Overview
Combining these senses of “PanAfricanism” and “Indigeneity,” what we propose for this symposium is [...] “a realm of philosophical inquiry whose contours—mobile, discontinuous, and always provisional—have been mapped here largely through a process of intellectual echolocation: bouncing ideas from one existing discursive terrain off another and listening for their reverberations.” What links the concepts of “PanAfricanism” and “Indigeneity” in contemporary aesthetics? Etymologically, the concepts are linked, as one of the earliest documented uses of “indigenous” (1646) by an English author is intended to distinguish between enslaved Africans in the Americas, who are said to be “not indigenous or proper natives of America,” and the indigenous people themselves.
“PanAfricanism” and “Indigeneity” are understood here as international concepts with local content. For example, “PanAfricanism” refers to all the arts and cultures in Africa but also all the African diasporic arts and cultures around the world. As a theory, Pan-Africanism proclaims “that Black peoples are constituted as a group by virtue of their common ancestry and shared experience of oppression (including enslavement, colonialism, and racism) and should likewise stand united in the realization of an emancipated future.” But there is no presumption here of sameness or universality, geographically or aesthetically, as each PanAfrican culture is particular.
Similarly, the concept of Indigeneity refers to the first peoples to inhabit the United States, Canada, Australia, the Caribbean, or other colonial countries or areas around the world. At the same time, “‘Indigenous’ has come to signify global collective consciousness among First Peoples.” Again, there is no presumption of sameness or universality, but rather particularity in a global context.
Indigenous aesthetics and PanAfrican aesthetics refer to the aesthetics of particular local arts or cultures in their own terms but also in connection with other similar arts or cultures with overlapping histories.
Combining these senses of “PanAfricanism” and “Indigeneity,” what we propose for this symposium is what the curators of the ongoing exhibition, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, have in mind: “a realm of philosophical inquiry whose contours—mobile, discontinuous, and always provisional—have been mapped here largely through a process of intellectual echolocation: bouncing ideas from one existing discursive terrain off another and listening for their reverberations.”
Our emphasis on “contemporary” aesthetics, since the 1960s, is about more than temporality. For example, Indigenous art “has always been an expression of what it means to be in the world, and arguably in multiple worlds, and it has always considered what is to come. Thus, Native art is, has always been, and will always be contemporary.” Indigenous aesthetics is always already contemporary.
Let’s now listen to the reverberations within and across PanAfrican aesthetics and Indigenous aesthetics.