of geographical locations and national provenance, I argue that this standpoint is nothing specific for either activist-intellectuals in South Africa or the USA, but rather a product of anti-colonial and anti-imperial sentiments in diverse geographical settings around the globe in the mid-20th century. The research project on Intellectual conceptualizations of Black and African aesthetics since 1956 sheds light on how trajectories in these settings were informed by each other through transnational circulation of people, goods and ideas under the global condition. Academic conferences, symposia and congresses in history and the arts served as much as a platform for exchange as the publishing houses, political party meetings, and informal gatherings in European capital centers of colonial powers such as Paris, London, and Lisbon. The intellectuals my study focuses on engaged with each of the major centers of “intellectual ferment in the black world” (David Attwell 2006). Urban restlessness and cross-cultural synthesis shaped their biographies and transnational careers. Hence, multiple influences informed the respective trajectories.

A second point I wish to emphasize in my study is the importance of different generations and periods of time. South African poet Peter Horn convincingly elaborated how the influence of American Black thinking on South African Blacks has been continuous since the turn of the century, but he also concedes that especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s the writers’ orientation was predominantly African, not towards America. Actors rather “drew their ideas and inspirations from the struggle of the South African masses in which they were directly involved” (Peter Horn 1978). Therefore, the multiple influences that informed the respective trajectories also changed over time. High importance is given to the topic of Black Arts and Black Critical Standards in the 1960s and 1970s, it appears. But, as I explain in my paper, when in 1976 as the days of the Black Arts movement were already waning, the political situation in South Africa was drastically changing and only beginning to allow for intensified debates. At the end of the 1980s, when the question of how to define and relate to African culture and aesthetics became more prominent again among scholars in the USA, discussions in South Africa continued to deal with the role of black artists and writers in society, because of the prevailing white supremacy and suppression up to 1994.

“Art has the power to upset, to disturb, to make us question our assumptions, to change us. But it also has the power to celebrate our cherished convictions, to pacify us,” formulates Berys Gaut more generally in 2007. These powers of art have made it the recurrent object of ethical hope and concern, he holds. His observations connect to your intriguing thoughts on “emancipatory aesthetics” and what Salman Rushdie terms “emancipatory postmodernism”. This emancipatory impulse is what both the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa and the Black Arts movement in the USA have in common. It is the necessity to construct guiding models with different basic assumptions that inspired intellectuals in the USA and South Africa, because “existing white paradigms or models do not correspond to the realities of Black existence” (James T. Stewart 1971). It is the desire to encounter the “imposition of anonymity on the native” (Olui Oguibe 1999) that erased African art works of the narrative spaces of art history and to sharpen the African consciousness of African artists in order to advocate for “change and continuity”, because “[A]n African artist is as much a victim of dispossession and dehumanization as an African farmer” (Matsamela Manaka 1987). To quote your essay, “philosophical engagement with aesthetic concerns […] incites profound questions concerning human ‘being’” (A. Shahid Stover 2014). Re-Humanization is the common goal of intellectuals in a post-colonial world, with the “struggle for national freedom, human dignity and social redemption” (George Padmore 1956) at the core. Those profound questions and demands stimulated activists in the Black Power and Black Consciousness movements in South Africa and the USA. They also inspired Pan-African and Pan-Asian renaissance and projects all around the globe. During the mid-20th century, intellectuals from diverse backgrounds argued for a new centrality of the human being and new humanism as the medium between the particular and the universal (Francesco Campagnola has provided stunning observations on humanism and renaissance as political tools in 1940’s Japan, for example). They all “turned so as to face” Western philosophy and history which proceeded to generate “what it imagines to be colorless and genderless accounts of knowledge, reality, morality, and human nature” (Alison Baily 2006).

BD - As you mentioned in your work, aesthetics is indeed a battlefield, for as Adorno makes clear – “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, nor its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.” As such, how would you describe your own understanding of aesthetics and thus enter the fray?

LD - I have faced this question frequently during my research and also received several invitations to ‘enter the battle’. I would however state that I am confronting the fray by staying out of it. Please allow me to explain how and why. W. G. Gallie in his remarkable essay on Essentially Contested Concepts (1956) discusses the challenge to work with abstract, qualitative, and evaluative notions that have different interpretations and a variety of meanings. Essentially contested concepts involve endless disputes about their proper use, he explains, and those disputes “cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone”, summarizes Grey in 1977. Both notions of arts and aesthetics involve a widespread agreement on a concept, though there is not an agreement on the best realization thereof. Accordingly, debates about aesthetics, and more specifically Black and African aesthetics, take place at the crossings of several academic disciplines and in their multiple intersections with curatorial practices and art criticism, creative writing and poetry, cultural activism, and Pan-African and African nationalist discussions. Academic disciplines concerned with the topic are art history, anthropology of art and cultural anthropology, cultural philosophy and, if established as an own discipline, aesthetics, as well as various branches of (postcolonial) literary studies, film and visual studies. Black and African aesthetics also feature within the philosophy of race, musicology, and Afro-American or African(a) studies in general. Furthermore, a considerable number of essays on aesthetics are published by lay people, mainly academics from disciplines that are not related to art or philosophy, who decide to share their ideas on the topic. This multiplicity of actors and debates, in addition to the character of the concept as such, obviously makes it very difficult for me as researcher to develop a singular understanding of the notion, as different connotations and interpretations claim validity in the respective realm.

This is why I elaborated quite intensively on my own training in cultural philosophy, because the education in a particular discipline in a specific geographical setting has naturally influenced my own positioning and approach towards aesthetics. Art as well as the study of it are inevitably influenced and mediated by socio-historical conditions that thoroughly implicate any endeavor, as you pointed out. During my comparative research on framings of Black and African aesthetics I had to realize that the totality of descriptions, definitions and characterizations of beauty, art and taste as well as the rules and structures according to which these statements are formulated are not directly linked to the constituted and formalized academic discipline philosophy, even though dominant proponents in Western academia – referring to 18th and 19th century philosophers of the European Enlightenment and the supposed ‘foundation’ of the discipline – would insist on this stance. Vassilis Lambropoulos in The Rise of Eurocentrism. Anatomy of interpretation (1993) for example claims Germany to be a special case in the discussion and, though his finding is questionable, it represents a common understanding of the role of German Enlightenment with regard to aesthetic theory. Terry Eagleton also states a curiously high priority and tenacity of aesthetic matters in modern European philosophy since Enlightenment, and a high status of aesthetics in European thought in general. Nothing entirely novel sprang into being in the mid-18th century concerning the discourse of art, he states, but I follow his opinion that something new is indeed afoot in this period that laid the ground for aesthetics being chosen as the realm to discuss (other) matters that were uncertain or to be (re-)defined. Most definitely, philosophical and artistic traditions from other world regions were consciously or unconsciously excluded in the initial debates of the late 18th and 19th century. Regarding the total absence of direct reference to Oriental art the English philosopher Bernard Bosanquet states in his History of Aesthetic (1892) that he was hardly called upon to deal with an aesthetic consciousness “which had not reached the point of being clarified into speculative theory” and that it seemed natural to him to “exclude everything that did not bear on the continuous development of the European art-consciousness”. Accordingly, Chinese and Japanese art are regarded as “something apart and not well capable of being brought into the same connected story with the European feeling for the beautiful”. 100 years later the deeply rooted presumption of European, and particularly German philosophy and the persistence on self-referentiality has essentially remained unchanged, holds German cultural philosopher Ulrich Lölke (though main argumentations of postcolonial thought have also gradually entered European mainstream philosophy, I would attest). More recently, increasing mobility, intensified world trade, extended media coverage, and constantly rising intercultural relations lead, on the one hand, to the search of culturally defined groups for anchors of identity in a dispersed and changing world. On the other hand, those confrontations of ‘Otherness’ channel the focus on cultural transfers and intercultural interactions as main source for social transformation and change. But, as Dorsch 2002 remarks rather deridingly, the recent European academic discourse is ‘celebrating anti-essentialist identities’, and endeavors to establish an "intercultural philosophy" and the promotion of concepts of “universal” or “global aesthetics” is increasing (e. g. by Urs Stäheli 2002, Wolfgang Welsch 2012). Similarly, renowned philosophers in the USA promote the “universality of arts” (e. g. Ben-Ami Scharfstein 1991, 2009) and come to the conclusion that art is a basic human need. Such essentializing or anthropological ultimate groundings are however frowned upon within postmodern and post-colonial thought. Aesthetic claims of validity are rather expressed in strategies of positioning, localization and asserting one's claims within aesthetic institutions. Homi Bhabha for example elaborates on the complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive reference which are used in the name of “the people” or “the nation”. It is this versatility and overarching presence of the concept of aesthetics that makes it so powerful and influential on the one hand and multiplies positions and argumentations on the other hand.

To summarize: the dispersive debate, splintered into several fractions and schools of thought in various disciplines does not allow for a systematical, comparative approach to academic conceptualizations of Black and African aesthetics and engaging in the debate myself ultimately means ‘coalescing’ with one of the fractions, usually by word-use, disciplinary background, or geographical location. I hence enter the fray by staying out of it – and by always bearing my own positioning in mind when reading, writing, asking and replying. Thank you for giving me the chance to do that.

This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

On behalf of Lena Dallywater and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of Lena Dallywater for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from April 22nd – May 23rd of 2018.)