V. Y. Mudimbe
 	Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (born 8 December 1941, Jadotville, Belgian Congo, is a philosopher, professor, and author of poems, novels, and books and articles about African culture. now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.   As a young man, he joined a monastery, but left in 1962 in order to study the forces that shaped African history. He studied in Louvain (PhD, 1970), came back to Congo and flew to the USA in 1979 for political reasons. After teaching at Haverford College and Stanford University, he is currently Professor of Literature at Duke University. His work has had a major impact on many disciplines including Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Literature, and History.  His major book The Invention of Africa (1988).

The Invention of Africa
 	Present-day marginality.
 	Colonization  (colonializing structure)
 	Classification of beings and societies
 	Evolutionary hallucination
 	Issues of 15th (16th) century European painting and allocation of African objects in the 19th century.
 	Foucault

Ascending path from savagery to commercial societies.

 	Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune (10 May 1727 – 18 March 1781) was a French economist and statesman who wrote “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind" (1750). For Turgot progress covers not simply the arts and sciences but, on their base, the whole of culture – manner, mores, institutions, legal codes, economy, and society   Wikipedia
Foucault on Valasquez
 	Painter:  how to depict the models.
 	“a representation [which] undertakes to represent itself…in all its elements…” Las Meninas (1656), by Velasquez

 	What is absent is the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is a resemblance.

Michel Foucault  1926-1984

 	French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity.   Wikepedia

 	Representation
 	Gennea. Engraving according to Hans Burgkmaier’s painting, “Exotic tribes.” Two sheets of a printed ribbon from eight states blocks. Woodcut and letterpress.1511. British Museum. 

 	“Is the painter sitting back contemplating his exotic models”
 	Burgkmair master of school of Augsburg:  please the Fuggers and Welsers.
 	Bartolomaus Springer’s book on his travels.
 	Clumsy sketches.

Imagine the Painter at work
 	Perhaps using a model, presumably white, strongly built: transform into a black entity.

 	Wants both human identity and racial difference. 

 	How to superimpose the African characteristics onto the norms of Italian contrapposto?

Another print by Burgkmeir:  
““The People of Calicut” 
 	Primitives
 	Similitude
 	Identity and Difference
 	Next:  The Triumphzug or Triumphal Procession is one of the great achievements in the history of printmaking. Overall responsibility for its executions was given to Burgkmair, who worked to an iconographic program devised by Jorg Kolderer, the court architect. Maximilian dictated the scheme to his private secretary Marx Treitzsaurwein in 1512, but as with Der Weiss Kunig, the project was brought to a halt by the Emperor's death. The first edition appeared in 1526”  U. of Melbourne web.

 	“The Holy Trinity”  Durer, 1511
How to superimpose African characteristics onto Italian contrapposto
 	The painting should a celebration and a reminder of the natural link connecting human beings and at the same time an indication of racial or cultural differences.
 	Contrapposto is an Italian term that means counterpose. It is used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs.  Wikipedia
 	David, by Michelangelo, 1501-04. The shoulders of the figure are seen to angle in one direction, the pelvis in another.
KUNST, H. J. (1967). L'Africain dans l'art européen. Cologne: Dumont Presse.
 	“One guesses that this nude man was copied from a classic model to which the artist gave characteristics, jewelry and swords, of an exotic people still strongly attached to nature.”

 	Mudimbe:  It could be easy to dismiss my concern as projecting a twentieth century perspective on the pictorial techniques.
Well, what can we do?
 	We can describe his artistic filiation and his dependence upon the classic ideals of the Renaissance.
 	We can compare him to contemporaries dealing with black figures.

 	Moriskentänzer, one of 16 (now 10) Morris Dancers by Erasmus Grasser, Munich 1480
 	Erasmus Grasser (c. 1450 – c. 1515) was a leading sculptor in Munich in the early 16th century  Wikipedia

 	Durer's "Portrait of an African Woman, Katherina" (1521)  Katleen the Moor Woman.

 	Bosch, Hieronymus: The Garden of Earthly Delight 
 	c. 1504; Triptych, plus shutters; Oil on panel; Central panel, 220 x 195 cm; Wings, 220 x 97 cm; Museo del Prado, Madrid 

Bosch  
“Garden of Earthly Delights” details
Cornelis van Haarlem (1562–1638)  Batseba 1594
 	Title Bathseba at her bath. wikidata:Q17335301 
 	Date 1594 

Formalist approach
 	One could in these paintings search for a vision which refers to historically conventional explanations, for example the sense of the characteristics and the idea of design…contours and masses… Fry. 
 	Roger Fry  [close associate of Clive Bell]  1940.
 	“the idea of design…of expression by means of the pure dispositions of contours and masses”  play of colors in harmony and opposition
 	But does not this refer to invisible traces?
A silent But powerful epistemological configuration
 	Foucault: 
 	“how one sees it”
Really expresses a discursive order
 	Signs that they belong to the “savage” universe.
 	The man incarnates power: he is the most well-defined signifier.
 	The picture seems in its simplicity and in the balanced rhythms of its lines seems a truly charming and decorative painting.
 	Yet what it really expresses is a discursive order.  
 	He has represented blackened whites.
Italianized African Women 
Filippo Pigafetta, Odoardo Lopez portoghese, Roma, Bartolomeo Grassi, 1591

 	Frontispiece of John Ogilvy’s Africa being an accurate description of the regions of Ægypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid, the land of Negroes, Guinee, Æthiopia and the Abyssines, London. Printed by Tho. Johnson for the author. 1670.

DOUBLE REPRESENTATION
First, SAMENESS signified by the white norm:  a biblical solution to the problem of cultural difference:  same origin of all humans followed by dispersion, and the bible says the African can only be a slave of his brethren. 
Second, classifies types of identities, cultural distance.  Cultural distance through accumulation of accidental differences:  bracelets etc.

The Portrait of Juan de Pareja” by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, dating from around 1650 
 	Peter Paul Rubens  (1577–1640) “Study of Four Blacks’ Heads”  1620 Title Four Studies of the Head of a Negro 
 	Date first half of 17th century 
 	Rembrandt Two Moors or Two Negroes from 1661 or 1697. The most popular theory has it that Rembrandt encountered these men in Amsterdam.
 	Young Negro with a Bow by Hyacinthe Rigaud 1697
 	“a new epistemological foundation was then functioning in the West”

Taxonomies

Varieties of Homo Sapiens (europaeus, asiaticus, americanus, afer) distinguished according to physical and temperamental characteristics. 
Systema Naturae, Linnaeus

Foucault:  Ordered Tables

 	L. developed a complex classification system for humans. He created the genus Homo which he subdivided into two sub-genera. In one, Homo nocturnes, he placed those apes that appeared to be anthropomorphic. The second, Homo diurnus (or ‘daylight Man’), was reserved for creatures that appeared to be more human.
Homo diurnus was, in turn, divided into three species
 	Homo sapiens were humans proper. The other two species – Homo monstrosus and Homo ferus – were ‘monsters’ of various sorts: monstrous peoples such as Patagonian giants and Alpine dwarves, and monstrous individuals such as the wolf-boy of Hesse and the wild girl of Champagne. 
 	Finally, Linnaeus subdivided Homo sapiens into four ‘varieties’: americanus, europaeus, asiaticus and afer.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (11 May 1752 – 22 January 1840) was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He was one of the first to explore the study of mankind as an aspect of natural history.
Naming and analysis of an alterity
 	The discovery of African art.

 	Constitution of the object of African Studies:  “Africanism” as a scientific discipline.

 	The resemblance has been pushed out of Rubens, Rembrandt, Rigaud perceptions of blacks.

 	Portuguese sailors brought back the first fetishes, thought to have mysterious powers.
 	Some saw them as signs of a state of barbarism, others more frequently as simple curiosities.  They were at first thought of as accounting for the mysterious diversity of the Same.
 	But in the 18th century they began to be seen as strange and ugly:  and it is only then that they “enter into the frame of African art.”

Curio cabinets of Catharina, wife of Douwe Sirtema van Grovestins
"Musei Wormiani Historia", the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities.
African Fetish
 	YAKA, fetishes were protective figures used by individuals, families, or whole communities to destroy or weaken evil spirits, prevent or cure illnesses, repel bad deeds, solemnize contracts or oath-taking, and decide arguments. A diviner or holy person would activate the statue, using magical substances. Fetishes gained power and were effective because people believed in them.

 	“In West Africa, Dahomey was a powerful commercial partner of European traders.”
 	Dahomey Amazons with the King at their head, going to war, 1793.

1793
The Ashanti (also spelled Asante) Empire (1701–1957) 
 	was a West African sovereign state of the Ashanti people of (Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Central region, Eastern region, Greater Accra region, and Western region, of present-day southern Ghana).   Wikipedia

 	Golden Stool (Sika ɗwa) in the Ashanti Kingdom, 1935

 	 Ashanti King's Stool

 	“The Ashanti empire expanded, dominating the Akans…”(604)

 	1772:  “Mansfield declared in England that slavery was against the law.” (604)

 	Slaves on a South 
 	Carolina plantation 
 	The Old Plantation 
 	1790

Mary Henrietta Kingsley
(1862–1900) 
 	was an English ethnographic and scientific writer and explorer whose travels throughout West Africa and resulting work helped shape European perceptions of African cultures and British imperialism.
 	“The African has never made an even fourteenth-rate piece of cloth or pottery.” Kingsley  (605)

 	Kente cloth

 	In the part before the quote Kingsley says that Africans are not at all child-like and have a lot of common sense.  But she does think, as the quote shows, that they “are deficient in the mechanical arts.”   In other places she favors the view that they need the Europeans to show them how to be civilized.
 	The Right Sort of Woman: Victorian Travel Writers and the Fitness of an Empire  Precious McKenzie 2012 Cambridge Scholars.
Not Art?
 	“These objects, which perhaps are not art at all in their ‘native context,’ become art by being given simultaneously an aesthetic character and a potentiality for producing and reproducing other art forms.”  (605)
 	The African arts could not have put Western culture in perspective, for arts are based on criteria which cannot emerge outside of the power/knowledge field of a culture.

 	The primitive pieces then are “wonderful” but also “savage” in terms of the evolutionary chain.

 	Figure 133 Sculpture covered with nails. Nkonde.
Lower Zaire. Yombe, Wood, nails, wooden spear and fabric. H; 97 cm. 
Musee Barbier-Mueller, Geneva

 	FON FETISCH 
 	Benin. H 48 cm.
 	Provenienz:
Schweizer Privatsammlung
 	About 5000 euros.
AS we Saw Earlier

 	Roger Fry  [close associate of Clive Bell]  1940 
No culture in our sense of the word
 	Fry:  “It is curious that a people who produced such great artists did not produce a culture in our sense of the word.  This shows that two factors are necessary to produce the cultures which distinguish civilized peoples.  There must be, of course, the creative artist, but there must also be the power of conscious critical appreciation and comparison.”  (1940)  
 	Mudimbe:  Fry is wrong.  Thee two factors cannot completely account for the internal patterns of cultures:  it is the power-knowledge of an epistemological field which makes possible a domineering or humbled culture.

 	Fry:  “the Negro artist, although capable of …profound imaginative understanding of form, would accept our cheapest illusionist art with humble enthusiasm.” 

My thesis confirmed by African tourist art.

 	B. Jules-Rosette:  “art produced locally for consumption by outsiders.”  1984
 	J-R:  “the concept of the tourist art system emphasizes how artists and their audiences perceive images and convert them into economic commodities”
 	But the idea does not neglect the expressive components of the interaction.
 	There is a system of exchange between producers and consumers (who often have little contact with the artists). 
 	This concept of tourist art implies a critique of the classical understanding of art.
 	It means a relativization of assumptions about manner and quality.
 	Mudimbe:  tourist art [like all art according to my thesis?] is both symbolic and economic exchange.  
 	Three models:  (1) traditional African arts that may be produced for external trade, (2) tension in tourist art between folk art and high culture, (3) tension between high culture and profit motives.
 	Jules-Rosette:  tourist art depends on Western demand for the “exotic” but this can be stimulus for new ideas to meet these needs.
 	Bronze memorial head made at the height of the Benin culture, between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries.

 	Pendant Mask: Iyoba, 16th century Nigeria; Edo, Court of Benin Ivory, iron, copper (?); H. 9 3/8 in. (23.8 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art