AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	2. Representation of the African Family of the 21st Century
Paper ID	680
Author(s)	Schipper, Mineke
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Literature and the arts are important media reflecting insiders’ perspectives on cultural traditions. Contemporary African writers comment upon the impact of modernity in a globalising society, and so do African painters. In African literatures written in English and French since colonial times, there has been a tendency to associate women more with ‘tradition’ and men with ‘modernity’ in matters regarding cultural identity and cultural change. The extremely popular Song of Lawino by Okot p’Bitek was a case in point. In this paper I’ll explore some Congolese urban paintings commenting upon the social conditions of family life today. Representations in such visual stories are clearly marked by consequences of modernity. New narratives in word and image have been created as a resul¬t of the overall processes of dige¬sting globalisation. All verbal and visual narratives hide unofficial agendas under the surface, and we must look for those hidden messages. My approach to analysing the visual narratives in the paintings concerned will be inspired by asking the usual critical questions practiced in cultural analysis: Who is (re-)presented and who is not? Who is speaking? Who is seeing? Who is acting? What does the narrator or the artist consider worth including in the narrative? What is ‘natu¬rally’ omitted from the narrative? What kinds of opinions are expres¬sed and to what extent are they consis¬tent with other (expres¬sed or silen¬ced) opinions? What are the characters striving for? Are they acting individually or as a group? Are they acting in accord with each other or are they opposing each other's inte¬rests? Such questions can be critical¬ly applied (or adapted) to all verbal and visual contexts. In their own specific ways contemporary verbal and visual narratives comment upon the conditions of modernity as experienced in the family in the Congolese capital today. The paintings mirror direct or indirect views of what ‘ideal’ family relations ought to be like. Women writers and artist painters are extremely rare in Congo; and usually the popular song writers are also men. The Congolese cultural production, then, strongly reflects male perspectives on male and female roles in life, on the family crisis, witchcraft, and so forth. For reasons of limited time and space, I’ll concentrate on fragments of what seems to be a master narrative in the various urban paintings concerned. This master narrative mirrors the gendered body in terms of social crisis and crumbling family relations. Through the mirror of the present urban family realities the paintings remind people of how things ought to be from the painter’s point of view. In words and images they are trying to weave a new narrative in which all hope is not lost.

Congolese Urban Family Paintings in a Globalizing Context