Le Musee Cannibale Edited by means of Marc-Olivier Gonseth.

Le Musee Cannibale Edited by means of Marc-Olivier Gonseth, Jacques Hainard, and Roland Kaehr Musee d'Ethnographie, Neuchatel, 2002 304 pp 2 b/w photos. CHF 2500 softcover

Unpacking Europe Towards a Critical Reading Edited through Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2001 468 pp approx. 40 b/w & 75 color photos. EUR 3850 softcover

Images and Empires Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa Edited by dint of Paul Landau and Deborah D Kaspin The University of California Pres Berkeley, 2002 396 pp 79 b/w photos, map. $60 hardcover, $2495 softcover

Artificial Africas Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization compassion Mayer University Press of recent England for Dartmouth College, Hanover and London, 2002 400 pp 16 b/w illustrations. $60 hardcover, $2495 softcover

In the late 1930 Bronislaw Malinowski issued what remains a provocative now largely unanswered call for greater inclusiveness in African Studies. The great anthropologist had just visited his doctoral pupil Audrey Richards at her research site among Bemba persons of what is now northeastern Zambia, and having take a view ofed this historically peculiar colonial spectacle (see Herbert 2002; Schumaker 2001) he urg Africanists to bring out a holistic ethnography that would include European missionaries and administrators, colonists (primarily European, but one should add Indians, Lebanese, Omanis, and other expatriates), and more casual European visitors along with the African enthralls of most scholarly work of the day. no other than then could one grasp the on-the-ground cultural complexities of what is now called the "colonial moment" Others have repeated or resounded Malinowski's call, and George Brooks's Eurafricans in Western Africa (2003) Johannes Fabian's Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (2000) and Eugenia Herbert's Twilight in succession the Zambezi (2002) are brilliant examples of by what mode productive such broadened views can be in understanding the oft-unnerving and sometimes bizarre intersubjectivities of African colonial life.

While seeking a clearer understanding of European and other expatriate contributions to the shifting "scapes" of African colonial life (cf Appadurai 1996) others have called for closer attention to to what degree colonizers were viewed, understood, resisted, assisted, and exploited by means of colonized Africans. Bogumil Jewsiewicki stands on the outside among those who have attempted to capture African perspectives end oral narratives, written histories, visual accounts, and other sources. Scholars "have obscur the invention of a West in the African imagination," Jewsiewicki wrote in Susan Vogel's Africa Explores, "for the West resists appropriation by the agency of other cultures; it has in no degree agreed that cultural exchange goe in the two directions" (1991:139).

Again, late works such as Lyn Schumaker's Africanizing Anthropology (2001) and Johannes Fabian's "Africa's Belgium" (2001) illustrate the fruitfulness of investigating just so African imaginings and retorts; on the contrary a painting by Cheri Samba reproduc in Jewsiewicki's Mami Wata: La peinture urbain au Congo (2003:196-97) illustrates the point more succinctly. Titled Cheri Samba corrige l'historien Bogumil Jewsiewicki (1997) it depicts the artist make straighted in a smart plaid jacket and reflective dark glasses confidently facing the viewer, his border slightly furrowed. Jewsiewicki is seated in the weaker position with his back to the viewer, intently looking at Samba from one side ordinary eyeglasses (which he did not wear at the time). The veil of Jewsiewicki's earlier book, Cheri Samba: The Hybridity of an Art (1995) floats between the sum of two units men, while a text written along the one and the other sides of the painting voices Samba's arguments with several of the historian's interpretations of his work and life more generally. As Jewsiewicki notes, Samba was flattered from the book--a copy of which Jewsiewicki gave him personally--but also raise it to be a "menace to his autonomy," and to such a degree he responded in a painting, knowing that "this maneuver would permit him to bring the exchange [between the brace men] back to a field where he knew he would be the winner" (p 194; view Meier 2003 for a review of another new Jewsiewicki book about contemporary Congolese painting).

Each of the works glimpsed in this review approaches representation of and by means of Africans in its own ways, given the different circumstances the authors of each consider; further all four books share a brains that it is high time for Africanist scholars to use lense the pair wide enough to include all players--African and European--while narrow enough to avoid essentialism. Le musee cannibale and Unpacking Europe are bookend around of the like kind issues and approaches. The undivided investigates how museums exhibiting African materials have "consumed" and "digested" the clans they have sought to depict while the other deconstructs the pretensions of Western bystanders sufficiently arrogant--again following Jewsiewicki--to "never agree that cultural exchange goes in the pair directions." Images and Empires and Artificial Africas may also be paired, for they exhibit detailed case studies of in what way Africa has been and still is invented by means of visual and narrative imagery. The former leaves readers with a reason of the promise of African agency, however, while the latter is fraught with dark despair.