Response: Gikandi, Levine and Auerbach

Uh, I haven't seen a precedent, so I hope I'm doing this right. Here's a response to the three readings this week, focusing primarily on the Gikandi. It ran a bit longer than I'd expected - apologies! I'll definitely work on trimming future responses... My first read-through of "Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference" left me sceptical of how far Gikandi had fulfilled the Picasso-centric goals of his piece as laid out in the early passages with his rather general conclusions of "perspective and spectatorship." (476) However, looking at it again, I wonder more appreciatively whether the article does not in its execution mirror the challenge of "displac[ing] Picasso…from [his] ritualised place" (476) he is keen for studies of modernism to take up. After all, the tight focus on Picasso the article begins with gives way to wider considerations of modernism, and allows, particularly, the African 'other's' perspective to dominate such considerations near the close, diluting and eventually edging out the Picasso factor - and thus view from traditional Modernist studies - to finally leave at least this reader with the stronger impression of the African take on the development of modernism. Of course, I say this, but all in all I still can't be sure whether that was Gikandi's intention, or if he simply meandered as was my original impression…

Something else that struck me from the article was an observation that I felt was a disturbing echo of another in Levine's "Ruling an empire," a chapter I thought was a straightforward read, if somewhat heavy on the disdain the author felt for the Empire's belittling of its colonial subjects - certainly it is a justified disdain and the obvious and contemporarily 'proper' way to view colonial rule, but it fairly drips from every other sentence engaging the colonial view of its subjects, a feature of the narration I found distracting in an excerpt with so much factual information. In any case, Levine notes that, in spite of the missionaries' criticism of "imperial policy and practice," they were "nonetheless a part of imperial conquest" (120) - "it was not imperialism as a philosophy that missionaries criticised." (121) Upon reading this, I was immediately put in mind of Gikandi's statement that "even when artists such as Picasso questioned colonial practices, they seemed to reproduce the colonialist model of African societies; they questioned the practice but not the theory of colonialism." (476) As Levine points out, literary portrayal from even the Victorian era of such missionaries has largely been "unflattering," (121) so their duplicity is hardly a surprise; however, to realise that 'revolutionary' artists often respected in literary studies were guilty of the same duplicity that seems self-evident in the case of missionaries does chill me. The insularity that shaped the Western view of the 'other' that is often accepted as fact, that both Levine and Gikandi point out as a flaw of commonly accepted knowledge is thus made real to me with startling clarity, and I realise I still have a way to go in my personal "displacement and deritualisation," as Gikandi would have it. (476) Reflecting thus on my thoughts after reading Auerbach's "The Brown Stocking," this realisation is underlined. Other than a brief raised eyebrow at the effusiveness of "Yet what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking!" (552) I had found very little quarrel with the chapter, thinking it fascinating and enlightening about a topic I still know precious little about. Only after Gikandi and Levine did I think to ponder more on the brief mention of "exotic peoples" (552) and the lack thereof contributing to the development of the modernist technique. Now that I think about it, Auerbach's conclusion thus seems incredibly simplified. I'm not sure what to make of it yet, but at least, thanks to Gikandi's challenge, I'm coming into awareness of the possibility that something may be made of it.

Tan Hui Jun, Jean [HT074193A]