“The Bag Is My Home”: Recycling “China Bags” in Contemporary African Art

Abstract

Frequently used as mobile storage containers or baggage by migrants and traders moving across borders, the mesh bag made of red, blue, and white polypropylene fibers has become a prominent element of African visual culture. This light, strong, and affordable woven bag, often referred to as “China bag” or “Chinese tote,”1 features prominently in recent artistic practices by African artists such as Nobukho Nqaba, Dan Halter, and Gerald Machona. In this essay I examine how these artistic interventions using photography, installation, video, and performance, circulating in galleries, museums, and the streets, contribute to sociological discussions about the ways in which emerging trajectories, relationships, and identities are perceived and debated in the context of the global South. I do not view the South here as a settled geopolitical order, but understand it as a concept about mobilities, transitions, and shifting relations.2 More specifically, I suggest that transformation of China bags from everyday objects into art works with sociopolitical agency embodies a sense of transience and transgression that alludes to understandings of the South as a passage without settled destinations.In these artistic practices that highlight symbolic subtexts in everyday life, the bag is much more than a container for traveling, as it plays a part in processes of individual expression, identity formation, and cultural negotiation. It embodies the ever-present element of movement, which remains an irreducible aspect of life on the African continent. Moreover, as the common name—“China bag”—implies, among the perplexed modes of migration and movement revealed in these artistic projects, one significant trajectory is the continually increasing presence of China on the continent over the past few decades. Engaging with the multiplicity of migration experiences and emerging theorizations on travel and movement, I suggest that the circulation and production of these artistic works around the bag not only provide some nuanced insights into transnational histories and realities of everyday African lives, but also open up new possibilities to rethink familiar and authorized paradigms of mobility in the global South.The China bag, an “ordinary object” on-the-move, is a fruitful trope to engage with the multiple meanings of mobilities in everyday living spaces in Africa. Recent academic interest in mobility studies, referred to as the “mobility turn” or the “new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller and Urry 2006; Cresswell 2006; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006), has shown that not only where we live, but also how we move, influences our subjectivities, narratives, and ideologies. Cresswell (2006: 1–2) argues that mobility is not only everywhere in the modern world, but also more central to both the world and our understanding of it than ever before: “It plays a central role in discussions of the body and society. It courses through contemporary theorizations of the city.” In our mobile era, dwelling is thought to “involve complex relationships between belongingness and traveling … People can indeed be said to dwell in various mobilities” (Urry 2000: 157). Many people, whether they are physically on the move or not, find themselves “living their daily lives at the increasingly complicated intersection between home and mobility” (Molz 2008: 328). Aside from the acknowledged importance of movement in the modern world (Canzler, Kaufmann, and Kesselring 2008: 3), the dynamic of mobility in the context of the global South remains a neglected topic. Whereas mobility is often considered as a basic principle of modernity (Cresswell 2006: 15) or a prominent feature of globalization in the Western world, the movements of people in the global South are often characterized as constrained (Smith and Katz 1993; Pfaff 2010), passive, and too often associated with traumatic experiences. Contrary to the impression frequently produced by international mainstream media, most global migration is intraregional, occurring within the countries of the former Soviet Union, South Asia, and West Africa (World Bank 2011). Despite the significance of South-South migration and its implications on transnational movement, the debate on mobility has tended to focus primarily on movements in the “developed” world, or from “developing” to “developed” world.Here I will challenge this familiar paradigm of mobility and demonstrate that mobility, circulation, and movement have always been, and remain, part of historical and contemporary experiences in the global South. Drawing on South African artist Nobukho Nqaba's metaphor “the bag as my home,” I explore the complexity of experiences of mobility on and beyond the African continent. What are the increasingly complicated routes and patterns of movement on and beyond the African continent? How do people negotiate belonging/belongings through various intersecting mobilities of cultures, images and objects? And how does this experience of “dwelling-in-movement” inform our understanding of the global South as a mobile space of continuous movements and transitions?These questions in turn raise others. How does this everyday object and its naming patterns illuminate the daily spaces and various trajectories in which they circulate? How do young African artists recollect and transform the quotidian object into art projects to comment on the political and material struggles of African migrants across the continent, amongst other things. Some artists use China bags to reflect new valences and meanings in current global socioeconomic shifts and how they are inextricably knitted into intensifying discourses of China-Africa engagement.3 Addressing these questions provides a more nuanced reflection on the multiple trajectories of circulation and mobility in and beyond Africa, including the circulation of artistic works as commodities. Situating this against the backdrop of recent debates on migration across and beyond the continent, we can see how the study of everyday objects and their spatial trajectories in Africa might complicate our understanding of the paradigms of migration and mobility in a wider, global context.To explore the politics of mobility and immobility in the context of the global South, we must trace not only the movements of humans but also the circulation of material objects. Recent scholarship concerning the relationship between people and things probes the social contexts of objects and commodities. “What is newly compelling about this sociological analogy,” writes Malewtiz (2014: 2), “is the notion that objects, like people, are subject to the contingencies of a continuing history, rather than to the determinist logic of origin.” Thing theorists (Brown 2001; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Hoskins 1998; Appadurai 1986) contend that material culture is similarly constructed and reconstructed by shifting social meanings and the use-value that is conferred on objects. My approach highlights the circulation of symbolic cultural objects through contexts—what Thomas (1991) calls “recontextualization”—and how this illuminates the complex connections and shifting boundaries between different places on and beyond the African continent. As suggested by Appadurai (1986: 5): “It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.” In this respect, an examination of the object-on-the-move—the China bag—can help us understand the spatial and cultural practices in which the object is embedded, especially everyday trajectories of life and death of people on the continent.Objects pass through many transformations, which is why Appadurai called for a study of the “life histories” of things, and it is worth noticing that the everyday movement of things is not only material but also “artistic and aesthetic” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2008: 8–9). There is a potential productivity of art works to trace in understanding mobility. In Art and Agency (1998), Alfred Gell draws our to the agency of objects art as of social that the object not only a of different identities as or but also with people use and Gell that art is produced in to the and of art works as a of of their or in the of things, and these objects have agency they and to with and In this respect, us a different approach to the of approach the ways in which things are and Gell at the processes by which objects are with and have an these us a more of and understanding the circulation of objects, from everyday to artistic the social life or the of objects, including how the objects are into artistic provides a to understand the shifting spatial and complicated of the context in which the objects on the of Appadurai Gell (1998), and Urry I that an examination of the circulation of objects, including how quotidian objects are into artistic works with and provides insights into the complicated paradigms of mobility, the shifting social and the politics of identities in contemporary Africa, where social and cultural and with a naming patterns of these bags are associated with and trajectories of migration and reflect how people, things, and move across bags by many in various of the bag” in the bag” or in bag” in the in the and some they have become global of not only across but within countries in the naming of the bag the spatial of current and social processes and the complicated of movement and migration is worth that in where they are the bags are not called “China they are associated with the movement of a of Some people bag is the it is often used by travel between and especially a significant of to China are an in up more than one of the the of travel home to the these bags are around and across the of a naming that the bag with a of people, the bag is referred to as a bag in is associated with the of by the in the In the in the of an Many of West African especially into the a to in the In the an to and other African to to their home It is that more than one people they into bags and of many used these mesh bags to their the a political more than it is in use and is in social and cultural in West Africa. both in and that in are these and with of and South Africa, the bags are as “China 2), and other on or where they bag” is to the in the of a for the bag, naming patterns different trajectories of human movement and is by as an everyday life that and an aspect of modern society. the naming of these bags us that mobilities and be without to the and that and to Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006: and that the mobility of some people also the immobility of it is to that mobility and and of and naming of the “China bag” a of different spaces between and to a between the South and the a of or or the bag new questions about mobility, often associated with modernity and It a of mobility in the global South that is and politics of an increasing are not always or whether in West Africa, or Africa, the naming of the bag a sense of and from one to it often to the of and to be here but from everyday of these which the of of people on-the-move, the artistic works that use and a common container often by people, the mesh bag is a that of the of life and the experience of everyday life in Africa. woven bag is the central visual in recent artistic projects, such as Nobukho Nqaba's Dan and Nqaba's can be as “the bag is my or is the for the mesh “the one with and “the as “the China bag this of the living and moving in South in in and to where a for from of Art at the of in and is in is a of the of up with the bag and a reflection on of migration within South Africa. 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