Beautiful/Ugly - African and Diaspora Aesthetics, edited by Sarah Nuttall
reviewed by Carol Brown
The intersections between 'beautiful' and 'ugly' in Africa and its diaspora form the basis of this book. Both concepts are subjective and have different meanings in different places and at different times. Western art history, literature and aesthetics have imposed certain ideas of beauty upon us, and it is these which this book interrogates and challenges.
In her introduction, editor Sarah Nuttall states that beauty in Africa has an ugly history - it has been viewed in racist ways which are largely derived from unexamined whiteness. Black has been considered threatening - darkness is evil, black people are savage and so on. She proposes that the question of beauty in Africa has been understood historically within four types of inscription:
Firstly, that of Africa and Africans as the figure of the ugly. She discusses Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye where Morrison describes how beauty must always be an occasion for looking, while the act of looking adjudicates what is beautiful and what is not, according to its own terms. Pablo Picasso also turned his Western eyes on Africa for his inspiration which at the same time filled him with 'terror and disgust'.
The second register which she considers is that of anthropology where the quest for the 'noble savage' was the aim of the coloniser viewing the African through his white eyes. This attitude also led to the Negrophile movements in Paris which used signs and objects of fetishism and primitivism to imply modernity. We have recently read much about Saartjie Baartman and how she was exoticised and exploited due to her 'African difference'.
Then there is the relationship to the market place of African beauty, especially in current museum exhibitions where Euro-American curators have 'hi-jacked' notions of African-ness for their own advancements, often excluding the African producers from the global arena.
Finally there is the view that African beauty is frivolous and therefore dismissed in relation to the sublime power of economics or politics.
The choice of essays in the book considers its premise in the widest sense. The visual is expanded to include questions of taste, even taste in the literal meaning of the word - in the African sense food is vital to how we understand the world. There are few memories so powerful as those of the smells, the sight and the sensation of food, where it can recall desire and loss. This aspect of beauty is one which has seldom been explored in the realm of the aesthetic. The beauty and creativity of food has mainly been celebrated in cook books. Cheryl-Ann Michael's evocation of edible pumpkin flowers, for example, evokes a time gone by (is it that far from Proust?).
William Kentridge writes about the dilemma of finding beauty in horror such as in the forensic photographs from which he has worked. This beauty is not about the image but it is rather about how the action of drawing is transformative - he describes it as 'a series of equivalences and negotiations between the paper and the object'. The image maps its own history - a history taken from associations of other drawings, other lines, other shadows.
Photographs also feature in Mark Gevisser's essay. The photographs are 1950s images of cross-racial desire in apartheid Johannesburg which, together with photographs of men which challenged sexual stereotyping, led him to consider the 'history of pain in beauty'. These ideas pick up through the book in other considerations of the ideal body type which, in apartheid South Africa, was white, masculine and heterosexual.
The ugly represented as shocking, strange, monstrous and fantastic is the focus of Michelle Gilbert's essay on Ghanaian popular posters. She discusses painted plywood boards on the streets which advertise morality plays - a part of all-night open air concert parties. The audience for this dwindling art form is mainly semi-literate men, and a few days before the performances large boards are erected to advertise the show. These feature images of fearful creatures such as witches devouring children, seven-headed snakes, grotesque images of women giving birth to snakes and other monsters of the wildest imagination. The plays, however, all end with a strong moral message and the posters are of a genre of their own with a language which speaks to the people and taps into a 'different' aesthetic.
These are but a few of the issues tackled in this book which presents the work of 18 writers. The book's strength lies in the quality and diversity of the articles, which draw upon a multi-disciplinary approach to a complex topic. It is informed by a sophisticated theoretical underpinning and looks through a wide lens at a relatively under-explored issue in the African context. Beauty is taken in the widest sense of the word and many Western ideas are challenged and examined in order to present a different aesthetic. Although the text is sometimes dense and academic it is approached in a readable, accessible manner which is thoroughly referenced and reinforced by a large number of coloured illustrations. These, at times, provide a weak point, in that the reproduction quality is not of the highest standard, but somehow the nature of the book allows for this. It is not a coffee table book but rather a serious examination of its topic. Many of the photographs are taken from previous fieldwork and many are video stills nd their re-photographing would not always have been possible. The information therein contained is intrinsic to the book and forms an often unseen resource.
The format of the book makes it comfortably readable and the divisions by colour add a liveliness to the publication. The book straddles the world of academia and that of pleasurable reading. It opens up interesting areas of debate and discussion and places the aesthetics of Africa on a global platform.
The book won the recent Arts Council for African Studies Association book award in the category for multiple authors (see ArtThrob May News).
Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Edited by Sarah Nuttall
Language: English
ISBN -13:978-0-8223-3918-2
