Marginality designates the intermediate space between the so-called African

tradition and the projected modernity of colonialism. It is apparently an urbanized

space in which, as S. Amin noted, “vestiges of the past, especially the survival of
structures that are still living realities (tribal ties, for example), often continue to hide
the new structures (ties based on class, or on groups defined by their position in the
capitalist system)” (1974:377). This space reveals not so much that new imperatives
could achieve a jump into modernity, as the fact that despair gives this intermediate
space its precarious pertinence and, simultaneously, its dangerous importance. As P
Bigo put it recently:

The young nations rightly fear seeing their original world swallowed up in the whirlpools of
industrial society and disappear forever, somewhat like animal species we try with difficulty and
often in vain to protect against the invasion of technical man. (Bigo, 1974:23)

There is no doubt that direct or indirect colonialism always provokes in the countries that
experience it cultural constraint, a contamination the more profound as it is hidden. Lifestyles and
modes of thinking of the dominant nations tend to impose themselves on the dominated nations.
Morever, they are accepted, even sought after. Models spring up, alienating factors for the people
who adopt them. (Bigo, 1974:24)

At any rate, this intermediary space could be viewed as the major signifier of
underdevelopment. It reveals the strong tension between a modernity that often is an
illusion of development, and a tradition that sometimes reflects a poor image of a
mythical past. It also unveils the empirical evidence of this tension by showing
concrete examples of developmental failures such as demographic imbalance,
extraordinarily high birth rates, progressive disintegration of the classic family
structure, illiteracy, severe social and economic disparities, dictatorial regimes
functioning under the cathartic name of democracy, the breakdown of religious
traditions, the constitution of syncretic churches, etc. (Bairoch, 1971; Bigo, 1974).
In general, troubled by such confusion, social scientists prefer to plead for a
reassessment of programs of modernization. No doubt many theories are still to be
proposed and plans to be made. Yet one may already understand that this marginal
space has been a great problem since the beginning of the colonializing experience;
rather than being a step in the imagined “evolutionary process,” it has been the locus
of paradoxes that called into question the modalities and implications of
modernization in Africa.

Discursive Formations and Otherness

It is certain that the learned Antelle, without

being a misanthrope, was not interested at all

18
 in human beings. He would often declare that
he did not expect much from them anymore….
P BOUILLE, Planet of the Apes

The colonializing structure, even in its most extreme manifestations-such as the

crisis of South Africa (see, e.g., Seidman, 1985)-might not be the only explanation for
Africa's present-day marginality. Perhaps this marginality could, more essentially, be
understood from the perspective of wider hypotheses about the classification of
beings and societies. It would be too easy to state that this condition, at least
theoretically, has been a consequence of anthropological discourses. Since Turgot
(who in the 1750s first classified languages and cultures according to “whether the
peoples [are] hunters, shepherds, or husbandmen” [1913-1923, 1:172] and ultimately
defined an ascending path from savagery to commercial societies), non-Western
marginality has been a sign both of a possible absolute beginning and of a primitive
foundation of conventional history. Rather than retracing an already too well-known
evolutionary hallucination (Duchet, 1971; Hodgen, 1971), let us take a different angle
by examining both the issues derived from a fifteenth-century painting and the
allocation of an “African object” to nineteenth=century anthropology.
Commenting upon Las Meninas of Velasquez, M. Foucault writes: “the painter is
standing a little back from his canvas. He is glancing at his model; perhaps he is
considering whether to add some finishing touch, though it is also possible that the
first stroke has not yet been made . . .” (1973:3). The painter is at one side of the
canvas working or meditating on how to depict his models. Once the painting is
finished, it becomes both a given and a reflection of what made it possible. And
Foucault thinks that the order of Las Meninas seems to be an example of “a
representation [which] undertakes to represent itself . . . in all its elements, with its
images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call
it into being.” Yet in the amazing complexity of this painting there is remarkable
absence: “the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a
resemblance” (Foucault, 1973:16).
Now let us consider Hans Burgkmair's painting Exotic Tribe. Is the painter sitting
back contemplating his exotic models? How many? It is not even certain that a model
is present in the room where Burgkmair is thinking about ways of subsuming
particular versions of human beings. The year is 1508. Miter is still alive. Burgkmair
is by then a respected master of the new school of Augsburg he has founded. He
would like to please the Fuggers and Welsers and has agreed to illustrate Bartolomdus
Springer's book on his travels overseas (Kunst, 1967). He has carefully read
Springer's diary, has probably studied some clumsy pencil or pen-and-ink sketches,
and has decided to draw six pictures of “primitives.”
The first picture of the series seems to represent a family. Let us imagine

19
the painter at work. He has just read Springer's description of his voyage, and,
possibly on the basis of some sketches, he is trying to create an image of blacks in
“Gennea.” Perhaps he has decided to use a model, presumably white but strongly
built. The painter is staring at the pale body, imagining schemes to transform it into a
black entity. The model has become a mirror through which the painter evaluates how
the norms of similitude and his own creativity would impart both a human identity
and a racial difference to his canvas. Perhaps the artist is already at work. Yet he has
to stop regularly, walk around the model, leave the luminous space before the
window, and retire into a discreet corner. His gaze addresses a point which is a
question: how to superimpose the African characteristics described in Springer's
narrative onto the norms of the Italian contrapposto? If he succeeds, the painting
should be, in its originality, a celebration and a reminder of the natural link
connecting human beings and, at the same time, an indication of racial or cultural
differences. It should bear witness to the truth of similitudes, analogies, and possibly
even the violence of antipathy. At any rate, Kunst notes that

The nude African depicted from behind conforms to the classical rule of contraposto expressed in
the compensatory balance of symmetrical parts of the body in movement: one shoulder leaning on
one leg and the other, raised above the free leg. One guesses that this nude man was copied from a
classic model to which the artist gave characteristics, jewelry and swords, of an exotic people still
strongly attached to nature. (Kunst, 1967:19-20)

It is easy to dismiss my concern about similitude in this particular creative

process. Am I not projecting a twentieth-century perspective onto the pictorial
techniques of the early sixteenth century? The structure of figures is there in the first
small painting, treated in a typical way. The fuss about similitude might just be, after
all, only a contemporary hypothesis about the process of establishing links between
beings and things from our present viewpoint. Yet it is possible to look for issues
stemming from Burgkmair's representation. In effect, we can describe his artistic
filiation and his dependence upon the classic ideals of the Renaissance (Kunst,
1967:2-o). We can also compare the principles of his technique with those apparent in
some contemporary works directly or indirectly dealing with black figures, such as
Erasmus Grasser's Moor Dancers (1480), Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Delights
(1500), Katleen the Moor Woman (1521) by Albrecht Dürer, and at the very end of
the century, Cornelisz van Haarlem's Batseba (1594). Speculating about or analyzing
the contrasts between white and black figures in these paintings, one could certainly
search for a vision which refers to historically conventional explanations-for example,
the sense of the characteristics and “the idea of design, that is to say, of expression by
means of the pure disposition of contours and masses, and by the perfection and
ordering of linear rhythm” (Fry, 1940:165). The complex play of colors in harmony
and opposition, the order of shades between the white and the black, are

20
obviously based on such intellectual and conscious references. But does not our
understanding of the colorful economies of canvases refer, in a very insistent manner,
to invisible traces?
The contrasts between black and white tell a story which probably duplicates a
silent but powerful epistemological configuration. Ex hypothesi it might simply be a
similitude interplay: “Convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathy tell us how the
world must fold upon itself, duplicate itself, reflect itself, or form a chain with itself
so that things can resemble one another. They tell us what the paths of similitude are
and the directions they take; but not where it is, how one sees it, or by what mark it
may be recognized” (Foucault, 1973:23-24).
Let us return to Burgkmair's finished painting. The three black figures-a boy, a
man, a seated woman with a baby pressed to her breast-have the right proportions to
one another and to the wider context. All are naked and have either bracelets around
their arms or 4 string around their necks, clear signs that they belong to a “savage”
universe (Kunst, 1967:20). The little boy is dancing, his oversized head turned toward
the sky. At the center of the canvas, the man, presented in clear, strong lines, is staring
at a faraway horizon, brandishing an arrow with his left hand and holding two other
arrows in his right hand. He incarnates power, not only because he occupies the
central place in the painting, but also because he is the most well-defined signifier in
.this scene. He is the locus defining the relationship between the boy at his left and
the woman at his right, depicted with both a touch of hieratic sense and a slightly
instinctual force. At the right, the woman with the baby is seated on a trunk. She
seems to be staring pensively at the pelvic area of the man. The curves of her body
are canonically executed.
The whole picture, in its simplicity and in the balanced rhythms of its lines,
seems a truly charming and decorative painting. Yet what it really expresses is a
discursive order. The structure of the figures, as well as the meaning of the nude
bodies, proclaim the virtues of resemblances: in order to designate Springer's blacks,
the painter has represented blackened whites. This was not rare during the sixteenth
and the seventeenth centuries, as a great number of the drawings of the period reveal.
That is the case for example, of the fifth picture in Filippo Pigafetta's 1591 edition of
his Relatione del Reame di Congo, representing three Italianized African women, and
that of the African king in the frontispiece of J. Ogilby's 1670 book on Africa. What is
important in Burgkmair's painting, as well as in similar drawings, is their double
representation.
The first, whose objective is to assimilate exotic bodies into sixteenthcentury
Italian painting methodology, reduces and neutralizes all differences into the
sameness signified by the white norm, which, let us keep in mind, is more religious
history than a simple cultural tradition. In concrete language this reference meant a
“biblical solution to the problem of cultural differences [which] was regarded by most
men as the best that reason and faith could propose” (Hodgen, 1971:254); that is, the
same origin for all human

21
beings, followed by geographical diffusion and racial and cultural diversification.
And it was believed that the Bible stipulated that the African could only be the slave
of his brethren.
There is another level, a more discreet one. It establishes a second representation
that unites through similitude and eventually articulates distinctions and separations,
thus classifying types of identities. Briefly, I can say that in Burgkmair's painting
there are two representational activities: on the one hand, signs of an epistemological
order which, silently but imperatively, indicate the processes of integrating and
differentiating figures within the normative sameness; on the other hand, the
excellence of an exotic picture that creates a cultural distance, thanks to an
accumulation of accidental differences, namely, nakedness, blackness, curly hair,
bracelets, and strings of pearls.
In their arrangements, these differences are pertinent signs. Because of the
fundamental order which they reveal, and to which they bear witness, the virtues of
resemblance erase physical and cultural variations, while maintaining and positing
surface differences as meaningful of human complexity. Diego Velasquez's Juan de
Pareja (1648) still actualizes this integrating reference, whereas major paintings such
as Peter Paul Rubens's Study of Four Blacks' Heads (16zo), Rembrandt's Two
Negroes (1697), and Hyacinthe Rigaud's Young Black (1697) explicitly express and
relate to another order. A new epistemological foundation was then functioning in the
West. Theories of diversification of beings, as well as classificatory tables, explain the
origins of constructing taxonomies and their objectives (Foucault, 1973:12-5-65). The
framework of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1735) is just one of the paradigmatic
classifications of species and varieties of Homo Sapiens (europaeus, asiaticus,
americanus, afer) distinguished according to physical and temperamental
characteristics (Count, 1950:355)- It would be too easy to link it, upstream, to
discursive formations about the great chain of beings and its hierarchy, and,
downstream, first to Blumenbach's craniology and, second, to the general anti-African
bias of the philosophical and scientific literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries (Lyons, 1975:24-85).
Two very different discursive formations-the discovery of African art and the
constitution of the object of African Studies, that is, the “invention” of Africanism as
a scientific discipline-can illustrate the differentiating efficiency of such general
classifying devices as pattern of reality, designation, arrangement, structure, and
character. I have already suggested that resemblance has been pushed out of Rubens's,
Rembrandt's, and Rigaud's perceptions of blacks. What is there, given in detailed
description, might be considered as a naming and an analysis of an alterity and refers
to a new epistemological ordering: a theory of understanding and looking at signs in
terms of “the arrangement of identities and differences into ordered tables” (Foucault,
1973:72).
Portuguese sailors brought to Europe the first feitiços, African objects supposedly
having mysterious powers, in the late fifteenth century. One finds

22