As a collection, this archive is many things, a quality it demonstrates via its diverse manifestations. An archive as “schematics of self” can act as a “cognitive itinerary,” providing insights into the formation of the self, the journey toward understanding the self within and without, and the methods of self-construction that involve navigating temporal, spatial, ideational, and ideological conduits toward establishing self-consciousness. An archive in this sense serves as a collection of items with representative power that speaks to the process of self-definition; it provides illumination on patterns of personal growth, which can be mapped for reexperiencing or interrogating the formation of the self, since the self is a progressive construct, continual in its self-redefinition. Manifesting in material form as a collection, the archive can disclose the interconnections between intellection as an activity or tool of self-construction, consciousness as a source of power, and choices or actions that define and individuate persons. An archive can also exist as a tribute to an individual’s (intellectual) enterprise/industry; it can serve as a collection of materials that have past, present, and future significance, indicating touchstones that stand out in an enigmatic life, career, or that emphasize an ideology, idiosyncrasy, or proclivity. In this sense, the archive would be the material realization of a cognitive itinerary.
An archive’s impact on liminal spaces, which human consciousness inhabits, is also pivotal to its significance as part of a matrix, a system. The human world is a composite system of relations where things, people, and events react to one another: each part works in tandem with the other to ensure effective functioning and the progress of nature and the species habituated within it. These relations afford human reality the luxury of continuity, even in the midst of ruptures and seeming discontinuities. An archive is part of this system, and there are myriad ways through which the archive can be conceived within this particular order. There are also several forms in which the archive can manifest that highlight this essence.
The archive’s manner of composition also informs its value. As part of an organized system, the archive acts as signage, that is, as a systematic collection of signs with referents and significations. The significations can manifest in terms of any of the afore-listed realizations of the archive. Its referents can be specific moments or actions in human cultural history that are readable or can be historicized. Because the archive holds its constituents in a systemic relation, wherein the elements that comprise it interact systematically, reading, engaging, or exploring the archive yields knowledge that transposes it from “a mere assemblage of things” to “a complex system with an equally complex import.” The transposition of an archive from a collection into a system is possible because of the complex levels of interaction within the archive itself or between the archive and the world external to it – the world within which it finds or achieves (greater) meaning. The nature of this interaction is based on the kind of knowledge the archive yields and also the kind of consciousness that interacts with it. The insight it provides and the interaction it allows – for instance, how accessible is the archive to intrusive reasoning? – determines what knowledge is to be gained from it. Equally important is the knowledge gained from exploring the significance of its composition as a system and that of its constitutive elements as independent (mini)systems.
Not all collections are systems, even if systems are collections of several parts, items, materials, etc. An archive provides knowledge that is conditioned by the relationship between its parts and between the parts and the referents residing within the world external to it, since all readable items including art and textiles are texts in their own right, and since archives wield referentiality. The archive can narrate the process of its being, stressing its significance as a “meta-schematics” to itself; narrate that of the materials that comprise it; and also narrate the generative force behind its creation, which in this case is the self. Two things must be noted here: conception and continuity. An archive is a conception; here that means a knowledge-scape conceived at some point in time and in some space, even if its quality, texture, and nature as a system are continually redefined. This means an archive is not static, regardless of being defined in and by space and time. Another way to see the archive in this sense is as an engineered knowledge cosmos – although in material form – generated (by the self) in the process of experiencing knowledge and thus fated to continuity, insofar as the generative center (the self) that transforms experiential knowledge into material forms or binds both persists.
I should, however, point out here that these positions are not definitely defined or fixed in their manner of relation: archive as knowledge source/cosmos and the self as a generative center. These roles can be reversed, and indeed this mutability is what shapes the relation, since both the self and the archive are constantly in a symbiotic relation in foregrounding their relevance, essence, usefulness, and continuity. As said earlier, the archive provides insight to the constantly evolving self, while, as will be shown, the self, by virtue of aiding the engineering of the archive, contributes to its essence and continuity, serving as a source to the archive’s persistence and continuity in and across time.
However, this state of perpetuity does not detract from the archive’s organicity as a system or its ability to yield knowledge of itself to others, or of others to third parties. What I mean here is that as an organized system it does not shut out possibilities of historicization. It means the archive opens up to external queries, queries that would aid its definition and contribute to its essence. In fact, yielding itself to historicization and (re)contextualization marks the dynamics and fluidity of the archive. The archive is thus fluid and organic.
The archive’s process of conception, its state of perpetuity, and its positionality with the world it textualizes all define it and the knowledge it provides. Archives textualize the material space because they co-shape the human perception of things. More so, archives as part of cultural forces condition human reception, relatedness, or perception of things or phenomena, especially if they (archives) are located or discovered outside of the temporality within which they have been composed, or if their constituent parts date differently. If an archive’s immanent parts date differently, this system of difference defines and contributes to its organicity as well as its relevance to the material world. Therefore, the archive is a sum of its constituent parts; hence, it cannot be treated independently of them or, at least, the diversity that defines it. An archive can be underscored by several forms of diversity, and temporality is only one of such. But in the case where a systemic difference occurs, the knowledge it provides is a mixture of the implication of this constitutive difference and its effects on the contextual world. Therefore, the knowledge an archive provides is multileveled with multiple implications. It becomes a blueprint, readable and applicable to several issues, so far as they relate to the ideology behind the archive’s conception, the ideology conceived of by the self that has created it.
What then is the archive? The answer is simple without being reductive and complex without being mysterious. The archive is a narrative. To appreciate the archive as a source of information, it is vital to see the archive as a system-in-narration. The various manifestations of the archive all yield patterns that tell a story. The knowledge extracted from an archive after due exploration by a probing mind is a consequence of seeing patterns within these patterns. These patterns have corresponding referents in the outside world, which allows a logical interaction between the probing mind (third party) and the archive. This is possible because as a system and as a narrative the archive has an organizing principle, a nucleus to its circumference, a generative center that holds it together and transforms knowledge into experience and vice versa, an intelligence constituted in much the same way that the human as a living narrative has a nucleus, an intelligence that holds its parts in harmony. The interaction of the two nuclei (that of the archive and that of the probing mind as a living narrative) allows for exchanges that advance the transfer of knowledge. This knowledge can come from the probing mind relating parts of the archive to existing referents in the human world or worlds beyond it, or engaging the intelligence that has organized the archive, which can be within or without the archive.
The intelligence of the archive can exist outside it, but still be felt within it as its generative source, where it performs the function of a marshal, commandeering its various parts for cohesion and unity. The intelligence within the archive would, in this case, be a trace of the overarching intelligence, a sort of microcosmic force, which can be anything from the self, a cosmic intelligence, a super-computer, or any consciousness external to the archive, to cite a few possibilities. What I am essentially saying here is that the self that serves as the source of the archive, engineering it into a possibility, leaves a trace of itself within it, one organic to its composition. Therefore, the archive and everything about it can represent the self: its organicity, constituents, the patterns that define it, the implications of its internal relations, and its extratextual connotations. All these can inform on the inner landscape of the intelligence (self) that has created the archive, especially since archives wield referential power.
The archive therefore is a metaphor of the self. Its ability to represent the self and the processes of its definition underscores it as a narrative. An interpretive engagement with the archive leads to exploring the cognitive landscape of the self, as if the self were responding to an investigative force. In the case where the archive represents and narrates the self, it would be acting in the capacity of a trace of the self. Although the archive is a narrative, it is not the self, but a trace of the self. Being a trace, the archive leaves room for the narration of the self without being the self. The archive thus is a useful tool for connecting culture and self, private experiences and common knowledge, or introspection, cultural epistemologies, and personal perspectives – everything that defines the self as a sociocultural being. It tells a story of the self as it relates, works with, affects, or is affected by the larger culture. These qualities of the archive have defined its importance, particularly to me and my consideration of African knowledge forms and their place in the global world. As I entered the last phase of my academic career and began to ponder how best to use my remaining limited number of years, the possibilities the archive offers encouraged me to settle more for introspective work. The possibilities are vital to the introspective angle from which I approach the idea of bridging personal experience and cultural knowledge for revisiting African epistemologies.
Over the decades I have acquired tremendous experience as a scholar and researcher, teacher, and mentor, and I have equally served as a policy formulator and public intellectual. As I began to think of how best to cumulate the diversity of knowledge and experience into a set of writings, my mind became restless. I had already written two memoirs and was planning the third. I agonized on how to structure an interrogation of myself as archive in order to arrive at originality and value. I settled for two interrelated bodies of ideas and objects – the accumulation of my creative/literary and academic work as one part; and the cumulation of my extensive collections of sculptures, textiles, and paintings as the second. Both parts are archives that are both external and internal to me, an entry into an expansive library. Both have taken a lifetime to collect. The two archives speak to the African societies from which they emerge and to which they are addressed. Both reveal the path of history and all of its contradictions.
I am part of the contradictions, of growing up in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. The visual objects speak to the contradictions of modernity. The literary works capture the anger and displeasure of modernity. In light of the foregoing, I consider my archive a narrative, a system-in-narration, a composition of patterns that tells a story, expressing all the afore-discussed possibilities. Comprising materials that hold value for me, it advances a theory that centers my lived approach toward decolonizing African cultural practices and knowledge form. The archive thus offers a narrative that not only textualizes this philosophy but also stresses my aesthetic choices in relation with my knowledge of the world and my cognitive itinerary in connection to my position within an epistemic space whose cultural vehicles continue to intimate me and to which I respond appropriately. The accounts this archive provides emphasize my position as a knowledge-scape; they present me as a matrix of possibility generating several layers of knowledge that find traction within a world outside of me.
This archive is thus an extension of me as a consciousness. In exhibiting cultural and personal significance, they advance a narrative of me and the experiences I have gathered over the years as the “intelligence” capable of organizing different elements into a system and an “organizing principle” generating patterns that cast private materials as cultural vehicles. This is buttressed by the fact that readers and viewers can respond to this archive, (re)negotiating the meaning of its composition as I have organized them and their knowledge of it as they have received it. This way, they create personal responses that interact with me as the “trace” within the archive, validating the evocative responses of an archive. This evocation is both of self and of culture.
Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies is, therefore, a product of ongoing interaction between me and the world, and between intelligence (self) and an archive as a collected system. I use my collection organized into an archive to explore personal and public perspectives in relation to the Yorùbá and the African world. This is the function of an archive, and mine is not different. The archive’s revelatory power or connotative possibilities are revealed when the intelligence that organizes it engages it. Probing it for knowledge reveals several layers of connection between the self and the archive: there is, for instance, the layer of industry, where the archival or ethnographic effort is made manifest; the layer of epistemic significance, which relates how the archive serves as a cultural vehicle revealing cultural histories; and the layer of self-representation, which is the layer of the “cognitive itinerary” where the archive traces and embodies the self, symbolizing strategic intellectual effort toward the (re)definition of consciousness. The connotative possibilities of an archive can be the subject of debate since they can take several forms. But what is implicated when the archive is engaged by the intelligence that organized it, while it is also expected to speak to the larger cultural firmament within which both self and archive are positioned? One simple answer is that the archive operates on a dual level. The archive is a complex system with an equally complex import. While this rationale is straightforward, it does not answer the question of what happens when the archive is engaged by the intelligence that has created it and is responsible for its organicity. What is the result of my metacognition of my own archive?
A useful answer, which sets the tone for the chapters in this work and reveals the overriding premise, is that the archive as a trace of self not only narrates the self, but also reveals how the archive (as a network) intimates to the intelligence that has created it. What this means is that the archive, as a network with cultural and historical significance, demonstrates the intelligence that has created it as a matrix of possibility. The intelligence not only lives on in the archive, as a trace, but is projected as drawing cultural networks into close proximity through diverse cultural vehicles (that make the archive) in order to establish a convergent zone. This zone is the intersection between the self and culture; the self as an organizing principle and the created archive as an expression of this principle as well as a cultural vehicle and a source of knowledge in its own right; the archive as a narrative of the self and of culture; the archive as a trace of the self and a network of interacting cultural elements. Also, within this convergent zone (made possible by the archive as a trace of self and a network of cultural vehicles) is the intersection between conclusions of general scholarship and those of personal observation; general aesthetics or aesthetic appeal and personal knowledge of the archive’s (and its parts’) symbolism; and the intersection between what is intimate to the self and how it draws the culture into this private world of intimacy.
An instructive summary of this zone is that it creates room for the collusion of what is known to all and what is known to the self. This condition is brought about by two important things: the archive comprising personal materials that also are cultural vehicles; and the intelligence (self) also being the organizing principle, that is, the generating center of the archive, as well as the critical voice interrogating the archive. In other words, if the intelligence that serves as the powerhouse of the archive interrogates the archive, a trace of the self, the intelligence interrogates itself. Doing so, it emphasizes itself as a matrix of possibility or a knowledge source. Engaging the archive to establish the convergent zone depicts the self as an archive, while the endeavor becomes autoethnographic. The self is essentially an archive demonstrating its ability to generate another archive with personal and public significance. These are bounded by the merging of personal and public realms, which allow for personal and communal import.
The philosophy behind the book, to put it simply, adapts a familiar English expression: show me your books, show me your clothes, show me the art in your home, and I will show you who you are. This is possible because the self is a miniature of culture. Questions of “why” and “to what purpose” that address the self (and also implicate the culture) can be quickly answered by engaging the materials collected into an archive. A double channel of knowing is created: the self and the culture. The intelligence enters both simultaneously to establish a connection between the self as a generative center and the culture as the knowledge source, and vice versa, since the self can also serve as a source of knowledge and culture, a generative zone. In establishing this connection, experience is transformed into knowledge, personal items into cultural vehicles, and personal knowledge into public and vice versa.
Each chapter in this book operates on this principle. I demonstrate how personal objects as cultural vehicles tell my cultural history even as they intersect other histories. The chapters are autoethnographic because their premises are rooted in the convergent zone whence they observe the world and emphasize my position within it. Using my archive with its traces of the self to engage the world and its knowledge and to foreground African epistemologies allows me to demonstrate how autoethnographic approaches can transform experience into knowledge and derive from the convergent zone. To reveal this, the book is divided into two sections. Each focuses on a particular archive: the first section (Part II) contains six chapters that interrogate African culture through memoirs, existing scholarly works, and creative literature. The chapters approach the convergent zone by using personal narratives to explore African culture for a broader sociocultural significance. The second segment (Part III) differs slightly in its approach even though the premise remains the same. With five chapters focused on various archival materials – textiles, paintings, hair, sculpture, and photographs – the place of the archive as a trace of self is accentuated.
The larger context in the two archival categories that form the second part of this book confronts the Western encounters with Africa as well as two imposed competing models of development: capitalism and socialism. The encounters and models changed Africa, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. As I am part of the changes, I had to document them, in minor and major tales, thereby constituting the primary archives of specific moments, as in the peasant rebellion of the 1960s captured in Counting the Tiger’s Teeth. While each chapter focuses on a separate archive, this strategy gives the book an opportunity to closely examine the place of Africa and its cultures within a changing social climate initiated by Western capitalist forces from several perspectives toward generating useful and holistic conclusions.
Not only have we as a people had to accept many imposed cultures, we also had to rebel against them and their life-altering influences. I was part of both responses. But the tools of studying our experiences – the libraries, protocols, and ideas – were also foreign and largely imposed. I experienced this as well as part of my education system in Nigeria, from the elementary to the University of Ife where I acquired two degrees. Since the 1960s the humanities and social sciences have changed with the times, from a “dark continent” paradigm, to modernization theories, to Marxism, and to the current market-controlled liberal scholarship and so-called democracy. Thus, I have to accept and challenge epistemologies, and, as this book argues, make a case for alternative ways of thinking. If there is a core theme that this book demonstrates, it is to reinforce alternative ways of thinking based on African indigenous ways of knowing. This book provides a convergent zone, where alternative ways of thinking can materialize or be shaped to purpose.
From the introduction is revealed how autoethnography reinforces and is a product of this convergent zone. The subsequent chapters focus on several archival materials – autobiographies and essays, textiles, sculptures, paintings, photographs, and hair – to explore several aspects of the Yorùbá and African reality; and in their treatment of these subjects is reflected the strength of autoethnography in returning agency to African cultures, even if it investigates or researches it. The intricacy of this convergent zone is laid bare as each chapter implicates its decolonial leanings from several perspectives. The strength of autoethnography – in reestablishing/buttressing African epistemologies, foregrounding the transformation of experience in knowledge, and reinforcing the connection between the self, the archive, and the culture – is established from the book’s introduction to its conclusion.
This book cannot be confined to one discipline. It is a work of History as of Philosophy; it is grounded in ideas associated with gods and goddesses as well as in sheer literary imagination. The book enhances the value of proverbs to the same pedestal as those of books. As the chapters range from folklore to academic work, they expand understandings around the limitations of disciplinary boundaries. While the book captures events in some chapters, it is not about these events but about the ideologies and epistemologies surrounding them. While the book references stories and tales, it is less about them than about meta-narratives and meta-theories, revealing the mega-ideas that shape societies. And those theories are largely non-Western, widely used in African communities as they draw from language and lifestyles. There is a major focus in this book on cultures, even when they speak to social hierarchies, modernity, ethnicity, and nationality.
There is cultural nationalism in basing the archives on the Yorùbá experience. Without a deep understanding of culturalism, the core of African indigenous knowledge systems would be lost. As deployed in this book, there is one advantage to culturalism: it reduces generalizations around Africa, thus offering challenges to some of my formulations as African culture becomes located in different people and places. There is yet one other advantage: one cannot be led astray, as an insider, by the failure to understand what one addresses.
Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies provides decolonial direction through the Yorùbá example. And this is very significant as there is not one single way to put decoloniality to work as a tool of decentralizing and distribution of agency. Its focus is on the Yorùbá space, past and present, and has implications on how Yorùbá epistemologies are presented and received, now and in the future. It also has implications for how the culture is studied as autonomous and historical, and as reflective of obtainable realities in Africa as a continent, without attempting to account for all of it. The connection between autoethnography and how Africa is studied is the thread that holds together the several levels of analyses and layers of meaning in the book. Autoethnography is an alternative and counter-hegemonic instrument and is useful to the African who has been branded the alternative to a Western standard; hence, it enhances the visibility of those branded as subaltern persons, centralizing their culture, institutions, and epistemic possessions away from Western hegemony. It draws attention to the importance of the rapport between individuality and communality, and how one affects the other. By doing this, it gains the cultural value it needs to be an evocative tool of decoloniality. As demonstrated in the chapters that make Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies, autoethnography rebrands the archive as a cultural vehicle to achieve cultural relevance since the archive returns the spotlight and value to African epistemologies.
Outline of the Book
Part I: Introduction
Chapter 2: Autoethnography and Epistemic Liberation
This introductory chapter addresses the idea of autoethnography, examining its reliance on the objectivity of research and the subjectivity of autobiographical works in ethnographic efforts. It argues for the use and importance of autoethnography when researching indigenous epistemologies, drawing attention to autoethnography’s relevance for decolonial studies. The discussion focuses on what autoethnography is, the arguments against it, the benefits, and ethnography’s relation to existing research methodologies and patterns, particularly within countries located at the margins of global power. In its conceptual exploration of autoethnography as a research mode, the introduction argues for the book’s approach toward centralizing African epistemologies. It also draws links between the theses of the chapters and the idea of autoethnography.
Part II: History, Fictions, and Factions
This book is an archival meta-narrative that reflects on my corpus as an ideological afterthought, considering the scope and concerns of my engagement with art and life as expressed in my writings, dealings, and experiences. The first part of this book focuses on the literary and historical dimensions of my textual narratives, highlighting the deep-seated ideologies within them. The recurring theme in this section is the telos present in textual narratives, regarded as “narrative politics” in different parts of the chapters.
The third chapter, “Narrative Politics and Cultural Ideologies,” delves into the functional prism of a narrative by using A Mouth Sweeter than Salt as an ethno-autobiographical embodiment of cultural ideologies. By locating the personal within the communal, the memoir attempts a master narrative that can be described as narrative frames embedded in varying cultures, often unconsciously, to provide a culturally accepted communal guide for being a “good” member of that culture. The chapter investigates how the memoir contributes to the production of collective memory, providing a complementary–alternative approach to navigating the cluster of the past and the people, similar to myth, religion, literature, and history. Although A Mouth Sweeter than Salt is a negotiation and interpretation of my sociocultural beliefs, and my experiences in relation to my past, this chapter is a meta-narrative that carefully guides readers through the reconstruction of the narrative’s fragments of cultural ideologies – some of which might not be perceived by even the keenest of readers.
“Memory, Magic, Myth, and Metaphor” is an intersectional evaluation of the narrativity of memory and memory as a narrative. It also examines the purgatorial and historical dimensions of memory: “a walk on the fragile fragments of my memory.” As in the previous chapter, this chapter extends the counter-alternative approach of narratives to past and culture, examining Counting the Tiger’s Teeth as a viable cultural manifestation and sociohistorical documentation. It identifies the focalization of the Ogun Àgbẹ́kọ̀yà narrative, from personal and communal perspectives, as a representation of the absurd reality characterizing immediate postcolonial Nigeria; the country struggled to transition into modernity, and these struggles are sustained in the metaphors and symbols employed by the narrative. Surpassing a mere invocation of memory, this chapter establishes the narrative as a restitution of the past.
The next two chapters, “A Poetological Narration of the Nation” and “A Poetological Narration of the Self,” examine the expression and manifestations of “self” and “nation” across different bodies of poetry. The concepts of “self” and “nation,” as designated in these poetological narrations, may seem oppositional and discontinuous. However, there is an overlapping relation between the two concepts. The discussion in “A Poetological Narration of the Nation” is grounded in the idea that poetry, as a national narrative, and especially in postcolonial Africa, is an aggregate of sociocultural, political, and economic realities within a nation. The poet has a duty and desire to fulfill this sociocultural responsibility. As national narratives, the poems that this chapter engages with are characterized by significant embodiment and representations of society, including the diasporic as part of a nation. The chapter situates and equates the relevance and representation of African women within larger discourses of nation, nationality, nationalism, and nation building. It examines the conscious and unconscious functions of poetry in a nation’s narration by examining the history, beliefs, and culture of a group of people with a shared sense of belonging.
“A Poetological Narration of the Self” pursues universalist-cum-collectivist interpretations of selected poems, extending and refracting from the personal and collective “self” respectively, as thorough invocations of emotions for understanding and creating an image of the self. The distillation of the emotions and thoughts provoked by the poem are re-recollected in this chapter. Through the prism of the universal self, the chapter highlights how emotions are quintessential to the survival of humanity and the universe in its entirety. Love, fear, despair, joy, disillusionment, and hope are portrayed as basic components of the human consciousness in understanding the self, the other, and the world. The discourse in this chapter highlights the poetological narrative of the self as a quest to sketch an identity and understanding of the self, established as the agency of consciousness prompting the existence of the self and others. This obtains a new, extended, and profound understanding of the self.
Chapter 7, “Satire and Society,” explores the critical undertones of A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger’s Teeth as reflective and refractive narratives commenting on society to encourage positive change. The chapter analyzes one of several narrative dimensions, engaging them as satire to reveal different vices that are latent in the society described by the memoirs – these flaws existed in the past but remain rampant in the present day. The societal ills include sociocultural follies, religious excesses, political menace, and environmental degradation. Their consequences, ranging from personal and previous shortcomings to present and collective vices, generate forces that push society away from development and morality. The environmental menace created by greed, recklessness, and careless acts continues to weaken nature’s capacity to support life and human existence. These narratives ridicule the recounted shortcomings against this backdrop of deterioration and existing sociocultural standards in the hope of restoring proper civic conduct and fostering desired development.
The last chapter, “Narrative Politics and the Politics of Narrative,” provides closure for the overarching frame of the book’s first section. It shifts from literary narratives to several other textual narratives focused on society’s history, sociopolitics, and cultural and economic reality. It describes the central aim of every narrative as the intent to persuade and achieve a desirable future for society, positioning them as conscious agents of human and societal development. This chapter establishes narratives as important and essential mechanisms through which humans order and stabilize reality as the constructs of their conscience and consciousness. It identifies relevant and common preoccupations across different narratives that span decades, presenting an overview of the politics of narrative. For example, Narrating Violence in Nigeria navigates the religious and political dimensions of violence, considering how it has impaired or enhanced Nigeria’s development. It not only historicizes and intellectualizes discourse; it also provides the rationale for studying its causes, identifying its symptoms, highlighting its consequences, and proffering pragmatic solutions to harmonize and advance society.
Part III: Visual Cultures
This part uses archived images to argue for autoethnography in relation to African epistemologies. These chapters present another angle to autoethnography, allowing material collections to serve as cultural vehicles. This establishes a convergent zone between several concepts: self and culture; personal library, ethnographic work, and cultural knowledge; experiential and public knowledge; private and public realms; knowledge evoked from cultural materials and sourced from existing literature; and items belonging to public and personal archives. It also probes the space between that which is known to all and knowledge gained from observation.
Chapter 9, “Sculpture as an Archive,” interrogates Yorùbá sculptural tradition using sculptures and carvings from my archive. It deploys the carvings as prisms through which several aspects of Yorùbá history and culture can be examined for extensive illumination. This chapter establishes that cultural items can be used to investigate a culture without undue subjectivity; also implied in the chapter is an unstated argument that using sculpture to address aspects of Yorùbá reality – by merging personal observation, experiential and academic knowledge, public/cultural knowledge, and perspectives from existing literature – is an effective strategy that applies autoethnography to oppose hegemonic, Eurocentric narratives of Yorùbá reality.
The chapter deploys sculpture to address not only Yorùbá reality but also scholarship on Yorùbá (and African) art, which foregrounds the function of sculptures as archival materials with cultural significance. It also addresses issues of the linguistic turn, authorship, and religious significance through the advocacy for, focus on, and use of Yorùbá epistemic concepts to appreciate the artistry and significance of sculptures. To properly engage sculptures as repositories of cultural knowledge, epistemic concepts and philosophical principles of indigenous tradition must be applied. The chapter buttresses this thesis by locating oversights caused by outsiders’ perspectives within an insider–outsider dialectic, emphasizing its influence on the study of Yorùbá sculpture.
By identifying sculpted materials as tools for performing a critical appraisal of Yorùbá history, economics, politics, and artistic industry, Chapter 9 explores the methodologies of understanding, ideologies contained in, and epistemologies sustained by Yorùbá sculptures and sculptural tradition. The chapter discusses the idea of sculptures as agents of socioconsciousness, repositories of knowledge, cultural codes, and reflectors of Yorùbá spirituality, philosophy, and religion.
“Textiles as Texts,” the following chapter, engages textiles as readable materials. It argues that Yorùbá textiles and sartorial tradition reflect the history, sociocultural economies, politics, and spiritualities of their culture. The presentation of textiles as text makes an argument for certain knowledge practices that define textiles as systems, especially ones that accommodate other mini-systems. These practices present a rich history of Yorùbá clothing, debating and correcting European misconceptions of Yorùbá garment origins and their dress tradition. This chapter also presents the Yorùbá cloth-weaver as a creator who allows intimate cultural values, as well as the configurations and ethos of society, to reflect through their created work.
Approaching textiles as text provides avenues for exploring their textuality, especially in their reflection of African epistemologies. In exploring the components of Yorùbá textiles, the chapter extracts the meanings invested in them, which have cultural and historical significance. These meanings retain, safeguard, and foreground histories that are an alternative to those created by Eurocentric scholarship. The readability of the texts is emphasized by the way that they reflect realities, philosophical concepts, and social codes when held in visual dialogue.
Chapter 10 reinforces the place of Yorùbá and African sartorial influences on Western designers, using different cloth types as primary data, and it reconsiders the European entry into the African cloth market. It also reexplores the theory that Africa has perpetually drawn creative influences from the West; this assumption is negated through a counter-narrative establishing how Yorùbá cloth types, tastes, and an established sartorial industry existed before European contact, influencing designers who sought to break into the African cloth market.
This chapter also emphasizes the readability of textiles by highlighting associations between different cloth types and existing cultural principles and folkloric practices. It not only imparts an understanding of a rich sartorial culture where clothes have designated functions and values, but it also explains how Yorùbá dresses serve as indexes that point to different junctures in time and space, as well as visions or ideas that have persisted throughout Yorùbá cultural history. Textiles embody cultural concepts and philosophies, reflecting cultural adherence or disobedience.
Chapter 11, “Canvas and the Archiving of Ethnic Reality,” interrogates the rapport between Yorùbá painting and spirituality, cultural order and principles, and artistic practices. It provides a conceptual understanding of the canvas as a blank space upon which the collective Yorùbá unconscious is inscribed with brush strokes and vivid colors, tracing the functionality of Yorùbá art in a cyclical process of inspiration between the painter, the culture, and the artwork. The complementarity between Yorùbá painting and culture addresses how fundamental epistemic and philosophical concepts are realized in paintings. For example, Ọ̀nà (crossroad) in Yorùbá painting exists as an artistic expression and a culturally loaded concept related to epistemic concepts such as Ìpín (lot), Àyànmọ́ (destiny), and Kádàrá (fate), affecting how they are realized on the canvas with culturally coded patterns or symbols.
Examining painting as visual rhetoric provides channels for exploring its place and its networks in Yorùbá culture – it is a contrast to the exhibitive dynamics within which visual artwork exists in the West. Addressing these networks identifies the close-knit, dynamic interaction between Yorùbá culture and its artistic practices. In Yorùbá culture the mediumship of painting galvanizes the creation of networks for artistic patronage, which develop differently from those in the West. This chapter explores the importance of “the network of placement” for understanding patronage, and painting exhibition in Yorùbá culture.
Paintings are idealizing frames in Yorùbá culture; this chapter explores how paintings condition human behavior and succeed at redefining the ambassadorial qualities that the culture endorses. These engagements are supported by the link between the aesthetic qualities inherent in Yorùbá painting and their cultural values. The chapter engages the intelligibility that characterizes Yorùbá painting as visual rhetoric by examining cultural concepts and realities such as aesthetic of the cool, Orí (head/destiny), Àṣẹ (generative power), and communalism and kinship systems (Ẹbí, Ará, Mọ̀lẹ́bí), using the archival images as examples. The examination is enriched by Yorùbá folklore, including proverbs, maxims, songs, and spirituality. Images from the archive support the exploration and allow the chapter to trace the circle that binds painting, painter, and culture together.
The subsequent chapter, “Yorùbá Hair Art and the Agency of Women,” explores hair as art, power, and symbol. Focusing on women’s hair, it addresses the hair’s synedochical power, expressivity, and cultural symbolism. It also examines hair’s metaphysical connotations in Yorùbá ontology and cosmology while addressing its proximity to Yorùbá spirituality. Yorùbá women are placed within this discourse, and the chapter discusses how the art of styling hair affects social perception, representation, and cultural expectations of women and the female identity. The art of the coiffeur in Yorùbá culture is a dedicated performance of identity; it narrates, instructs, educates, and holds people in visual dialogues.
Chapter 12 interrogates the styling of women’s hair as an avenue for power shifts between the sexes as well as between the female subject and members of society. The workplace of the coiffeuse is a performative space where transformational power is exhibited – in the Yorùbá social sphere this is a fecund space for female solidarity, expressions of femininity, cultural pedagogy and reorientation, and a place to ventilate and learn as well as a space for excising mutually felt forms of oppression. It is germane to the structure of Yorùbá society as a space of both conformity and nonconformity, reaffirming orality and the efficacy of folkloric elements such as proverbs, songs, and panegyrics for cultural progress.
By focusing on the workplace of the Onídìrí (hairstylist) as a unit in the Yorùbá social sphere, the chapter considers the self-reflexivity and referential power of women’s hair. Aside from foregrounding the symbolism of Yorùbá hairstyles and how they reveal accepted expressions of femininity, or their transgression, it also demonstrates how hair is an expression of self-fashioning for the Yorùbá woman. The chapter employs Yorùbá epistemic concepts to evaluate the function of women’s hairstyles and their place in Yorùbá ontology and the culture’s social space. It explains how these hairstyles reveal several Yorùbá philosophies on beauty, moderation, aestheticism, behavior, extravagance, artistry, tradition, authorship, civility, anti-aesthetics, and creation and rebirth, among others. The chapter also traces connections between Yorùbá hair and cultural beliefs on destiny, deity worship, and visual engagement or the act of seeing and being seen in Yorùbá culture. By evaluating women’s hair as art, the chapter applies aesthetic principles associated with Yorùbá art, relying on images from the archive.
Chapter 13, “Photography and Ethnography,” traces the connections between photography as a tool, an activity, and a producer of knowledge and culture. It reflects on the nature of photographs, especially in relation to African culture, its people, and black skin in general by engaging with photography as a colonial tool and activity, along with several photographs that provide physical representations of the camera’s power. Aspects of photography are significant as processes and activities for encoding knowledge, and although they are non-material they are integral to the way that photographic images and tools are received and used. The chapter also focuses on how racial politics, cultural practices, and knowledge – whether an insider’s or an outsider’s – influence perception of photographs and the impact of photographs on individuals.
This chapter traces the memory function of photographs, touching on the colonial imperatives sustained by cameras and the technology that aids their functionality. It also addresses the visibility and agency afforded by digital cameras, rescuing them from subaltern positions. It remains an open question whether digital cameras are completely autonomous from the colonial imperatives that are discoverable through the use and functionality of analog cameras. The gaze behind the digital camera, with its own cultural conditioning, controls what is produced. The camera lens that focuses on the subject is also conditioned by the human eye that directs it.
The chapter further addresses the possibilities that digital cameras offer to people as individuals, without sacrificing their position in a culture as members of a collective. It interrogates these possibilities because they do not erase the powerful relation between the camera lens and the human eye, despite the tools available to manipulate images during or after production. These explorations are carried out to foreground possibilities for the reception of photographs in a world where lenses, either human or machine, are conditioned by contextual knowledge.
Ultimately, this chapter explores how photographs can affect the remembrance of Yorùbá cultural history – the human eye that creates through the camera lens, or the eye that sees the finished product as a photograph, is a product of cultural conditioning. It examines photographs as major archives, exhuming history and establishing linkages. The discussions attempt to answer these questions: Do photographs represent certain sources of or advancements in knowledge? How are meaning and deduction, as aspects of seeing and gazing, implicated in, through, and by photographs? Do contextual realities extend the frame of photographs beyond that which is visible on the canvas? Images from the archive expand on this chapter’s arguments.
Part IV: Conclusion
Chapter 14, “Self, Collective, and Collection,” builds on the case made for autoethnography, concluding the thesis of the book by reflecting on the interconnection between the self, the collective culture, and the archive in the form of the collection. It presents the self as its own narrative, which can be understood via its actions, including the creation of an archive. It argues for a collection as a manifestation of cultural ideologies, especially in relation to the Yorùbá, who consider archives to be a means of defining selfhood. The chapter also makes arguments for the premises of the previous chapters by emphasizing their connection with the idea of autoethnography and their relation to one another, sustaining and reemphasizing African knowledge.
