Abstracts
|
|
Abstracts |
This paper attempts to explore the current uses and misuses of the notion of globalization in relation to the artistic production of cultures usually assumed to reside on the periphery of influences flowing from cosmopolitan centers. It begins with a review of the terminology of cultural encounter (the "shadows" and "mirrors" of the title), from "contact" to "assimilation" to "adaptation", "syncretism" and "creolization". What happens to this discourse when an essentially economic model such as globalization is applied to cultural, and specifically artistic, practice in far-flung places? I will argue, following Fabian, that we are at a moment in time when the connections of the local to the global (typically using modernity as the connective thread) are very inadequately theorized. Looking to several actual case studies in Africa from both the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth, I suggest that (a) modernity is not the only vector of change, (b) history is at least as important as spatialization and (c) art comes from art at least as often as it results from social change, which requires a great deal more complexity of explanation than the model of Western culture as a predatory steam-roller flattening everything in its path, or only slightly more accurate, globalization as a virus which spreads everywhere and for which there is no known vaccine or cure.