African Verbal Arts and the Study of African Visual Aesthetics

Abstract

In this paper I would like to briefly explore the possibilities that research into African verbal arts presents for an understanding of 'aesthetics' in African cultures.When used in African studies, by both non-indigenous and indigenous scholars, the Western derived label aesthetics generally serves to refer to a given culture's views on 'beauty' or related qualities.Scholarly attention has until now been largely focused on beauty as an attribute of human beings and of anthropomorphic renditions in statuary art and masked performances, in addition to several other visual phenomena.Although analyses of African verbal arts, both oral and written, may also instruct us on notions of quality in non-visual domains, in the present paper emphasis will be on what the opinions that are expressed in various literary types may teach us about the aesthetics informing the creation and evaluation of the visual arts in African cultures.While in keeping with the focus of this special issue of Research in African Literatures, this emphasis also reflects a disciplinary bias of the present author who has a background in African visual art studies.Although in African studies aesthetics usually refers to the idea of beauty, a limited number of scholars in this field--additionally--employ the term in the sense in which it has been used by most twentieth-century Western philosophers, namely as pertaining to 'the philosophy of art'.In the West, this conception of the label aesthetics has come to refer to--the study of--the philosophical views that throughout the documented history of Western thinking have been

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