Publications
What does a people, made up of more than 1.2 billion souls living on a continent of more than 30 million square kilometres, have to say about itself? Africa is the repository of a collective memory, the receptacle of civilisations with moving boundaries whose gestures have crossed the centuries. What binds the populations of the African continent is the consciousness of living on the same territory, of belonging to the same history, and of facing the same challenges on the African soil: access to education and health; the respect of fundamental human rights; the right to free movement, self-determination and economic emancipation. Over time, this African consciousness has created a sense of belonging – sometimes tenuous – to the same land, the same people and the same destiny. Pan-Africanism, this collective ideal of political, social, economic and cultural emancipation, is the foundation of an unprecedented project.
Contents
Narratives of Womanhood
- Introduction: Is Writing the History of Women’s Art in Africa, Writing the Art that is Coming? Being African, Woman and an Artist Nadine Hounkpatin
- Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Sociopolitical Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia Gladys Kalichini
- An Aesthetic and Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Three Generations of Cameroonian Woman Artists Ruth Colette Afane Belinga
- Algerian Women Artists: Between History, Appropriation and Deconstruction of an Image Nadira Laggoune
- An Art of Proximity Rachida Triki
Institutional Narratives
- Introduction: Escaping the Vicious Circle Sonia Recasens
- Breaking Boundaries and Borders: Undoing Stereotypes with the Stereotypes (The Case of Contemporary Art from Africa) 3POINTS . . . (Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Alice Korror Ebeheakey, Bernard Akoi-Jackson
- Modern Women: Archiving African Modernism Perrin Lathrop with Ndidi Dike
- Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and Miranda Burney-Nicol: Fragments of Trajectories of African Visual Artists Between Paris and London at the Time of Decolonisation Through the Lens of the Magazine Le Musée vivant. Amandine Nana
- One Museum under the Lens: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Representation of Women Making Art Karen E. Milbourne
An Aesthetic and Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Three Generations of Cameroonian Woman Artists
Ruth Colette Afane Belinga
Abstract
The notion of gender is popular today. To follow this fashion the present paper devotes itself to the Cameroonian woman artist, whose situation cannot leave anyone indifferent. For several years the concept of women’s emancipation has been increasingly rooted in Cameroonian cultures. But it is paradoxical that at the same time there is still controversy about female creativity on an intellectual level. In the field of art the situation dates back a very long time and seems even more serious. Women’s artistic production continues to be dismissed because of their naturalness. Art books either do not mention women or graft their participation onto that of the men who assist them in artistic creation. The consequences are clear. Women’s art remains a victim of a macho and fixist vision and continues to be placed in silent eternity. The misunderstanding comes from the fact that women’s art studies in general are first approached in an exterior and superficial way. Authors avoid using a semantic and structural approach, which is an appropriate way to break down any misunderstanding and extract African women’s art from stereotypes. The study of women’s art raises the important issue of de-vulnerability, that is, the possibility of defending oneself, to emerge from a history of defeat and to learn to win again. If there is such a thing as a women’s art, we need to be able to write its own history, to allow the art from this category of artists to live its life by taking it out of existing patterns. The approaches used so far need to be re-examined. “De”-marginalising women’s art is thus a process of deliverance and detachment.
Without slipping into the abyss of vindication, this paper intends to proceed genealogically in order to denounce the questionable nature of the discarding of women’s production into the dustbin of art history. Here, women’s art is read from a threefold perspective: first generation women, second generation women, third generation women.1 The aim here is to push against the tide of this “male-centric” vision and to seek to lift Cameroonian women’s art, as artistic creation, out of the ignorance in which it has been held until now. Our investigations revolve around the question of how to grasp the artistic and symbolic characteristics of Cameroonian women’s art over time. We hypothesise that the artistic creation of women in Cameroon proposes a set of visual constraints that define a space of formal possibilities, itself subject to a certain number of principles of vision that, in turn, determine the formal structure of the works. It is therefore important to examine these forms from a stylistic and aesthetic point of view, as well as the contexts in which they were born, in order to understand their artistic and symbolic characteristics.
1
Note that the “first, second and third generations” distinction here simply allow us to categorise the women selected for this study into groups in order to differentiate them.
Note that the “first, second and third generations” distinction here simply allow us to categorise the women selected for this study into groups in order to differentiate them.
