| This study attempts to explicate the dynamics of African cultural production in a modernizing context. This context co-extends with the time-frame running from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s. A working definition of culture is set forth that is intended to point a way beyond cultural anthropologism; and the said definition is realised through a fusion of Semiotics and Cultural Sociology. The main theoretical references are sought in the works of Umberto Eco and Pierre Bourdieu. Central to our analysis is the category of the "Field", which is here construed as the configuration of relations between the modern African nation-state and African civil society. Within this configuration are located multiple spaces of cultural socialization, such as those of political representation and artistic production. These spaces are further held to be set up in a hierarchy, chiefly because the group-based practices within them are informed by strategies aimed at a hegemonic representation of Africa. Africa thus becomes culturalized through corporatist struggles over legitimate articulation of manifold experiences (of past, present, and future). The corporatism makes for cultural agency, and is grounded in the affinities among given habitus-types, the formation of which is wrought through cultural capital accumulation both within the ken of the Nation-State and Civil Society. "The-Signs-of-the-times" are basically relations of socialization in a modernizing Africa; but these relations are always subject to manifold ordering. And through such ordering are generated the conditions of encodement, conditions which are none other than the properties of social recognition and misrecognition. For purposes of illustration we analyse a sample of works in aesthetics and political ideology. |
