Brotherhood
This entry is excerpted from “Wandering Geographies: Aesthetic Practice along China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” an art essay by Christian Yuen Zi Chung and Sasha Su-Ling Welland published in a special issue of Feminist Studies (Vol. 47, no. 2, 2021) on the topic of “Global Intimacies: China and/in the Global South.” This special issue emerged from “Wolf Warrior II: The Rise of China and Gender/Sexual Politics,” a 2017 international workshop convened shortly after the release of Wolf Warrior II (战狼 II), a patriotic, masculinist, and high-grossing film about a Chinese special forces operative who becomes involved in a civil war in an unnamed African country. Workshop participants reflected on the role of gender and sexuality in China’s relationships with the Global South.
In the “Wandering Geographies” essay, Chung and Welland examine narratives about China in relation to North or South as always already unstable. As a participant nation in the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, the new People’s Republic of China (PRC) embraced an ethos of Third World anti-colonial socialist solidarity but did not join the post-Bandung Non-Aligned Movement. PRC leadership exercised economic and military influence during the Cold War, although their alliances could cross ideological lines in unexpected ways, such as when they invaded North Vietnam in 1979. While the PRC once represented a revolutionary communist stronghold against the capitalist economies of Taiwan and Hong Kong, its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aspirations of global ascendance have exacerbated political tensions in “Greater China” and ignited debates about its extractive economic relations with former “socialist brothers” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This wandering geography of “China” serves as our rubric for thinking through artworks that materialize historical mobilizations of Global North and South—as First and Third World developmental stages, physical geography, and economic hierarchies—simultaneously shifting our understandings of these “ideologies of scale and projects of scale making.”[1]
The following questions are invoked: More than half a century after Bandung, is China of the Global South or exerting its influence upon the Global South? Does it perform global ascendance by “becoming North” or by reimagining its ties to Asia, Africa, and Latin America? What is entailed and entangled in diverting South to North?
Global Socialist Brotherhood as Masquerade
In Fosso’s Emperor of Africa (2013) series he becomes, through the reperformance of iconic poses, Chairman Mao Zedong. Shot with exacting attention to detail, these self-portraits accentuate the theatricality of image-making. Throughout the four and a half decades of his career, Fosso has continually photographed himself. Born into a Nigerian family in Cameroon in 1962, he fled to the Central African Republic during the Nigerian Civil War. After apprenticing with a photographer in Bangui, he opened his own studio in 1975 at the age of thirteen.[2] To use up the ends of film rolls after a day’s work, Fosso turned the camera on himself dressed in flamboyant fashions that ran counter to edicts issued by self-crowned Emperor Bokassa I, the post-independence ruler of the Central African Republic, who was overthrown in 1979 by a resurgence of French colonial influence. Alone in his studio, Fosso struck incisive poses while variously garbed in underwear, jaunty caps, bell bottoms, high-heeled boots, wide-collared shirts, and sunglasses. After the inclusion of his work in the 1994 Bamako Biennale in Mali, Fosso began to assume other personas, including his grandfather, friends lost to violence, and for African Spirits (2008), historical figures ranging from Angela Davis and Malcolm X to Kwame Nkrumah and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Olu Oguibe interprets these performances as drawing upon Igbo traditions of masquerade that entail role reversal and gender fluidity.[3] Fosso elaborates, “When I work, it’s always a performance that I choose to undertake…. I link my body to this figure, because I want to translate its history.”[4]
Figure 1: Samuel Fosso, series Emperor of Africa, SFEA 1956, 2013. Color photograph. Courtesy of Jean Marc Patras / Paris
Figure 2: Mao Zedong Receiving Red Guards on Tian'anmen Square, Beijing, 1966
What does it mean for a West African artist to link his body to the figure of Mao Zedong? What history is being translated in the double-edged image of Fosso/Mao standing on the rostrum atop Tiananmen Gate, hand raised to the crowds of Red Guards below? The historical black-and-white photograph that Fosso restages was taken in 1966 at the outset of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as Mao unleashed the nation’s youth to foment ongoing revolution against tradition, imperialism, and class hierarchy. As a brightly hued propaganda poster, this image circulated in street parades, carried aloft by those he had deputized to struggle to the end. Fosso further alters the image: the characters on his arm band read Feizhou (Africa) rather than “Red Guard,” and the background resembles an African cityscape more than Tiananmen Square. Fosso’s youth overlapped with China’s promotion of socialist brotherhood with Africa through projects that provided material support and forged alliances during the Cold War political realignment after the Bandung conference. The largest intervention involved financial and technical support for the 1,860 kilometer-long Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA), designed and constructed between 1968 and 1976. This project enabled landlocked Zambia to transport copper ore to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, breaking an export blockage by South Africa and its Portuguese colonial allies. China also built stadiums and public buildings for other socialist allies, including Guinea’s national legislature.[5] Fosso as Mao harkens back to an aspirational image of global socialist masculinity, a cohort of “new men” forged through opposition to the capitalist world bloc who would be “formed through pedagogies of work that emphasized practical training, exhortation, and role modeling.”[6] But his self-portrait also begs the question of what it means to masquerade as the Chinese Chairman in the twenty-first century, particularly under the self-proclaimed title of Emperor, exhorting Africa to rally behind the image of a patriarch remade. The commingled politics of authority figured in the body of the male ruler translates the Bandung history of postcolonialism into the present as China expands its economic and cultural reach in Africa through state-driven investment.
Figure 3: Serve the Revolutionary People of the World, 1971
The politics of image-making become even more heightened in Fosso’s reperformance of an earlier photograph of Mao Zedong in a peasant’s straw hat, inspecting yields of rice and corn ready for harvest. Taken in the Henan countryside in 1958, the original image also included First Vice Chairman Liu Shaoqi in its projection of surplus at the outset of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). This centralized campaign to collectivize agriculture and bring industry to rural areas through people’s communes resulted in a widespread famine that left tens of millions dead. Liu’s push for moderation amid the disaster led to his purge, eventual denunciation as a “capitalist-roader,” and death during the Cultural Revolution. A photo-processing artist who retouched several of Mao’s most famous portraits removed Liu from the original photograph and painted cornstalks over his excised figure.[7] In Fosso’s image, his own body replaces and becomes Mao as he mimics the compositional rules of socialist realism with precision: look toward the upper-left corner, the bright shining socialist future.
Figure 4: Samuel Fosso, series Emperor of Africa, SFEA 1955, 2013
Figure 5: Mao Zedong Inspecting Harvest, 1957-58
Of this multi-layered masquerade, Oguibe writes, “Fosso, as performer, is both subject and inquisitor, the man behind the mask who interrogates empire and postcolony alike, the ultimate Fanonian ‘man who questions.’”[8] As China’s BRI interests become increasingly entangled with African economies through investment in extractive industries such as copper mining, development of global agribusiness operations that marginalize small-scale farmers, and export of grain, consumer goods, and sex workers from China to African markets, is revolutionary socialist brotherhood truly as deep as the ocean? As African and Chinese political elites broker deals, who are the people being served? The sharp relief of Fosso/Mao in a field of African wheat is ripe with references to the everyday struggles of those contending with postcolonial independence, and now, its reconfigured aftermath decades later. Emperor of Africa strikes a questioning, parodic pose of brittle socialist masculinity on the glorious road of South-South solidarity resurfaced with BRI state capital.
Anna Tsing, “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3 (2000): 347. ↑
Yves Chatap, “The Lives of Samuel Fosso,” Aperture 227 (2017): 38-45; Emmanuel Iduma, “The Self-Portraits of Samuel Fosso,” Guernica, November 17, 2014, https://www.guernicamag.com/the-self-portraits-of-samuel-fosso. ↑
Olu Oguibe, “Samuel Fosso: Emperor of Africa,” Aperture 221 (2015): 89. ↑
Chatap, “The Lives of Samuel Fosso,” 42. ↑
Helen F. Siu and Mike McGovern, “China-Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities,” Annual Review of Anthropology 46, no. 1 (November 2017): 341. ↑
Jamie Monson, “Remembering Work on the Tazara Railway in Africa and China, 1965-2011: When ‘New Men’ Grow Old,” African Studies Review 56, no. 1 (April 2013): 48. ↑
“Zhan Yan and Zeng Huang, “Image Is Everything,” China Daily, January 8, 2008, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2008-01/08/content_6376904.htm. ↑
Oguibe, “Samuel Fosso: Emperor of Africa,” 89. ↑