Books by Samuel Mark Anderson
Oxford University Press, 2020
The Art of Emergency charts the maneuvers of art through conflict zones across the African contin... more The Art of Emergency charts the maneuvers of art through conflict zones across the African continent. Advancing diverse models for artistic and humanitarian alliance, the volume urges conscientious deliberation on the role of aesthetics in crisis through intellectual engagement, artistic innovation, and administrative policy. Across Africa, artists increasingly turn to NGO sponsorship in pursuit of greater influence and funding, while simultaneously NGOs-both international and local-commission arts projects to buttress their interventions and achieve greater reach and marketability. The key values of artistic expression thus become "healing" and "sensitization," measured in turn by "impact" and "effectiveness." Such rubrics obscure the aesthetic complexities of the artworks and the power dynamics that inform their production. Clashes arise as foreign NGOs import foreign aesthetic models and preconceptions about their efficacy, alongside foreign interpretations of politics, medicine, psychology, trauma, memorialization, and so on. Meanwhile, each community embraces its own aesthetic precedents, often at odds with the intentions of humanitarian agencies. The arts are a sphere in which different worldviews enter into conflict and conversation.
To tackle the consequences of aid agency arts deployment, volume editors Samuel Mark Anderson and Chérie Rivers Ndaliko assemble ten case studies from across the African continent employing multiple media including music, sculpture, photography, drama, storytelling, ritual, and protest marches. Organized under three widespread yet under-analyzed objectives for arts in emergency-demonstration, distribution, and remediation-each case offers a different disciplinary and methodological perspective on a common complication in NGO-sponsored creativity. By shifting the discourse on arts activism away from fixations on message and toward diverse investigations of aesthetics and power negotiations, The Art of Emergency brings into focus the conscious and unconscious configurations of humanitarian activism, the social lives it attempts to engage, and the often-fraught interactions between the two.
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Articles by Samuel Mark Anderson
Cultural Anthropology, 2019
Descending on the capital city of Freetown a decade after Sierra Leone’s civil war, members of th... more Descending on the capital city of Freetown a decade after Sierra Leone’s civil war, members of the Sierra Leone Indigenous Traditional Healers Union (SLITHU) unearthed countless “witch guns,” apprehended dozens of malevolent witches, and endeavored to rehabilitate culprits as productive citizen herbalists. The organization’s leader, President Field Marshal Alhaji Dr. Sulaiman Kabba, described these operations as a “disarmament program” for witches, discursively echoing postwar disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs previously imposed by the United Nations. Moreover, he dubbed SLITHU’s interventions “a rebranding effort,” appropriating pervasive marketing rhetorics. This article follows Kabba’s example by successively examining the disarmament campaign through the discourses of antiwitchcraft, postwarcraft, and rebrandcraft. A common logic underlying all three discourses hinges on a spectacular politics by prospection, exposing aspirations for social transformation but displacing the labor of change from leaders to their putative clients. The illusory effects of witch-finding, postwar reintegration, and rebranding epitomize models of contemporary neoliberal governance built on an unstable foundation of trust rather than material investment, leaving them vulnerable to devastating collapse.
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Africa, 2018
Grotesque and vulgar, the masked character Gongoli upends the codes of Mende decorum in his madca... more Grotesque and vulgar, the masked character Gongoli upends the codes of Mende decorum in his madcap pursuit of laughs. His impropriety goes so far as to allow his mask to fall, comically revealing the identity of his dancer and subverting the anonymity so elemental to his fellow spirits’ vaunted status. Yet despite such transgressions, he stands among the most beloved figures of Sierra Leone’s rich performance traditions. Gongoli’s popularity hinges on his irreverence towards the fundamental laws of masked dance, laws that also regulate the balance between individual agency and communal responsibility, between internal desire and external restraint. The only quality necessary to play Gongoli is shamelessness (ngufe baa), and the greatest performers are acrobats braving risks that are not physical, but social. This article follows Siloh, an itinerant performer whose celebrity inheres in his uncanny similarity to the Gongoli he often plays. The composite figure Siloh Gongoli exemplifies a comic aesthetic relished throughout Sierra Leone in storytelling, ritual, festivals, videos and radio shows. Although mobilized for different ends, each of these conventions undermines principles of self-effacement, gerontocratic privilege and esoteric power by shamelessly playing with and within the existential tensions between interior and exterior selves.
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e-misférica, 2009
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Other Publications by Samuel Mark Anderson
The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, 2019
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American Ethnologist, May 2016
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caa.reviews, May 2016
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Conference Presentations by Samuel Mark Anderson
Amid the 2014-15 West African Ebola crisis, so-called traditional medicine was vilified as a majo... more Amid the 2014-15 West African Ebola crisis, so-called traditional medicine was vilified as a major potential vector for transmission, yet nonetheless bore minimal impact on the epidemic’s spread. One important instance that was attributable to herbalism was the reputed index case for Sierra Leone, a healer who unwittingly treated a Guinean with Ebola. Through an incoherent series of misunderstandings, clumsy notifications, and outright deception, this case escaped containment and lead to the majority of early infections across the country. One factor was a pervasive rumor suggesting the healer’s death was precipitated by a curse brought down by her spirit familiar, a giant snake accidentally released by her nosy husband. Such reports were not mere superstition, but grounded in the experience of spectacles by local magicians using snakes, scorpions, and other dangerous animals to demonstrate mystic powers and anti-venoms. Meanwhile, early sensitization materials by NGOs misrepresented Ebola and undermined diagnosis. Local populations were open to biomedical interpretations of the disease, yet the cursed snake narrative was more logically consistent than an arbitrary eruption of a hitherto alien malady presented with an unrealistically broad spectrum of symptoms. Moreover, the virus spread to the broader population not through the healer’s herbalism, but via her professional connections as a birth attendant at the local government hospital where it entered an overtaxed and undertrained public health system. Such circumstances reveal that each progressively disastrous stage of the outbreak resulted not from any single explanation, but rather through the confluence of multiple incoherencies.
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Through extravagant public “disarmaments” from 2009-11, the Sierra Leone Indigenous Traditional H... more Through extravagant public “disarmaments” from 2009-11, the Sierra Leone Indigenous Traditional Healers Union (SLITHU) took upon itself the task of eliminating witchcraft from the postwar nation. Its spectacular actions unearthed countless “witch guns,” captured witches, and jailed offenders until they could be cured and “rehabilitated.” They claimed jurisdiction over issues of public health, performance culture, traditional chieftaincy, and internal affairs, yet had no formal relation with nor oversight from any relevant government ministries. Furthermore, despite a few promises, the government has apparently never financed their operations. Yet the Union continually aligns itself to the State, even if that State holds it at perpetual arm’s length.
This paper examines SLITHU’s relations with the Sierra Leonean government and with the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), the country’s national television network. Through their informal collaborations, these three bodies enhanced their own claims to legitimacy by demonstrating abilities to interact with each others’ strange epistemologies and to experiment with their own familiar practices. SLITHU engaged high profile government sites and agencies; SLBC’s cosmopolitan journalists accessed titillatingly exotic occult activities; the Sierra Leone government received spiritual substantiation of its right to rule and its projects of attitudinal and behavioral change. Such mutual manipulations of the familiar and the strange orchestrate forms of political, spiritual, and medical power, and suggest some of the ways performance and spectacle are vital to local understandings of Sierra Leone’s public health system.
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“The Public Life of Poro in Sierra Leone” applies an analysis of publicity to Sierra Leone’s Poro... more “The Public Life of Poro in Sierra Leone” applies an analysis of publicity to Sierra Leone’s Poro initiatory society. The laws of secrecy enshrouding Poro appear to exempt it from public discourse and to protect its autocratic grip on its constituents from open debate. However, Poro’s secret, private, and public activities are mutually constitutive, not mutually exclusive. Poro instantiates a radically different alignment of publicity and privacy, challenging those globalized ideals—currently promulgated across Sierra Leone by NGOs and government bodies—that align public scrutiny with personal autonomy.
This paper focuses on a series of politically-charged funerary ceremonies conducted by the Poro of Kailahun Town in eastern Sierra Leone. A variety of political parties made dramatic claims to public space through their sponsorship and presence at these events, reshaping the political terrain of an opposition party stronghold. Meanwhile, other performances allowed Poro to steer the terms of participation in the 2012 elections by way of veiled threats against candidates and voters. Through spectacle, Poro’s restrictive power of discretion constitutes a public arena for the rehearsal of social action, proscribes participants’ responsibilities, and dramatizes participation’s inherent risks. In spite of its limitations, Poro offers a space for debate and communal transformation, but one in which social change is recognized as carrying the threat of extraordinary violence.
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In the wake of Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war (1991-2002), a flame has sprung up across sev... more In the wake of Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war (1991-2002), a flame has sprung up across several villages, a fire lit not to destroy but to rehabilitate. Fambul Tok, an NGO founded and operated by Sierra Leoneans and financed by American donations, promotes community ownership of the national peace process by invoking “ancient traditions” of fireside conferences and community absolution in the form of dramatic bonfire ceremonies that host acts of public testimony, witnessing, and forgiveness.
This paper examines one such bonfire whose particular complications belied the disconnections between Fambul Tok’s self image and the villagers’ own perceptions and aspirations of the occasion. Instead of seeking reconciliation, many participants sought entertainment or development projects. Instead of being run by locals, the program was meticulously stage managed by visiting officials. And instead of allaying tensions, the gathering threatened to exacerbate them. These disjunctures evince the bonfires’ nature as an “invented tradition” constituted more from a mixture of Western psychoanalysis, Internationalist NGO bureaucracy, and an imagined primordial Africa than from the lived culture of the participants. Nonetheless, by dramatically visualizing narratives of the past through these exceptional public events, Fambul Tok does in fact succeed in kindling local traditions of spectacular justice.
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Civil war displaced more than half of the population of Sierra Leone. Fleeing brutal violence at ... more Civil war displaced more than half of the population of Sierra Leone. Fleeing brutal violence at home, villagers traveled to urban centers, the capital Freetown, refugee camps in neighboring states, and further abroad to Europe and America. Ten years since the conflict’s resolution, these peregrinations have had dramatic repercussions for Sierra Leone’s aesthetic culture. Many Sierra Leoneans remark that local performances are stronger, since returning artists were exposed to a greater range of performance styles and skill levels than they would have at the village or chiefdom level. At the same time, the influx of international idioms of Islam and Evangelical Christianity, brought back with converted travelers, challenges the continuities of practices such as masked dancing that many now consider haram or sinful. Yet in spite of these threats, the secretive initiatory societies of Poro and Sande are opening out, however conditionally, to annual celebratory programs at which normally sacrosanct masked dances are performed for public entertainments. The goal is to call back former villagers, to remind them of their rural roots, and to profit from the opportunities they have reaped in the cities or foreign lands. Seduced by the cultural performances of the village, the relatively wealthy returnees are encouraged to become “true sons of the soil” through contributions to village infrastructure and development. This paper examines how the mass movements of peoples instigated by war have changed Sierra Leone’s venerable performance traditions, and how these same traditions now propel villagers’ attempts to reconstruct their communities.
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Bald, bulbous, bug-eyed, and boorish, the grotesque Gongoli exemplifies principles of antisocial ... more Bald, bulbous, bug-eyed, and boorish, the grotesque Gongoli exemplifies principles of antisocial aesthetic inversion by satirizing local values, going so far as to subvert even the anonymity so elemental to his fellow masked dancers’ vaunted status. In spite of his transgressions, he stands among the most beloved figures of Sierra Leone’s rich performance traditions. Gongoli’s popularity rests on his irreverent parody of the fundamental laws of masked performance, laws rooted in the ties between individual agency and communal responsibility. This paper explores these codes of difference and celebrity by following Siloh, an itinerant Gongoli performer whose onstage success is indivisible from his offstage character.
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Across Sierra Leone’s countryside, a troupe of former combatants in the nation’s decade-long civi... more Across Sierra Leone’s countryside, a troupe of former combatants in the nation’s decade-long civil war performs vibrant spectacles that fuse mystic power with messages of reconciliation, reconstruction, and development. These performances’ imbrications of local aesthetics, national history, and international norms argue for a reassessment of the definition and possibilities of national culture.
Hassan Jalloh was once a feared commander of the Civil Defense Forces (CDF), a militia that mobilized local hunters’ practical skills and mystic powers for war. Faced with the pitfalls of disarmament and reintegration, he transformed his unit into a performance troupe and once again reinvented their mystic toolset, now for public entertainments. These remarkably popular performances dizzily synthesize dance, song, acrobatics, masked “devils,” and mystic acts of disappearance and transformation, while Jalloh preaches throughout the program, tying the acts to national and international issues. One dance demonstrates the risks of HIV/AIDS. The conjuring of a pile of pens leads to a speech on education. The comic devil gongoli playfully pits two political parties against each other, attempting to defuse historically violent tensions.
Jalloh likes to proclaim that he is a “national and international player.” and his performances are successful precisely because they generate a new public space that ties Mende culture to national and international history, politics, religion, and development. Hassan Jalloh’s spectacles argue that national culture is not simply an exhibition for external audiences or reinforcement for the State; it constitutes a dynamic sphere of ongoing experimentation and negotiations between the local and the global.
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In vivid spectacles touring the Sierra Leone countryside, a troupe of ex-combatants led by former... more In vivid spectacles touring the Sierra Leone countryside, a troupe of ex-combatants led by former commander Hassan Jalloh are restaging a blend of Islamic and village hunters’ mysticism, once exploited in the name of war but now redeployed in the name of reconciliation, nation-building, and individual empowerment. While the country’s ten-year conflict caused incalculable physical, spiritual, and psychological damage, many Sierra Leoneans are reshaping that history rather than outright rejecting it. Hassan Jalloh has epitomized this reconfiguration by converting his unit into a performance troupe exhibiting the very mystic powers that formerly protected their forces and terrorized their enemies. In his spectacles, he offers an alternative history of the war, not only as a decade of destruction but also as a period of transformative possibility. This paper focuses on one of Jalloh’s most popular acts, one in which he mystically clothes himself in various outfits that demonstrate his and, by extension, Sierra Leoneans’ capacity for transformation in the post-war era. Jalloh’s performances act as a window into the reconstruction of Sierra Leone’s relationship to its conflicted history, a historiography that is only as powerful as it is empowering.
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Migrations are especially hard on the spirits. Stripped from their links to geographic markers, d... more Migrations are especially hard on the spirits. Stripped from their links to geographic markers, distanced from their ties to familial lineages, and faced with new, skeptical publics, masking societies must work quickly and efficiently to reestablish effective religious practice. One of the primary areas of conflict becomes confrontations with state-imposed infrastructure, perhaps most vividly demonstrated during state-sponsored festivals. Masks that are accustomed to controlling their own environs are forced to cede authority to administrators and corporate sponsors. This paper uses two examples, a Zangbeto troupe from Benin who performs in Burkina Faso and itinerant Egungun troupes who move from festival to festival in Southern Nigeria, to explore some of the tactics that mask troupes use in order to gain and maintain power in new geographic contexts. It argues that successful masking societies purposefully amplify the spectacle of their performances to highlight aspects that translate across ethnic boundaries. Based on three months of ethnographic research in two West African communities, this study is the beginning of a project that investigates the relationship of masking societies to state infrastructure.
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They are unlikely guardians, these ungainly mounds of raffia that slowly spin through various rit... more They are unlikely guardians, these ungainly mounds of raffia that slowly spin through various ritual spaces of southern Benin. Possessing neither acrobatic virtuosity nor grotesque façade, the spectacle of the Zangbeto consists of superficially cheap tricks; tipping over, the stack reveals itself empty, and objects disappear and transform beneath its bulk. Yet the Zangbeto wield incredible supernatural power, and these humble heaps are but their visible, daylight manifestation. By night, they trade their awkward visibility for a supple aurality, and, as disembodied cries, prowl the city with a cadre of human allies, capturing and punishing thieves and witches. Ironically, the roots of this immaterial force are decidedly material; vigilantes hired by merchants to guard wares in the lawless borderlands between Nigeria and Benin. In fact, the Zangbeto originate at the very moment of French and English conquest, as a negotiation of the chaotic period between Dahomean royalty and colonial hegemony.
Thus, the Zangbeto’s profound authority lies precisely at that point at which its dancer disappears. Zangbeto are powerful border guards, regulating the intersections between man and spirit, history and the present, and most critically, the visible and the invisible. The contemporary African cityscape has been characterized by tropes of shadows or invisibility, a troubled doubling that encompasses such diverse urban phenomena as informal economies, shifting spiritual practices, and a postmodern disintegration of semiotic meaning. This paper reads the Zangbeto as a last defense against this collapse of the boundary between the seen and the unseen, a crisis embodied in rumor, witchcraft, failing infrastructure, state malfeasance, and neo-colonial exploitation.
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Distant shouts and the clanging of bells awaken a visiting videographer as he awaits a midnight p... more Distant shouts and the clanging of bells awaken a visiting videographer as he awaits a midnight performance of Lo Gue masks in an isolated West African village. Peering out from a cracked car door parked in a village clearing, he witnesses the approach of an impossible figure. Skin-tight white uniform glowing in the full moonlight, all that is distinguishable is a volatile leaping form, tethered to a handler, as it accosts villagers heading to the performance grounds. Even after attending dozens of masquerades in the region, the unexpected ludicrousness of this Gyinna-Gyinna mask is perhaps the only spectacle to genuinely terrorize the beholder.
Two years, several Lo Gue performances, and 7,000 miles later, the same videographer is stunned to see an uncannily familiar form materialize in the latest music video of pop diva Lady Gaga. In silhouette, choreography, and lighting, the specter of Gyinna-Gyinna is summoned. Genealogical links between these two performances appear spurious but not impossible; a troupe of Lo Gue maskers played Paris in 2008 in a staged re-presentation of this masked ritual that arouses many intercultural anxieties. If the Gyinna-Gyinna derives its affective impact from immediacy, confusion, and a stunning singularity, what of these remained beneath the bright lights of the Quai Branly Museum stage?
The ambiguities of this touring performance exhibit the profound contrast between that original, terrifyingly singular, indistinct form in the moonlight and the garish, proliferating repetitions of Gaga’s video as it cycles ad infinitum on MTV. At first frenzied glance, Gyinna-Gyinna acquires its authority through exception; Gaga acquires hers through ubiquity. Yet further reflection on the nature of masking and horror reveals that the chasm between mystery and exposure is illusory. Rather than abject the frightful, these two performers incorporate it, spooning out shock as spectacle. Exposure thus becomes a marker, empowering and unifying its audience, and demonstrating how both Gyinna-Gyinna and Lady Gaga boldly embrace the power of fear to fashion community.
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A cry from the crowd, an eruption and a skirmish send five well-dressed Béninois and three touris... more A cry from the crowd, an eruption and a skirmish send five well-dressed Béninois and three tourists leaping back as a singer in their midst collapses thrashing. As he gets to his feet and begins a hypnotic swaying two-step, he joins a growing mob of whirling possessed amidst a growing mob of orbiting onlookers. This awkward dance between adepts, tourists, priests, and camera crews mirrors the many uncertainties that circle around Oudiah’s coastline during the Vodun Day festivities every January 10th.
Since its establishment in 1993, Benin’s national holiday has been promoted as an occasion for its people to communally celebrate the disparate religious sects and practices that comprise the diverse ethnic makeup of the West African state. Simultaneously, it is publicized as the model moment for members of the African Diaspora to return to their place of origin, rediscover their heritage, and revisit the haunted spaces of the trans- Atlantic slave trade. And, of course, it is also advertised as an ideal destination for the tourist in search of exotic culture, a public introduction to the private and enigmatic world evoked in the popular and fraught notion of the term “Voodoo.”
What are the repercussions of these disparate figurations of the same event? How do the participants regulate their conflicting priorities? What is the true potential for productive exchange? This paper charts the intersections of diverse choreographies–from the grand procession down the “Route of Slaves” to the circling steps of Vodun ceremonial dance–and explores the conflicting passions these movements conjure and regulate. Raised under the hypnotic pulse of drums on the beach of a former slave port, these passions reveal the many pitfalls and possibilities of cross-cultural exchange.
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Books by Samuel Mark Anderson
To tackle the consequences of aid agency arts deployment, volume editors Samuel Mark Anderson and Chérie Rivers Ndaliko assemble ten case studies from across the African continent employing multiple media including music, sculpture, photography, drama, storytelling, ritual, and protest marches. Organized under three widespread yet under-analyzed objectives for arts in emergency-demonstration, distribution, and remediation-each case offers a different disciplinary and methodological perspective on a common complication in NGO-sponsored creativity. By shifting the discourse on arts activism away from fixations on message and toward diverse investigations of aesthetics and power negotiations, The Art of Emergency brings into focus the conscious and unconscious configurations of humanitarian activism, the social lives it attempts to engage, and the often-fraught interactions between the two.
Articles by Samuel Mark Anderson
Other Publications by Samuel Mark Anderson
Conference Presentations by Samuel Mark Anderson
This paper examines SLITHU’s relations with the Sierra Leonean government and with the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), the country’s national television network. Through their informal collaborations, these three bodies enhanced their own claims to legitimacy by demonstrating abilities to interact with each others’ strange epistemologies and to experiment with their own familiar practices. SLITHU engaged high profile government sites and agencies; SLBC’s cosmopolitan journalists accessed titillatingly exotic occult activities; the Sierra Leone government received spiritual substantiation of its right to rule and its projects of attitudinal and behavioral change. Such mutual manipulations of the familiar and the strange orchestrate forms of political, spiritual, and medical power, and suggest some of the ways performance and spectacle are vital to local understandings of Sierra Leone’s public health system.
This paper focuses on a series of politically-charged funerary ceremonies conducted by the Poro of Kailahun Town in eastern Sierra Leone. A variety of political parties made dramatic claims to public space through their sponsorship and presence at these events, reshaping the political terrain of an opposition party stronghold. Meanwhile, other performances allowed Poro to steer the terms of participation in the 2012 elections by way of veiled threats against candidates and voters. Through spectacle, Poro’s restrictive power of discretion constitutes a public arena for the rehearsal of social action, proscribes participants’ responsibilities, and dramatizes participation’s inherent risks. In spite of its limitations, Poro offers a space for debate and communal transformation, but one in which social change is recognized as carrying the threat of extraordinary violence.
This paper examines one such bonfire whose particular complications belied the disconnections between Fambul Tok’s self image and the villagers’ own perceptions and aspirations of the occasion. Instead of seeking reconciliation, many participants sought entertainment or development projects. Instead of being run by locals, the program was meticulously stage managed by visiting officials. And instead of allaying tensions, the gathering threatened to exacerbate them. These disjunctures evince the bonfires’ nature as an “invented tradition” constituted more from a mixture of Western psychoanalysis, Internationalist NGO bureaucracy, and an imagined primordial Africa than from the lived culture of the participants. Nonetheless, by dramatically visualizing narratives of the past through these exceptional public events, Fambul Tok does in fact succeed in kindling local traditions of spectacular justice.
Hassan Jalloh was once a feared commander of the Civil Defense Forces (CDF), a militia that mobilized local hunters’ practical skills and mystic powers for war. Faced with the pitfalls of disarmament and reintegration, he transformed his unit into a performance troupe and once again reinvented their mystic toolset, now for public entertainments. These remarkably popular performances dizzily synthesize dance, song, acrobatics, masked “devils,” and mystic acts of disappearance and transformation, while Jalloh preaches throughout the program, tying the acts to national and international issues. One dance demonstrates the risks of HIV/AIDS. The conjuring of a pile of pens leads to a speech on education. The comic devil gongoli playfully pits two political parties against each other, attempting to defuse historically violent tensions.
Jalloh likes to proclaim that he is a “national and international player.” and his performances are successful precisely because they generate a new public space that ties Mende culture to national and international history, politics, religion, and development. Hassan Jalloh’s spectacles argue that national culture is not simply an exhibition for external audiences or reinforcement for the State; it constitutes a dynamic sphere of ongoing experimentation and negotiations between the local and the global.
Thus, the Zangbeto’s profound authority lies precisely at that point at which its dancer disappears. Zangbeto are powerful border guards, regulating the intersections between man and spirit, history and the present, and most critically, the visible and the invisible. The contemporary African cityscape has been characterized by tropes of shadows or invisibility, a troubled doubling that encompasses such diverse urban phenomena as informal economies, shifting spiritual practices, and a postmodern disintegration of semiotic meaning. This paper reads the Zangbeto as a last defense against this collapse of the boundary between the seen and the unseen, a crisis embodied in rumor, witchcraft, failing infrastructure, state malfeasance, and neo-colonial exploitation.
Two years, several Lo Gue performances, and 7,000 miles later, the same videographer is stunned to see an uncannily familiar form materialize in the latest music video of pop diva Lady Gaga. In silhouette, choreography, and lighting, the specter of Gyinna-Gyinna is summoned. Genealogical links between these two performances appear spurious but not impossible; a troupe of Lo Gue maskers played Paris in 2008 in a staged re-presentation of this masked ritual that arouses many intercultural anxieties. If the Gyinna-Gyinna derives its affective impact from immediacy, confusion, and a stunning singularity, what of these remained beneath the bright lights of the Quai Branly Museum stage?
The ambiguities of this touring performance exhibit the profound contrast between that original, terrifyingly singular, indistinct form in the moonlight and the garish, proliferating repetitions of Gaga’s video as it cycles ad infinitum on MTV. At first frenzied glance, Gyinna-Gyinna acquires its authority through exception; Gaga acquires hers through ubiquity. Yet further reflection on the nature of masking and horror reveals that the chasm between mystery and exposure is illusory. Rather than abject the frightful, these two performers incorporate it, spooning out shock as spectacle. Exposure thus becomes a marker, empowering and unifying its audience, and demonstrating how both Gyinna-Gyinna and Lady Gaga boldly embrace the power of fear to fashion community.
Since its establishment in 1993, Benin’s national holiday has been promoted as an occasion for its people to communally celebrate the disparate religious sects and practices that comprise the diverse ethnic makeup of the West African state. Simultaneously, it is publicized as the model moment for members of the African Diaspora to return to their place of origin, rediscover their heritage, and revisit the haunted spaces of the trans- Atlantic slave trade. And, of course, it is also advertised as an ideal destination for the tourist in search of exotic culture, a public introduction to the private and enigmatic world evoked in the popular and fraught notion of the term “Voodoo.”
What are the repercussions of these disparate figurations of the same event? How do the participants regulate their conflicting priorities? What is the true potential for productive exchange? This paper charts the intersections of diverse choreographies–from the grand procession down the “Route of Slaves” to the circling steps of Vodun ceremonial dance–and explores the conflicting passions these movements conjure and regulate. Raised under the hypnotic pulse of drums on the beach of a former slave port, these passions reveal the many pitfalls and possibilities of cross-cultural exchange.
To tackle the consequences of aid agency arts deployment, volume editors Samuel Mark Anderson and Chérie Rivers Ndaliko assemble ten case studies from across the African continent employing multiple media including music, sculpture, photography, drama, storytelling, ritual, and protest marches. Organized under three widespread yet under-analyzed objectives for arts in emergency-demonstration, distribution, and remediation-each case offers a different disciplinary and methodological perspective on a common complication in NGO-sponsored creativity. By shifting the discourse on arts activism away from fixations on message and toward diverse investigations of aesthetics and power negotiations, The Art of Emergency brings into focus the conscious and unconscious configurations of humanitarian activism, the social lives it attempts to engage, and the often-fraught interactions between the two.
This paper examines SLITHU’s relations with the Sierra Leonean government and with the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), the country’s national television network. Through their informal collaborations, these three bodies enhanced their own claims to legitimacy by demonstrating abilities to interact with each others’ strange epistemologies and to experiment with their own familiar practices. SLITHU engaged high profile government sites and agencies; SLBC’s cosmopolitan journalists accessed titillatingly exotic occult activities; the Sierra Leone government received spiritual substantiation of its right to rule and its projects of attitudinal and behavioral change. Such mutual manipulations of the familiar and the strange orchestrate forms of political, spiritual, and medical power, and suggest some of the ways performance and spectacle are vital to local understandings of Sierra Leone’s public health system.
This paper focuses on a series of politically-charged funerary ceremonies conducted by the Poro of Kailahun Town in eastern Sierra Leone. A variety of political parties made dramatic claims to public space through their sponsorship and presence at these events, reshaping the political terrain of an opposition party stronghold. Meanwhile, other performances allowed Poro to steer the terms of participation in the 2012 elections by way of veiled threats against candidates and voters. Through spectacle, Poro’s restrictive power of discretion constitutes a public arena for the rehearsal of social action, proscribes participants’ responsibilities, and dramatizes participation’s inherent risks. In spite of its limitations, Poro offers a space for debate and communal transformation, but one in which social change is recognized as carrying the threat of extraordinary violence.
This paper examines one such bonfire whose particular complications belied the disconnections between Fambul Tok’s self image and the villagers’ own perceptions and aspirations of the occasion. Instead of seeking reconciliation, many participants sought entertainment or development projects. Instead of being run by locals, the program was meticulously stage managed by visiting officials. And instead of allaying tensions, the gathering threatened to exacerbate them. These disjunctures evince the bonfires’ nature as an “invented tradition” constituted more from a mixture of Western psychoanalysis, Internationalist NGO bureaucracy, and an imagined primordial Africa than from the lived culture of the participants. Nonetheless, by dramatically visualizing narratives of the past through these exceptional public events, Fambul Tok does in fact succeed in kindling local traditions of spectacular justice.
Hassan Jalloh was once a feared commander of the Civil Defense Forces (CDF), a militia that mobilized local hunters’ practical skills and mystic powers for war. Faced with the pitfalls of disarmament and reintegration, he transformed his unit into a performance troupe and once again reinvented their mystic toolset, now for public entertainments. These remarkably popular performances dizzily synthesize dance, song, acrobatics, masked “devils,” and mystic acts of disappearance and transformation, while Jalloh preaches throughout the program, tying the acts to national and international issues. One dance demonstrates the risks of HIV/AIDS. The conjuring of a pile of pens leads to a speech on education. The comic devil gongoli playfully pits two political parties against each other, attempting to defuse historically violent tensions.
Jalloh likes to proclaim that he is a “national and international player.” and his performances are successful precisely because they generate a new public space that ties Mende culture to national and international history, politics, religion, and development. Hassan Jalloh’s spectacles argue that national culture is not simply an exhibition for external audiences or reinforcement for the State; it constitutes a dynamic sphere of ongoing experimentation and negotiations between the local and the global.
Thus, the Zangbeto’s profound authority lies precisely at that point at which its dancer disappears. Zangbeto are powerful border guards, regulating the intersections between man and spirit, history and the present, and most critically, the visible and the invisible. The contemporary African cityscape has been characterized by tropes of shadows or invisibility, a troubled doubling that encompasses such diverse urban phenomena as informal economies, shifting spiritual practices, and a postmodern disintegration of semiotic meaning. This paper reads the Zangbeto as a last defense against this collapse of the boundary between the seen and the unseen, a crisis embodied in rumor, witchcraft, failing infrastructure, state malfeasance, and neo-colonial exploitation.
Two years, several Lo Gue performances, and 7,000 miles later, the same videographer is stunned to see an uncannily familiar form materialize in the latest music video of pop diva Lady Gaga. In silhouette, choreography, and lighting, the specter of Gyinna-Gyinna is summoned. Genealogical links between these two performances appear spurious but not impossible; a troupe of Lo Gue maskers played Paris in 2008 in a staged re-presentation of this masked ritual that arouses many intercultural anxieties. If the Gyinna-Gyinna derives its affective impact from immediacy, confusion, and a stunning singularity, what of these remained beneath the bright lights of the Quai Branly Museum stage?
The ambiguities of this touring performance exhibit the profound contrast between that original, terrifyingly singular, indistinct form in the moonlight and the garish, proliferating repetitions of Gaga’s video as it cycles ad infinitum on MTV. At first frenzied glance, Gyinna-Gyinna acquires its authority through exception; Gaga acquires hers through ubiquity. Yet further reflection on the nature of masking and horror reveals that the chasm between mystery and exposure is illusory. Rather than abject the frightful, these two performers incorporate it, spooning out shock as spectacle. Exposure thus becomes a marker, empowering and unifying its audience, and demonstrating how both Gyinna-Gyinna and Lady Gaga boldly embrace the power of fear to fashion community.
Since its establishment in 1993, Benin’s national holiday has been promoted as an occasion for its people to communally celebrate the disparate religious sects and practices that comprise the diverse ethnic makeup of the West African state. Simultaneously, it is publicized as the model moment for members of the African Diaspora to return to their place of origin, rediscover their heritage, and revisit the haunted spaces of the trans- Atlantic slave trade. And, of course, it is also advertised as an ideal destination for the tourist in search of exotic culture, a public introduction to the private and enigmatic world evoked in the popular and fraught notion of the term “Voodoo.”
What are the repercussions of these disparate figurations of the same event? How do the participants regulate their conflicting priorities? What is the true potential for productive exchange? This paper charts the intersections of diverse choreographies–from the grand procession down the “Route of Slaves” to the circling steps of Vodun ceremonial dance–and explores the conflicting passions these movements conjure and regulate. Raised under the hypnotic pulse of drums on the beach of a former slave port, these passions reveal the many pitfalls and possibilities of cross-cultural exchange.