Abstract
The work of the Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda has been characterized from the outset by intertextuality, which he uses as a means of conveying the complex entanglement of symbolic and historical tensions that relations between Africa and Europe have always carried with them, not only during the long centuries of colonization but also in the post-colonial present. These reflections are crucially informed by the artist’s own experience: in the early years of his career he was selected to participate in several artistic residencies on the European continent and it was during the first one, which took place in the city of Venice in 2010, that he began to create pieces that directly call into question the relationship of Europe with the continent that for centuries it has considered its own Other—a critique carried out from the soil of Europe itself.
The chapter presents an analysis of Kiluanji Kia Henda’s works The Merchant of Venice (2010) and Othello’s Fate (2013), a photographic portrait and a series of tableau-vivant photographs, respectively, that can be considered cross-cultural and transmedial adaptations of William Shakespeare’s dramas, and The Isle of Venus (2018), an installation whose title refers to Os Lusíadas by Luís Vaz de Camões. This analysis will clarify how these three classical, Renaissance literary texts echo in the three contemporary artworks, focusing particularly on the reinterpretation of the theme of the ethnic and cultural Other that they engage with. My aim is to understand how, in our post-imperial contemporaneity, the universalization of European cultural referents, and within these of the literary canon, provides an “inversion of the gaze” that enables the historical Other to contribute to the interpretation and definition of what Europe’s present is.
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Notes
- 1.
The ‘reversal of the gaze’ as a different trope from the ‘empire writing back’, but alike in its meaning of consideration and interpretation of European cultural referents by the formerly colonized, is taken from Luís Kandjimbo’s Ensaio para inversão do olhar. Da literatura angolana à literatura portuguesa (2010).
- 2.
- 3.
In this respect, one must think about the surge of so-called Afro-European authors and the interest their works have aroused in the continent’s literary systems over the last two decades.
- 4.
See also the definition of ‘content appropriation’ by Young (2008, p. 6): “When this sort of appropriation occurs, an artist has made significant reuse of an idea first expressed in the work of an artist from another culture”. The ideas appropriated by Henda for his three works are the exceptionality of the outsider from The Merchant of Venice, the interplay between literal and metaphorical blackness from Othello, and the existence of a locus amœnus as haven for the encounter of cultures from The Lusíads.
- 5.
The Self-Portrait as a Young Man is a recurrent subject particularly in Mannerist and Baroque paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: well-known examples are Tintoretto’s (c. 1548), Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s (1623) and Rembrandt’s (1634). Besides the title Self-Portrait as a White man, a more direct relationship with European artistic canon can be seen in The Great Italian Nude (Fig. 5.1), which cites (with an upside-down figurative turn) the subject of female nudes such as those by, for example, Tiziano Vecellio’s Venere di Urbino (1538) and Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863).
- 6.
For an account of how Othello’s words inspired the American artist Fred Wilson to conceive a work reflecting on the definition of one’s self, see Erickson (2007, pp. 119–50).
- 7.
As the curator Bruno Leitão points out, “[it] is almost impossible to talk about Kiluanji Kia Henda without linking Kiluanji Kia Henda the artist to Kiluanji Kia Henda the individual” (Leitão, 2018, p. 39)—on a path already traced by Picasso about a “science of man” (Brassaï, 1999, p. 133) that should feed on the global knowledge of the circumstances and the reasons behind artistic creations.
- 8.
For a definition of allegory and its relationship with irony, see Arduini and Damiani (2010).
- 9.
In the latest Arden edition of the play, it is stated that “the sense that this [The Merchant of Venice] is primarily Shylock’s play—indeed, his tragedy—is given added emphasis from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards in criticism and performance, from Charles Macklin’s 1741 stage realization to the present time, and has remained remarkably resilient” (Drakakis, 2010, p. 1) and “interest in the figure of Shylock has taken precedence in any discussion of the play” (2). Speaking of the protagonist role in The Merchant of Venice, Calimani (2016, p. 14) also says that “it is Shylock who stands out above all” the other characters, notwithstanding its second position as compared to Portia in terms of the number of speeches and verses spoken in the text. (All translations from Italian in this article are the responsibility of the author.)
- 10.
See also: “It is precisely during this period [the later sixteenth century] that […] the figure of the ‘stranger’ comes into his own as a challenge to the social fabric of community” (Drakakis, 2010, p. 11).
- 11.
Another marker of Shylock’s absolute otherness is the deprivation of individuality that derives from the fact that his enemies never call him by his name, as if in this way “the stranger becomes more controllable, less dangerous” (Calimani, 2016, p. 17).
- 12.
A photographic genre with a narrative intention that evokes, in the modes of composing the objects and characters on the scene and their gestures, the figurative painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Cotton, 2004, p. 49) and which has affinities with the portrait.
- 13.
This central position is another counter-discursive practice used by Henda, inasmuch as the traditional iconography of the African in the European artistic canon reflected the deprivileged and dehumanizing treatment they were subject to by placing them in a marginal and inferior position within the formal construction of the paintings (Ashcroft et al., 2002, p. 189).
- 14.
- 15.
Various elements concur to this interplay: first, as Shaul Bassi comments in his notes to an Italian edition of the play, “snow-white beauty […] befitted a young aristocrat but was not yet a ‘racial’ mark, since the adjective ‘white’ referring to Europeans would only be used from the mid-seventeenth century onwards” (Shakespeare, 2009, p. 319); for a discussion on the progressive racialization of fairness/whiteness in Elizabethan culture and the process through which it became a mark of racial privilege, see Hall (2002). Besides the metaphorical level, which implies the early modern lyric conventions and beauty culture, a correct interpretation of the Shakespearean text must also take into account the theatrical and make-up conventions of the time: “From a theatrical and metaphorical point of view, Desdemona’s whiteness is as superficial and overdetermined as Othello’s blackness” (Bassi apud Shakespeare, 2009, p. 358).
- 16.
The comparability between the historic destinies of discrimination which both Jews and people of African descent have been subjected to is another common trait between The Merchant of Venice and Othello: “Some might argue that we experience multiple frames when reading or seeing any, and all, of Shakespeare’s plays—that Shakespeare’s plays are both timely and untimely all at once. While this is true to a certain extent, there is something different about the ways history and context get framed for Shakespeare’s Venetian plays, The Merchant of Venice and Othello. The violent histories that occurred towards Jews and Africans since the early modern period render history and context more fraught and complex when approaching the constructions and presentations of religion and race in Shakespeare’s plays” (Thompson, 2016, pp. 3–4).
- 17.
- 18.
Taken from the “Principles and values” section of the European Union website: https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history_en
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Girotto, A. (2024). The Other in Kiluanji Kia Henda: Shakespeare and Camões Revisited. In: Gonçalves Lind, A., Pinto, A.P., Lambert, D. (eds) The Process of Becoming Other in the Classical and Contemporary World. Palgrave Studies in Otherness and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62395-0_5
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