All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of laughing people. Without hearing this chorus we cannot understand the drama as a whole.

Mikhail Bakhtin

In the last three or four years we have witnessed an upsurge of interest in African popular art forms so strong that it promises to become a movement. The individual researchers scattered over the continent, who for decades have been pursuing their interest in these arts in isolation, are suddenly finding that there is a forum emerging. Issues formerly raised piecemeal, mainly in short articles and often as a sideline by people whose principal expertise lay in some better-established field, are now getting full-scale treatment in the detailed monographs that are appearing from different parts of Africa. It seems the right moment to set out the scope and possibilities of this field, and to lay claim to a central position for it in the humanities and social sciences.

The most obvious reason for giving serious attention to the popular arts is their sheer undeniable assertive presence as social facts. They loudly proclaim their own importance in the lives of large numbers of African people. They are everywhere. They flourish without encouragement or recognition from official cultural bodies, and sometimes in defiance of them. People too poor to contemplate spending money on luxuries do spend it on popular arts, sustaining them and constantly infusing them with new life.

Karin Barber's thoughtful and substantial overview of popular arts in Africa comes at a critical juncture in the development of this field of study. Only in the past decade has a dialogue been initiated among scholars in the various disciplines who study popular arts. Barber's essay stands as an important contribution to this dialogue. Her commentary reflects the richness and complexity of this potential field of study whose purview includes visual, literary, and performance arts.

Studies of the popular arts consistently describe them as topical, new, innovative, and modern. Most scholars, Barber included, identify the emergence of an African popular art with one setting and one period, the urban colonial and post-colonial world.

A plethora of new arts combining local African and Western forms have emerged and been documented precisely during this period. Barber identifies this syncretism as a characteristic feature of African popular art. She argues persuasively that many contemporary urban popular arts seem to derive their vitality and energy from the scale and tempo of this change and to be fundamentally about this change. Although this definition of popular arts in Africa is especially seductive to scholars because of the scale and tempo of change in the colonial and post-colonial urban setting, it risks too close an identification of African popular arts with one period and setting and denies them any history within the pre-colonial era and within non-urban settings.

The ahistorical tendency of most studies of popular arts arises in part from scholars' retention of a Western model of art which categorizes the arts as folk/traditional, popular, and elite. Barber notes that the Western tripartite classification is still invoked with only minor modifications in most accounts of African popular arts. The paradigm which characterized African traditional society and its arts as closed, consensual and unchanging has been successfully challenged in the past decades by Africanists in history, anthropology, and art history. Few scholars would now assert that “traditional” societies or their arts were ever static or frozen. Yet, it is still tacitly held in studies of popular arts that African “traditional” arts are monolithic and undifferentiated in their local setting and thus they are all subject to the same rate of change.

I have been asked to comment on the implications of a sector of culture being examined as popular within the typology adopted by Karin Barber to describe cultural strata in contemporary African societies. In order to face her enormous and daunting task (an intellectual call to arms which few other scholars would have had the courage, or the wide ranging intellectual ability, to meet so successfully) Barber adopted the standard cultural typology from European models, a typology which she finds discomforting, but never actually rejects:

I contend that this typology emerges again and again because it is innate—not in African societies, but in us. For whatever Indo-European archetypal, psychosexual, or categorically imperative reasons, Western scholars and scholarships are doomed to threes. Aside from our own cultural compulsions, and the attractive contrastive model that this tripartite division of African societies provides, I do not believe that there is any inherent reason why contemporary African culture should be so tri-sected in order to examine a phenomenon which appears to be unitary. I would argue that popular art is better understood as the product of a seamless web spun by the world market place which entangles every class in Africa to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the accessibility of that class to that market. Just as the cultural influences extending from the world market are pervasive, so the response to those influences is essentially the same, whether the respondent/artist is a village gin distiller, an urban bicycle repairer, or a university trained novelist. But this argument grows out of the aesthetic nature of popular art, and it is to that commodity as described by Barber that this argument must turn.

Popular arts are an effervescent and protean aspect of contemporary culture in Africa. Karin Barber's overview captures the styles, flavor, and general sociological significance of these art forms for both artists and consumers. Noting a lack of theoretical synthesis in the field, the author begins with a critique of the tripartite “European model” of folk, popular, and elite art. She aptly remarks that this model obscures analysis by relegating popular art in Africa to an “undefined and shapeless space” between folk and elite art. Moreover, Barber is concerned with the role that the popular arts play as expressive acts that reflect particular social, political, and economic relationships.

Karin Barber has written a probing paper on, in her phrase, a “fugitive category,” and one of the merits of her approach is her willingness to dwell on the fugitive quality of her subject as much as on the categorical. To discuss the popular arts is to discuss the nature of the populace, and to stress the ambiguous definition of the producers and the audience of such artistic expression is to recognize the inchoate, uncertain, changeable nature of urban African society. Barber both recognizes this and suggests ways of going further. Her insistence that expression in its various forms be taken seriously—that Africanists listen to the cassettes being played on the streets, look at paintings on walls, and read market literature—points to one of few ways in which people's concerns, conceptions of themselves, and ideas about the world can be studied, not assumed. “Decoding” this enormously varied body of texts—as her examples suggest—can be extremely valuable to Africanists with many concerns.

Much of the discussion of Barber's paper when presented to the African Studies Association meeting focused on defining categories more than on their fugitive nature. The problem is real enough: her distinction among traditional arts, popular arts, and elite arts raises boundary problems: are the three clearly separable? do these divisions correspond to any meaningful classification of the populace? But if academics' instinctive tendency is to define boundaries more precisely—or to make typologies more specific—Barber's paper suggests that ambiguity is itself a social fact.

Barber, writing about creative expression, finds that the concept of “popular” has very similar ambiguities to those discovered by social scientists studying populism. The difficulty with identifying the “populace,” the “people,” or the “masses” as a category is that it does not necessarily correspond to any particular relationship to the means of production, to any particular cultural characteristics, or to any particular set of aspirations, definitions of self, and set of relationships. African societies are complex and highly ramified: people live for and sometimes die for subcategories.

When I presented the first version of this paper at Madison, I was still in the middle of wrestling with many of the elusive and intractable problems it raised. Dealing with some issues led to kicking others into the margins, where they lurked balefully as enormously extended footnotes. The critical comments of my colleagues were extremely helpful in restoring some perspective and bringing some of the marginalized issues back into the center. But what is published here is still far from a finished statement—it merely represents another stage in the continuing struggle with the hydra.

Mary Jo Arnoldi, in particular, addressed herself to the part of the paper that had become most distorted by my struggle: the part that examines the usual distinction between popular, traditional and elite and attempts to rescue something of value from this hackneyed triad. This was the part of the paper that I was most uneasy about and that I have revised most since the presentation. Since Arnoldi did not have the opportunity to see the revised version before her comments were published, some of her very good points have now been pre-empted. But much of what she says still stands and offers me an opportunity both to disagree about certain issues and also to clarify some aspects of my argument.

In the first version of my paper I did not sufficiently acknowledge the existence of unofficial or popular traditions within pre-colonial cultures. As Arnoldi points out, my picture of the “popular” was ahistorical because I located it in only one epoch, the colonial and post-colonial one. Because I was trying to come to grips with the indefinite, shapeless, and fluid area covered by popular in most scholarly writing, I inadvertently reified what was on the margins of this area: the “traditional” and the “elite,” turning the traditional in particular into a monolithic entity. As this picture of the traditional was contradicted by my own research on Yoruba oriki (Barber, 1984b) it is not surprising that I felt uneasy about it even before I read Arnoldi's perceptive comments. But unlike Arnoldi, however, I still think that the colonial/post-colonial popular arts form a distinctive though not boundaried field: they are qualitatively different from the unofficial arts of so-called traditional culture, whether pre-colonial or present-day. It seems to me that Arnoldi's own examples of Iteso and Bamana traditional-popular arts illustrate this brilliantly.