Déborder la Négritude

Déborder la Négritude is a tremendously welcome anthology on twentieth century Senegalese art. It introduces French audiences to research by several Anglophone scholars, whose work appears in dialogue with European and Senegalese scholars. The book further presents several significant Senegalese artists in their own words through interviews conducted with them between the years of 2003 and 2019. Presented in French with several essays translated from the English by Zoé Jourdain, this book presents Senegalese, French, and North American viewpoints on Senegalese postcolonial art in equitable dialogue. The book traces key movements from the 1960s through their interpretation by artists of subsequent generations, making a strong contribution to scholarship of Senegalese art by dismantling stereotypes associated with the well-studied Ecole de Dakar artists and the first generation of teachers/scholars at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts du Senegal. It further presents the important work being done by subsequent generations of artists working from the 1990s through today as part of a sustained discussion of art (and politics) from the 1960s to the present.Déborder la Négritude emerges from an international symposium “Dakar: scènes, acteurs et décors artistiques. Reconfigurations locales et globales?” held at the Instititut National d'Histoire de l'Art (INHA) from April 27–28, 2017. Mamadou Diouf and Maureen Murphy were the co-organizers of the conference, and the chapters in their current anthology arise from the papers read at this symposium and the artists interviewed during the proceedings. The goal of the symposium at the time was to situate the work of contemporary Senegalese artists into the history of modern art making in Senegal. Beginning with the influence of inaugural president L.S. Senghor and his role in creating and sustaining the national art school (now the ENA–Ecole Nationale des Arts) in Dakar, the organizers proposed further discussion around the role of the art biennales, begun under Senghor in the late 1960s and reconstituted in the early 1990s for their creation of an art market for today's artists (INHA 2017). The unquestioned strength of this symposium was that Murphy and Diouf brought together scholars and artists from three continents to focus on how contemporary Senegalese art has been formulated and practiced in a globally cognizant, internationally strategic manner from its inception.The book is primarily dedicated to the scholars and artists at the 2017 conference, although not every 2017 presentation appears here, while some papers not presented in 2017 are included in the book. It is divided into three sections, which largely progress in chronological order from independence to the present. The first section, “Récits esthétiques et politiques,” begins with Joshua I. Cohen's take on “art nègre” and the artistic events of the 1960s, including the founding of the École de Dakar under Senghor. Coline Desportes and Giulia Paoletti further contribute to the Senghorian era through their important dissections of the French influences on artists, photographers, and certainly on Senghor himself. Murphy adds context by highlighting the impacts of the major Senegalese traveling exhibition L'art sénégalais d'aujourd'hui in 1974. Emmanuelle Chérel contributes a fascinating new reading of the artists Joe Ouakam (Issa Samb) and Vincent Meessen, who both based projects off of a photograph of Omar Blondin Diop, a Senegalese anticolonial revolutionary and promoter of street performance art who died under suspicious conditions in a jail on Gorée Island while serving a three-year prison sentence. In reading these essays as a group, what they do well is delete the notion of Senghor as the only political influence on the arts of the 1960s–80s and point out how other artists and revolutionaries were joined in a more fervent and desperate struggle against colonialism, assimiliation, and the embrace of French values that seemingly pervaded all art produced during the Négritude period.In the section “Confrontations et débordements,” four authors bring the reader out of the Senghorian period and into the thirty years spanning the 1990s to the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Diouf looks at the work of El Hadji Sy1 in order to examine one artist's refusal of Négritude aesthetics and his signature importance in the development of a post- (or rather anti-) Négritude art style. Elizabeth Harney takes another tack, examining how artists such as Cheikh Ndiaye and non-Senegalese artists have looked back to the Senghorian period, now conceptualized as “modern,” and committed to a sort of intentional nostalgia, what Harney terms the “retromodern,” in projects featured in the 2018 edition of the Dak'Art Biennale. El Hadji Malick Ndiaye uses the image of the “vortex” to capture the importance of the Dak'Art Biennales from the 1990s to the present. He argues they served not just as important platforms for emerging African artists, but more crucially for the creation of Dakar as a primary destination city for the production and consumption of contemporary art in the global market. This, of course, was the subject of Joanna Grabski's 2017 book, Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar. As the book has not yet appeared in French, Grabski's summary of its main arguments here provides a helpful précis for French readers.This brings us to the third and final section of the book, “Dialogues,” which features master Senegalese artists Iba Ndiaye, Viyé Diba, Soly Cissé, Diadji Diop, Cheikh Ndiaye, and El Hadji Sy in conversation with Murphy, Diouf, Malick Ndiaye, and Grabski in regards to the issues discussed by the scholars at the conference in Paris and Senegalese postcolonial art more generally. With the exception of Iba Ndiaye's (2003) and El Hadji Sy's (2019), all of the artist interviews were conducted at the 2017 conference. Therefore, there is slight dissonance between the printed scholarly essays and the artist's commentaries, which reflect the discussions of the 2017 conference, and not the essays that appear in this volume. That being said, the last chapter in the book, Sy's 2019 interview, discusses neither the 2017 conference nor the preceding chapters. Murphy instead focuses her questions on historical exhibitions (l'Art sénégalais d'aujourd'hui, Magiciens de la terre, 7 Stories About African Arts), asking Sy to comment on them or look back at his role (in the case of Magiciens, his non-role) in these pivotal moments. This interview feels short and choppy, as if snippets were extracted and stitched together rather incongruously. Sy mentions his frustration with André Magnin, who approached him about participating in the 1989 Magiciens de la Terre exhibition. Sy's comments that he was not a “magician or sorcerer” deserve more time, given that this was a primary concern about the racist, Eurocentric pedagogy of Magiciens. Yet Murphy's next question is to ask about the 7 Stories exhibition in 1995. It feels like much was left out of this one exchange, and I was left wanting to ask Sy so much more about that moment in the late ‘80s.What is most exciting about this volume is the multitude of voices and perspectives, from artist to historian, emerging scholar to established practitioner. There is ample room for the hidden and understudied stories emerging from Senegalese art practice over the last sixty years. So many “cooks in the kitchen” could have had the effect of creating a dissonant and incoherent cacophony of opinions, and yet this anthology avoids this. Given that the focus of the 2017 conference and this volume is the legacy of the Senghorian period and the way subsequent generations of artists have internalized that history, the contributors are all presenting different pieces of the same larger puzzle. The many contributors fill in gaps in the knowledge record of Senegalese art since independence, and the most successful moments in the book are when scholars and artists correct each other and help each other see a much bigger picture by putting all their information at each other's disposal.For example, Murphy asks Soly Cissé about how he positions himself in relation to the artists who preceded him. Did he see himself as following in their footsteps or was he in disagreement with them during his artistic training at the École Nationale (p. 215)? His complete answer comes over several pages: his artistic practice is freedom. He was trained by artist-professors, he and his contemporaries were thus grounded in the history of African art taught to them, but they were willing to exploit this history for a new purpose, Cissé says, for the new needs of the times (p. 215). Cissé describes his complete independence from the thoughts and practices of his teachers and colleagues via his work with live sheep in one exhibition (p. 217). It is one thing to be taught; it is another to take what one has been taught and radically bend it into a new form. So no, is his ultimate answer to Murphy. He is not the inheritor of a legacy that must be safeguarded and preserved, he is free to do what he wants with that history. As he puts it, to be “Senegalese and sculpt [Roman] gladiators” (p. 219).Cissé's comments find unexpected support in the words of Iba Ndiaye, one of the founding professors hired by Senghor to set up the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Ndiaye points out in his interview with Murphy that the three founding professors (Papa Ibra Tall, Pierre Lods, and Ndiaye) were frequently at odds with each other, constantly disagreeing on what should be taught and how. When Cisse and his peers were studying at the École, its very founders (and successors) were still in disagreement on its pedagogy, so there was no unified vision for Cissé to follow or rebel against, leaving him and his fellow student artists free to develop their own paths. The seemingly homogenized state-art of Négritude was always more dynamic than it appeared, and this is buttressed by Chérel's arguments about artists actively pushing back on Senghor's vision while he was ostensibly in charge of the arts and the government. Issa Samb's rebellion against the École was therefore a default rejection of the state, his artistic interventions much closer to political revolution than previously described. If there is a common thread throughout the formation and development of art in Senegal after 1960, it is the undeniable fact that art since this time is inextricably married to politics. Happy marriage or not, the two have never finalized a divorce.A single criticism emerges in this book, one that was also present in the 2017 symposium in Paris: while the work of emerging scholars is presented in both (Cohen, Paoletti, Desportes), the work of emerging artists is not. Further, while the work of female scholars was well represented at both, the work of female artists was hardly present (Harney's essay being an exception), and no female Senegalese artists were mentioned in any essays or included as artist presenters/interviewees. As women artists in Senegal have practiced alongside the male artists featured in this volume, especially since the 1990s, they are appropriate interlocutors for a volume that sets out to surpass the (patriarchal) legacy of Négritude. The inclusion of more emerging artists—male and female—who have inherited not just the École de Dakar style, but also the Laboratoire Agit-Art, Set-Setal, récupération, retromodern, hip-hop, and street styles along with their experiences in a myriad of international schools, travels and exhibitions would have made this book all the more perfect

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