ABOVE: Double pages 174–175 and 146–147 in Homme Blanc - Homme Noir. LEFT: Bishop with glasses. Nigeria. Reproduced as fi g. 190, page 238 in Homme Blanc - Homme Noir. 133 the profane, even if most of the objects remain charged with power. This is the complexity and richness that we were trying to convey to the reader. T. A. M.: This book includes essays by authors such as Jean Echenoz and Patrick Mauriès, who are not normally connected to the African art fi eld. Why did you involve them? A. W.: To open up the game! To escape the vile habit of allowing only the mandarins to contribute to this kind of catalog, usually in jargon that the general public is at a loss to understand. With a subject like ours, where many approaches are possible, it seemed an obvious choice to include contributions by art critics and writers. Understanding the colonial period requires resources from various disciplines, each of which is very often focused on its own interests. Walls must be scaled and free thinkers must be found to take on the subject. T. A. M. : The wealth of imagery that accompanies the text presents works—whether produced by African artists or European Africanists—that are full of life, invention, humor, and beauty. Do you feel that a specifi c aesthetic has emerged from this melting pot? How would you defi ne it? A. W.: One must make the distinction. The Africanists, and there weren’t many of them, can be seen as documentarians. But as I have already mentioned, the story is much more complex from the African side, and it’s about time we showed a real interest in it. The selection of objects we made can only begin to convey the creative richness, the humor, and the strategies that have been invented to defl ect and resist the tragedy of the colonial period. These objects suffer from being labeled as “Colonial art,” which relegates them to the status of a minor art, a bit like naïve art, only worse—mediocre souvenirs for tourists or terrible mementos of cultural destruction. We need to fi nd a better way to describe it, but the terminology may endure because it at least has the merit of situating these works in time and place.
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