Sounds Of Blackness,Signs Of Whiteness

My blog-reading is, and is likely to continue to be for some time, confined to a few people Although "confined" is the wrong word in this context, "expanded" would be better. I am floating like a butterfly across an expanse of wild and brightly-coloured flowers.

An track by Sounds of Blackness (turn up the volume before clicking the link) was on the virtual turntable when I came across a couple of posts which fitted together so well I'm absolutely determined to pass them on. (I've tried to do this many times before for many other things but am time-poor...)

The trail started with a GV link to the blog France Watcher which reports on one man's campaign to honour his compatriots and rid his country of colonial monmuments. Mboua Massok defaced a statue of a French general which stands in Independence Square in Douala, the largest city in Cameroon. And he's proud of it, openly admitting to the deed in court. He says:


The trial is not about his person but about “colonisation, acculturation, and alienation…". According to Massok, the real issue here is not about defaced public property, but about Cameroonian national identity, and the imperative to Cameroonize public spaces such as streets, public, buildings and monuments: “Does General Leclerc, a French soldier, deserve to be honored at the Bonajo [Douala] independence square of all places, at the expense of Cameroonian martyrs such as Douala Manga Bell and Ngosso Din?”


"Deface" doesn't do justice to that multicoloured garb - red and green and purple and brown. As far as I can tell. The graffiti reads "To be demolished in 180 days. Our martyrs first." Mr Massok had already attempted to destroy the statue with a chisel (and failed) before turning to paint.


It reminded me of the work of Yinka Shonibare who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize a couple of years ago. He plays with ideas of race, class and identity and is perhaps best-known for his tableaux based on European history in which the mannequins are dressed in "African" fabric, itself often the product of the colonial nations exported back to the colonies.
But in a way both these examples of representations flow in one particular direction. Over at Naijablog Jeremy has an alternative suggestion, another current - the disruption of the symbolic economy of the white body:


The West has ownership of the production of signs, meaning and representation, thanks to an all-powerful corporate media machine. Many non-westerners are drawn to the glow of this symbolic economy like moths to a flame. It seems to me that an important but neglected project is to find effective ways of disupting this semiotic regime. One such strategem is to produce images of the white body which contradict this representational norm.


Turning the messages inside out. Black aid workers feeding skeletal white children. White beggars sifting through the rubbish in Lagos or Johannesburg - something one of his commenters has seen. Removing some of the marketing miasma.