| Diawara's review of Richard Wright's complex relationship to modern
Africa, reflecting both his hopes and his fears, brings to mind
all of the problems of modernism as it is laid over African culture. Africa cannot
escape, but how can this vast continent of so many different cultures
bring itself into a modern world? Wright's answer for Africa was to accept modernism,
and throw off traditional tribal and religious forms of feeling,
thinking, and collective action.
"The Rise and Fall of Nkrumah" details the problems of modernism in the
political rise and fall of this leader of post-colonial Ghana. "Nkrumah did three things:
He led a great revolution. He raised the status of Africa and Africans...
(and)Ghana's economic policies were the most dynamic and successful
of the new African states.
I would observe a parallel: the ideology of revolution may brings down states, but seems poorly constructed to lead the new state: while modernist aesthetic ideology debunks mainstream art making, it is also poorly equiped to continue to produce original art works. A lesson may be learned from this battle between the old art the the new art. The new is less well able to see the old, as the old may well see the new. The idologies of modernist art (formalism, art-for-at's-sake, the ism of modern art) have not endured. To replace social morality and activisms for our current aesthetic uncertainties is not the answer. It simply switches one problem for another, one set of ideologies for another. It avoids real questioning of the nature of art. Modernism assumed too much, while social activist art would use it to its own ends, as though art had no nature of its own. For me, these are the questions that these readings pose.
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