‘Heritage comes from the past’: cultural policy rhetoric & the problem of contemporary arts in Francophone Africa

Kinsey Katchka
North Carolina Museum of Art

This paper considers the critical role of policy rhetoric in shaping the ideological and philosophical frameworks in which modern and contemporary African arts are created and exhibited. To do so, I problematize the tension between tradition-based heritage and modern/contemporary visual arts in state cultural rhetoric since the colonial period. Drawing on research carried out in Senegal since 1996, I consider the paradigmatic oppositions undergirding the distinction between ‘heritage’ and ‘contemporary’ as articulated in the rhetoric, policy and practice of African arts and heritage.

Though museums constitute an essential component of this research, my intention here is not to critique the institutions and policies that shape national heritage in Africa, a task I and other scholars have undertaken elsewhere. Instead, I interrogate the more fundamental underpinnings that structure policy’s inherent contradictions, exclusions, and ideologies. To parse the disjuncture between contemporary arts and heritage discourse, then—in Francophone Africa and elsewhere—I turn to literature exploring culturally specific concepts of time. Here, I suggest that assumptions of Enlightenment-based thought, in which history is conceived as linear and qualitatively progressive, informs nationalist policy and creative practice in the present day.