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From the Editors BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] In Bamako we say, “I ka nye tan,” which, in English, means “You look well,” but, in fact, it means, “You look beautiful like that.”

Seydou Keita

H

ow the black body has been imaged in the West has always been a rich site for global examination and contestation. The representation and depiction of black peoples often has been governed by prevailing attitudes about race and sexuality. From the ubiquitous Renaissance paintings that picture black people as the sublime backdrop or purposely attracting the lustful gaze of the other, to the 2012 French Elle magazine’s article on First Lady Michelle Obama’s sense of style finally filtering down to the fashion-strapped black masses, to the 2012 Italian Vogue special issue on African fashion, there is evidence that discussion of the black body remains relevant. How the black body is displayed and viewed changes with each generation, constantly allowing young diasporic innovators from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean to add their own ideas about reinvention and self-representation. To be sure, the universality of black culture and its global presence has played a leading role in mainstream sports, music, performance, fashion, and visual arts, with implications worthy of much critique.

Paris, an internationally key and highly influential Western space in all things concerning the visual arts and modernity, was the perfect stage for Black Portraiture[s]: The Black Body in the West, the fifth in the series of visual art conferences organized by Harvard University and New York University since 2004 and jointly presented in 2013 with L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), musée du quai Branly, and Cornell University. We were honored to participate as conference organizers with professionals representing a wide range of disciplines. They included Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Harvard University, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute); Manthia Diawara, Lydie 6 • Nka

Diakhaté, and Jaira Placide (New York University, Institute of African American Affairs); Awam Ampka (New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis); Thelma Golden (The Studio Museum in Harlem); Jean-Paul Colleyn (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Centre d’études Africaines); and Anne-Christine Taylor-Descola, Anna Laban, and Christine Barthe (Musée du quai Branly).

The essays offered in this special issue of Nka were gathered from that historic meeting in Paris from January 17 to 20, 2013, and offer the most cutting-edge perspectives on the production and skill of black self-representation, desire, and the exchange of the gaze from the nineteenth century to the present day in fashion, film, art, and the archive.

Artists, historians, designers, writers, and image makers from around the world gathered in Paris to discuss the state of the black portrait circulating in the present and in the past. They asked: How are these images—both positive and negative—exposed to define, replicate, and transform the black body?

Why and how does the black body become a purchasable, global marketplace, and what are its legacies? In what visual and nonvisual spaces do these images and instances either take permanent residence, reemerge, recycle, or simply become illegible? How can performing blackness be liberating for both the performer and the audience? Can the black body be deracialized to emphasize cultural groupings, encouraging appropriation and varied performances across racial lines? Finally, and importantly, what are the responses and implications?

These are some of the questions that were posed over the four-day conference held at noteworthy venues across the snowy city of Paris, including L’École des Beaux-Arts, the Université de Paris 7, and the musée du quai Branly, where a riveting film series was held on the last day. Discussions also focused on aesthetics, vernacular style, fashion, and ethnography in describing a sense of place and identity. Day after day, participants and presenters conducted diverse visual readings of the notion of the black portrait while challenging conventional perspectives on identity, beauty, cosmopolitanism, and community in Africa and its diaspora.

Through a series of panels, films, and readings, Black Portraiture[s] included a wide range of

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641612 © 2016 by Nka Publications

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discussions relating to the experiences of a people who have been caricatured through much of visual history, particularly in nineteenth-century anthropological and colonial photography. Presenters also explored how African men and women used photography, and later environmental portraiture, film, fashion, art, and performance, to experiment with varied ideas of themselves and to ultimately honor how they see themselves and wish to be seen by others. For example, they demonstrated how some photographers, often in collaboration with their subjects, created idealized poses, while others displayed active confidence through style and dress.

Scholars, artists, and writers alike unabashedly proved how these individuals sought to celebrate their beauty and style, whether in Senegal, France, Jamaica, New York, or all around the world.

As in the past, photographs and film today are considered visual testimony of a collective memory.

Even now, race and power guide our visual reading of these images, which both entice and incite. What we imagine and know about these subjects through the visual image is mediated through the insight of curators, historians, writers, poets, photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists and is framed within the experience of the idealized portrait, whether in art, fashion, film, or documentary photography.

“Having a portrait taken by [the well-known Malian photographer] Seydou Keita . . . signified that the sitter was modern,” according to Manthia Diawara.

“To go before Keita’s lens is to pass the test of modernity, to be transformed as an urbane subject even if one has no power in the market or at the train station.”1 Thus, African photographers today are reconstructing their experiences of life by capturing moments through visual testimony. Writers and curators today are framing exhibitions in novel ways in urban spaces as well as in popular museum settings. By including a discussion of fashion, we continue to bring international attention to contemporary designers and photographers and bring to light the social and aesthetic impact their work has made in defining this art form. Some authors use theoretical and analytical tools of art history and film studies, while others mine the wealth of popular imagery to demonstrate the complexity found in mapping and reading both historical and

contemporary black portraiture. All in all, we believe that the essays presented in Black Portraiture[s] offer an important collective story told through multiple voices.

What makes this collection of essays so exciting and critical is its broad focus on the black portrait and the important aesthetic and ideological issues it continues to engage. Drawing on the ideas and works of leading and emerging writers of our time while including the discussions of photographers, scholars, artists, curators, and filmmakers of the African diaspora, the Black Portraiture[s] conference clearly revolved around collaboration, building upon the strengths of each of the organizing institutions as well as the curators, writers, artists, filmmakers, and photographers whose visualization of the African diaspora has guided these crucial discussions about art and representation. By featuring some of the most extraordinary writers, historians, artists, and theorists working today, we hope this special issue of Nka, based on the conference, enables readers to see that the image remains ever powerful in an age where black lives matter.

Cheryl Finley is an associate professor and director of visual studies in the Department of the History of Art at Cornell University. Deborah Willis is professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Notes

1 Manthia Diawara, “Talk of the Town,” Artforum 36 (February 1998): 67.

Finley/Willis

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