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The Production of Social Space as Artwork 231
politics and crisis of the subject, and the processes of homogenization and
assimilation of non-Western cultural economies into the framework of late
capitalism. Because most non-Western artistic contexts lack power it is often
easy to either dismiss their importance or altogether ignore them. The history
of modernism in relation to African art is well known in this regard.
Africa fulWlls a role in which it could be absorbed as an astonishing example
of a certain ethnographic turn toward which modernism’s fascination
with alterity has always tended—or in the very worst case as embarrassing
cases of an impossible mimesis. In whatever epistemological mode the African
artist is grounded, in the larger discussions of modernism or contemporary
art it is Wrst on the basis of a pure disavowal, what the critic Hal Foster
calls a process of disidentiWcation. 13 Another way this disidentiWcation occurs
is through appropriation and assimilation of Africa as an effect of certain
tropes of authenticity and cultural purity invested with the power of ethnographic
realism. Most notably, for the African artist authenticity has become
a congenital condition. Authenticity, because it partially hosts in its ambiguous
carapace the kernel of the stereotype, is a burden unsupportable by the
practical, conceptual, and historical forms through which it is represented
in contemporary cultural discourse. Authenticity, rather than afWrming the
continuities of a cultural past (based on nineteenth-century Western romanticism
14 as a general signiWer for an African tradition) in fact comes off more
as the antithesis of such continuities. Authenticity’s primary structure is the
Wction that reproduces it as the Wgure of a unitary, homogeneous belief in
the particularism of an African essence.
Authenticity as an idea toward the standardization, hence banalization,
of the complexity of contemporary African identity appeals to certain
romantic notions of African uniqueness that have been promoted for
so long. Authenticity therefore must be understood as the handmaiden of an
ethnocentric discourse blind to the complexity of the modern map of African
social reality, and doubly blind to the multiplicity of identities forged
in the crucible of colonization, globalization, diaspora, and the postcolonial
social transformation of insular cultural worlds. Authenticity is not only a
vague notion with ambiguous features that no one can possibly identify, let
alone describe its practicability in the context of African artistic procedures,
but also a code for Wxity, absolutism, atrophy. Writers such as Wole Soyinka
and artists such as Issa Samb and the members of Laboratoire AGIT Art in
Dakar were correct in questioning the efWcacy of the ethnocentric model of
negritude in the 1960s. 15 In the same manner in which their critique of negritude
as a universal of the African world functioned, so did their rejection
of the false claims of Eurocentric universalism over the territory of other