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Who is the Populist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Frederick Cooper
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Extract

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.

Type
Commentaries
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , September 1987 , pp. 99 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1987

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References

NOTES

1. I write as an historian who has studied labor. Much has been written in my field about class consciousness, and more often than not scholars have inferred what workers must have thought or felt from occasional evidence of behavior, such as strikes. That has not prevented some from positing that workers must first achieve a degree of consciousness of themselves as a collectivity before they can act. Recovering what workers said, sang, or wrote—difficult as that is—may be one of few ways in which independent evidence of thought can be obtained, and for the analysis of consciousness to be something other than a tautology.

2. E. P. Thompson (1974) shows that in England before the triumph of capitalism the patricians' rituals of power were countered by the plebians' assertions of their own cultural values, a kind of “theater” and “countertheater.”

3. The literature on this point is now enormous, but see Kitching (1980) and Leys (1978).

4. See Kristin Mann's discussion (1986) of the self-conscious defense of Yoruba marriage customs that developed among elite families in Lagos around the turn of the century. See also Cohen (1981).

5. In the quite different context of South Africa's Eastern Cape, Philip Mayer (1980) shows that migrant workers in the 1950s divided between two quite distinct cultural forms, “school” and “red,” which were very different ways of maintaining identity in the face of migrancy and oppression, but when he restudied this region in the 1970s, the development of South African capitalism and the impact of urban life was such that the two types of expression had become submerged under a more unified, more distinctly urban cultural form that had developed in the townships of South Africa (and which is described in several of Barber's references).

6. Issues related to these are discussed from a different perspective in Cooper (1983).