Questions have always been posed on the relationship between creativity and politics: Is art perpetually called upon to be a site of personal and cultural politics? Why is the social and political liberation of black subjects still being hinged on art expressivity? Through the decades, black artists and black productions in Africa(n) diasporas have been made, seen, and interpreted through a somewhat inflexible category of politics. 1 Does art by the marginalized, the subaltern, the excluded, the forgotten, the dominated, fulfill the liberatory potentials critics ascribed to it? What other possibilities do political art fulfill that transcends the politics? Beyond art as a symbolic system or creative strategies constructed towards fashioning, expressing, or supporting a political agenda , what about the goal of art and its creative processes as means of personal fulfillment or individual aggrandizement?
Contributors to the discourse have played around Murray Edelmanâs contention that, âart is the fountainhead from which political discourse, beliefs about politics, and consequent action ultimately spring.â 2 This is evident in many ways, particularly, the ways art production s have been called upon to fulfill statist politics. Art production was part of the symbolic means of communicating the legitimacy of Obasâ power and majesty by objectifying social fulfillment and embodying social memory in ancient Benin empires. 3 In seventeenth century, Japan art was part of the system of social stratification and power legitimacy by the state and political elite. 4 Artistic productions were also integral to the imperial reign of notorious figures such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who considered the âsoft powerâ of art as a persuasive medium that could complement the brutal and aggressive force of militarism. 5
Art is, therefore, innately political; it innovatively synchronizes life into abstractive, embodied, and visceral forms to both create and share meanings, values, beliefs , and political ethics . 6 Art gives us a perceptible image or sets of images to perceive evocative messages sourced from the social and cultural milieu in which the artist is embedded and which forms the stock from which the transactions of political, cultural, and social identity issues are produced. As Judith Butler once noted, the processing of seeing images is itself never shorn of preemptive sociopolitical biases. When the field of vision is tainted by the schema of identity politics , the processes of viewing the end product is always steeped in the ideological impurities of the context that produces these images. 7 Arts, its producers, consumers, interpreters, and the regulators, are all, therefore, subject to politics. 8 As the meanings we take away from art are subjective, we, within the vast universe of broad meanings artistic production offers, take away an array of connected ideas that encapsulate a reality that we relate to, or which relates to us. While we can, therefore, agree with Edelman that politics is a production of art, we would also assert that art, especially, when it takes on a pedagogical mission, is produced by the politics against which it wages its ideological wars. Indeed, art generates the ideas of heroism, virtue, nobility, and cultural fantasies that we have come to suppose are intrinsic to human moral and cultural essence. These ideas are crucial to political rituals; they grant us a shorthand way of grasping complex materials. However, politics also pushes us to intuit the artistic images with which we discourse with the world to evoke, to provoke, to conscientize, to resist, and to conjure ideal images of the world while we condemn the insalubrious aspects of the real.
Art, therefore, produces politics and politics produce art; both are interlocked in a conjugal embrace of mutually reproducing images through which we understand our world, interpret them, compartmentalize broad and complex human experiences into relatable paradigms, stage our agency and assert the terms of our humanity within the context of our social temporality. Through art , we create and re-create realities of our worlds, revise existing beliefs and assumptions to answer to ongoing anxieties, panic, aspirations, and desires of the audience . Art, therefore, is not merely adjunct to politics neither is it a stream from which political actions and processes flow. The creative processes of art, the poetics, the expansiveness of meanings that spring from artistic innovation are all an integral and interwoven aspect of the political milieu of the artist and his/her audience . Art and its inevitable political interpretation, contrary to assumption, are not floating signifiers per se, they are floated signifiers discharged from a politically imbued imagination , filtered through embodied politics, and dispensed into an ethically charged space thus making the entire chain of artistic production a densely and politically overlayered one.
This book, Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora, a product of an extensive dialogue on the politics of artistic creativity , examines how black artists in Africa and the African diaspora create art as part of the procedures of self-making in their respective universes. We consider that art , whenever it is re-interpreted against the conditions of the present, stimulates ideas, rejuvenates rational stances, reinforces and upturns definitive perceptions, and poses new ways of seeing. Critics, in investigating creativity in art, have, therefore, tried to expand their analyses beyond the definition, aesthetics , practices of production, and the immediate visceral impacts of art, to considering other ethics of creativity such as how the conditions that contribute to creative process also engenders the possibilities of its efficacy or not. 9 Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora goes ahead to investigate the political aesthetics of art and the creativity of black artists and culture that spans across spaces and places. By weaving together chapters and analyses from various regions such as North America, North Africa , West Africa, Latin America , and the Caribbean , Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora examines the efflorescence of black culture and creativity in both national and global contexts.
Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora emerged out of inquiring the politics of black creativity in the twenty first century. Already, anthropologist, Stuart MacLean, urges an understanding of creativity that transcends the mere implication of a facility to solve problems, one that is calibrated to the demands of global capital. Instead, creativity should be considered regarding its force to impel a rethink of both the syncopation of the human imagination and the making of the material universe. By mapping an âexperimental, multiagentive, and pluralistic vision of creativity,â MacLean offers a critical means of escape from the constrictive ideas of creativity. He conceives creativity as a timeless conception of the universe that does not merely replicate originary or cosmogonic models of action but a relational process of interacting actions between non-individuated humans and non-humans. 10 In this collection, the essays go further to explore creativity as an outcome of the contentious yet âintangible chemistryâ between art producers, their cultural milieu, and the reactive ways the latter impugns on the consciousness to stimulate art production . The writers focus on identity politics , social, and cultural changes going on in black cultures in African Diasporas (with its evolving meanings), 11 migration , transnationalism, multiple belongings, and consciousness. These forces, we acknowledge, are no mere backdrops to artistic production just as art is not reducible to a foil to politics. Both art and politics are self-constituting and mutually influencing, thus making political culture integral to art and the creative instinct of black cultures .
This collection is necessitated by the imperatives of investigating black culture in an era of increasing globalization , migration , the flux of identities, and inc...