Theoretical Angst and the Myth of Description

I read Don Cosentino's "First Word" and I was moved by it.I have asked similar questions of Africa-and-the-world recently, not just in the area of arts but her entire cultural heritage.Some of my questioning has been motivated by the Martin Beral syndrome in our communities and schools, some by reflections in the commercial press like those in Time that Cosentino cites; but most Bloomington in a Sunday Herald-Times article by Kelly Rota) We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets... (Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, p. 256) Only shallow people insist on disbelief.You and I know better.We understand how reality is invented.A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world.(Don DeLillo, Mao II, p. 132) In the sixties art history's emphasis on formalism and artistic biography, with its attendant interest in connoisseurship, left Africanists wondering how the discipline could contribute to a humanistic understanding of art in the hands and the minds of people.We responded with a renewed and vigorous interest in the contexts of art, and studied those contexts with the same sorts of ethnographic approaches used by anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists.Now Africanists have a new kind of opportunity.The ways we work place us in a position not occupied by other areas of art history, or other branches of the humanities for that matter.And I think that gives us the opportunity to establish a particular kind of usefulness for theory.We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets... (Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, p. 256) Only shallow people insist on disbelief.You and I know better.We understand how reality is invented.A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world.(Don DeLillo, Mao II, p. 132) In the sixties art history's emphasis on formalism and artistic biography, with its attendant interest in connoisseurship, left Africanists wondering how the discipline could contribute to a humanistic understanding of art in the hands and the minds of people.We responded with a renewed and vigorous interest in the contexts of art, and studied those contexts with the same sorts of ethnographic approaches used by anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists.Now Africanists have a new kind of opportunity.The ways we work place us in a position not occupied by other areas of art history, or other branches of the humanities for that matter.And I think that gives us the opportunity to establish a particular kind of usefulness for theory

Art · Literature · Mythology · Psychoanalysis · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology

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