Johannes Fabian: Objects of Pleasure and Pain

Johannes Fabian: Objects of Pleasure and Pain: Another Look at African Paintings

Popular painting, studied in Katanga (Democratic Republic of the Congo) by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian in the 1970s, emerged when urban Africans took pleasure in decorating their living rooms - often with reminders of painful events and experiences. The lecture looks back at the architecture of memory represented by the genres of pictures discovered then; it looks forward to Fabian’s current project, another take on Katanga genre painting, one in which objects are given a voice. This study will draw on a corpus of conversations with popular painters, recently transcribed and translated from recordings made over thirty years ago and deposited in an open virtual archive (http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol12/katangagenrepaintingintro.html). What kind of findings may be expected from an approach that confronts pictorial with textual evidence will be shown by comments on the two most popular genres, “Colonie belge” (the colonial prison) and “Mamba muntu” (the Mermaid), icons of pain and pleasure.