CONSTRUCTING HISTORY AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION: THE THING, TIME, AND SPACE IN AFRICAN ART

Frank Ugiomoh b.a.; ph.d.
University of Port Harcourt.

Every age is a modern and contained within any given modernity are forces that are opposed to each other. They are those of tradition as convention; and invention as what needs to be done within apparent limitations, which reflexive relationships with tradition allows. In history as narrative a problem confronts attempts to understand the past where the past is contained in the present. The agenda of historicism, which discards how tradition overlies invention, is central to such impasse. Applied to non – western cultures modernist vision remains burdened with seeking cleavages. Such obsession alters perception when in consideration of the object of culture and how cultures stand against each other. Attempts to understand African art as history is fraught with the above predicament.

Debates around the problem stack such discourse options as ‘the otherness syndrome,’ ‘the discourse of difference,’ sub-altern studies etc. Latin American and Asian focus on the impasse has continued in counter reposition on the historical value of the thing. An African response, especially from the continent, has hardly engaged the limiting propositions cast on the understanding of African art as history. Required then, as primary objective here, is to look again at time and space coordinates and how temporal identities such as prehistory, traditional and contemporary privilege matching understanding of human ‘acts’ reposes in the object or ‘thing’.

To this end I provide specific sketches on the rupestral art of Southern Africa, traditions of Benin art and their continuity in contemporary culture, while they share time and space with the manifestly modern. Drawing on Foucauldian historiography on time values, as well as how time can be appreciated within the web of happening occasioned by experience, I aim at redirecting attention to multiple moments of time with regard to the cultural location of the thing.