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and references sleep close by, which connects to sleep at the beginning and end of this palindrome of night. A particularly beneficial insight seems to be Douglass use of Nelson Goodmans distinction between analog and digital systems in Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Hackett, 1976). She stresses the primacy of the analogor whole idea or line of thoughtover the digitaldiscrete letters finely differentiated. This insistence may be the result of her concentration on the exclusively analog ring form of the eastern Mediterranean. As the construct progressed through time, however, it became more reductive, which is evident in later classical and medieval writings. The Aeneid, for example, which duplicates the Iliads reliance on alternation to define parallel units, changes to digital at its epicenter between books six and seven, as described earlier. Not surprisingly the key word that distinguishes this change is somni, of sleep. In the Middle Ages, perhaps influenced by the popularity of the Aeneid, this type of reduction became known as the minor arts. Douglas has arranged her book in a ring, which she diagrams. A chapter ten T. S. Eliot excerpt centering the letter b is matched by Isaacs chapter two Old Testament question, Where is the lamb? This is accompanied by the hints that the parallel points across the diagram and is validated. As the bard, which might be recast as the word is validated (see be) as the b and ard (perhaps a pun for art) immediately following it (p. 25). This artful wordplay is validating not only the letter b in the center of a palindrome across the book, but its analog, not the Old Testament lamb, but Christ, the New Testament Lamb. In the center of the book, which is chapter 6, words from Eliots poem reappear sprinkled within the text: the end and the beginning, right and left, and others, along with hints to the poems palindrome, to its author, to the letter b, or the Lamb, with the name Christie. In tackling the question of why the ring structure has appeared in different ages and cultures, Douglas cites two theories: the philologist Roman Jakobsons idea that a faculty for creating or recognizing these correspondences lies inherent in the relationship among language, grammar, and the brain (p. 72) and a general notion that having been invented, it was found to be so useful and satisfying that it spread. She agrees with Jakobson that writing in parallels is a natural phenomenon, but sees ring composition simply as a desire to return the text to its beginning, and not necessarily, as has also been proposed, implicated in the mystery of creation itself. To Douglas, ring composition is a demanding construction that generates a high style of writing. She observes that complex conventions fulfill a role in validating a message, noting religious doctrine

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

tends to be under challenged, and skeptics to be alert to contest it, again perhaps a pun on the b as art. No wonder, she says, that religious themes should inspire very elegant writing and, in their high periods, unsurpassed literary and artistic technique (p. 27). If, as Douglas believes, the well-crafted composition is its own authentication (p. 27), she has achieved the very end that she has been describing. The ring of her book is a tribute to Eliot and an important contribution to the study of compositional form. In setting forth the rules of this elusive patterning, she has made a brilliant discoverynot of the structure itself, but of its mechanics.
SISTER LUCIA TREANOR, F. S. E.

Department of English Grand Valley State University nuttall, sarah, ed. Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics. Duke University Press, 2007, 416 pp., 112 color + 14 b&w illus., $27.95 paper. Western intellectuals have faileduntil recentlyto find a beauty concept in the cultures of Africas indigenous peoples. For example, David Hume in his essay Of National Characters (1748) said that Negroes were naturally inferior to Whites and possessed no arts, hence no beauty. Echoing this point (racist, to be sure), Immanuel Kant said in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763) that the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling, and, as such, they are incapable of experiencing beauty. Even mid-twentieth-century cultural anthropologists like E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Clyde Kluckholm, and B. Malinowski could not find a significant beauty concept in the ethnic groups they studied (such as the Azande and the Nuer for Evans-Pritchard). Eurocentrism blinded these intellectuals: in the case of Hume and Kant a view of beauty (as pleasure) assumed to be universal, and in the instance of the anthropologists a European interpretative framework imposed on African cultures. Transcultural aestheticians as different as Wilfried van Damme from the Netherlands and Or lando Hernandez from Cuba are teaching us that no single culture, no matter how popular it may be, owns the intellectual rights to the concept of beauty. On the contrary, they argue that beauty arises in the conceptual lives of human beings on the springs of culture. African American scholar Kariamu Welsh-Asante had the right idea about beauty when in 1993 she commented on the works of her husband, Molefi Asante: All definitions of aesthetics [and beauty] are autobiographical (The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions [Greenwood, 1993],

Book Reviews
p. 254). In other words, life circumstances, especially cultural ones, frame the beauty concept. In African aesthetics, the turn toward the autobiographical (read: cultural) view of beauty occurred a few decades before Welsh-Asantes pithy statement. For example, American art scholar Susan Vo dIvoire in gel started studying the Baule of the Cote 1968, publishing Beauty in the Eyes of the Baule in 1980, and Nigerian art scholar Chike Aviakor worked with the Igbo of southeast Nigeria (Aviakor is Igbo) and published Igbo Aesthetics in 1982. Perhaps no one demonstrated this cultural turn of beauty more forcefully than the American art historian Robert Farris Thompson, who researched the Yoruba in western Nigeria and published in 1968 Aesthetics in Traditional Africa. These authors represent only a few of the earliest proponents and investigators of the African view of beauty as a cultural construct. Perspicacious readers of this review will already have identified a problem with the intellectuals named so far. Except for Aviakor, the experts are Western. In other words, the theoretical constructions of beauty in Africa originate from outsiders, instead of Africans themselves. This is the entry point to Sarah Nuttalls excellent and fascinating Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics. Nuttall confronts directly the dilemma darkening African aesthetics. Outsiders have constructed African views of beauty, because, in part, Africans have passed on their thoughts on beauty to successive generations via the spoken word instead of the written one. Beautiful/Ugly helps dissolve the dilemma by letting eleven Africans and seven fellow travelers tell their own story about beauty. The contributors are Nuttall (South Africa), Simon Gikandi (USA), Achille Mbembe (South Africa), William Kentridge (South Africa), Rita Barnard (USA), Dominique Malaquais (South Africa and USA), Pippa Stein (South Africa), Els van der Plas (the Netherlands), Mark Gevisser (South Africa), Celesten Monga ` (Great Britain), (Cameroon), Franc oise Verges Cheryl-Ann Michael (South Africa), Patricia Pinho (Brazil), Kamari Maxine Clarke (USA), Rodney Place (South Africa and Poland), Michelle Gilbert (Great Britain), Mia Couto (Mozambique), and Isabel Hofmeyr (South Africa). The articles dot the gamut of possible expressions on beauty: original and critical scholarship; reflections on paintings, photography, short stories, and food; one interview; fragments of oral stories; and two short stories. Additionally, no cost was spared to present the books images, which utilize a complete palette of colors, take up full pages (sometimes two), and are printed on high-quality glossy paper. Indeed, the sharp images graft onto the book a second personality, that of coffee table art book. In sum, Beautiful/Ugly repre-

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sents a feast on beauty articulated and generated by Africans and others who have made Africa their life work. Two themes traverse the articles and art and unify them. First, the anthology addresses beauty mainly in one part of Africa. As the saying goes, Africa is one continent with many worlds. One world ignored by Beautiful/Ugly is the Islamic world lining the Mediterranean, and another is the moneyed world of European descendants distributed throughout the continent. The spotlight of the work shines on the sub-Saharan world of Black Africans and its diaspora in Brazil and the United States. Second, the galvanizing concept for the articles and art is the ugly, understood literally and symbolically. As an aesthetic concept, the ugly drags its own history into the twenty-first century, and it is tied like an umbilical cord to beauty. For example, the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz in his classic The Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853) argues that beauty contains its negation, the ugly. For Rosenkranz beauty is first, and the ugly is second. Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, reverses this relation. In Aesthetic Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1969), he aruges that the ugly causes the beautiful. The writers in Beautiful/Ugly clearly agree with Adorno, not necessarily because they have read his theories but because they have found themselves surrounded by the ugly. For them, the ugly stakes its claim in Africa as an existential condition. The ugly carries many meanings in Beautiful/Ugly, beginning with the obvious sense of the term as distasteful or repulsive. Nuttall reminds readers that Kant linked the Negroes ugliness of appearance to their stupidity (p. 9). However, she does not linger on this literal view of ugly, pointing out that the articles raise the ugly to the level of symbol. And here the book challenges and fascinates readers, particularly in the way forms of beauty grow from the ugly like plants in bad soil. A few examples will make the point. Mbembe presents violence as ugly, and, from this soil, new forms of music and dance blossom. His article examines Congolese music and dance near the end of the twentieth century. Everyday life in the Congo is a play with death, where wars and rebellions, rapes and massacres, drugs and unrest (p. 70) reduce human existence to that of an animal. However, the insatiable enthusiasm for existence (p. 92) of the Congolese people finds expression in their music and dance, both of them nurtured and altered by the ugly. For example, when in the 1980s a new cycle of violence gripped the Congo, the band Zaiko Langa Langa introduced a dance accompanied by screams: Regardez ses fesses. Voyez comment elles bougent! (Watch her buttocks. See how they move!) Numerous Congolese bands adopted the technique of screams

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with an atalaku or animator trying to coordinate his screams with the instruments in the band to direct the steps of the dancers. It would be a mistake to equate these screams and dance steps with the stately and ` proper dos-a-dos in a reel, for example. Dancing to this Congolese music resembles a carnal experience that celebrates the flesh. In a sense, the singers and dancers are rejoicing at not only having survived another day amidst the ugly but also at having transformed it through art into beauty. Stein sees the poverty and pain of children at the Olifansvlei Primary School (South Africa) as ugly. Ten-year-old Lerato writes to her teacher: I am sad today. My sister burnt to death in our shack (p. 180). How does one attempt to transform this type of ugliness into beauty? The answer: Ask the children to create fresh stories and to represent the main character of the story in a sculpture. The children created their sculptures by excavating another dimension of the ugly, waste materials from their environment. Five photographs capture eight of these simple yet captivating dolls, made with plastic or cold drink bottles, plastic bags and bubblewrap, twigs, assorted fabrics, sand, foam chips, mattress stuffing, wire, stones, and nails. In local culture, the sculptures resemble fertility dolls, which, infused with magical powers, act as ciphers through which a wished-for child or ancestral soul can pass through and enter into her owners womb (p. 167). Like the Congolese dancers, these children are able to transform the ugly as pain and waste into art and beauty. Most of the articles in Beautiful/Ugly plant beauty in the bad soil of the ugly, and they beg the reader to articulate a view of beauty larger than the one tied to a specific art form like music, dance, or sculpture. Fortunately, this demand has been anticipated and addressed by Nuttall in her 11,000-word introductory essay, Rethinking Beauty, which is worth the price of the book. Beauty requires a reconceptualization adequate to the contemporary historical situation of Africa, a situation different from that of Europe, North America, Latin America, India, China, Japan, and the Islamic world. The socius of Africa functions without the written word, and, as a consequence, gives birth to distinctive forms of creativity, like masks and carvings, even music with screams and fertility dolls fabricated from waste materials. These creative forms intimate that at least two elements may constitute an African view of beauty. First, beauty is sensuous in the sense that it belongs to the world of sensations (p. 22), a view that separates itself from that of two major Western thinkers, Plato, who banished artists from the republic because art moved people away from the truth of Forms, and Kant, who placed the locus of beauty in the mind as the free play of understanding and imagination, a place far removed from the senses. Second,

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

beauty appears in the tense of the future (p. 28), a phrase loaded with meaning in Beautiful/Ugly. Its literal meaning brings out the incompleteness of beauty as a concept, since scholars have not yet exhausted their hermeneutics of the term. In this sense, the complete understanding of beauty remains in the future. (This is assuming beauty does not turn out to be what Gabriel Marcel calls a mystery.) Another meaning of beautys future tense addresses its ontological character. Beauty is slippery. It enables perceivers to slip past their impoverished and violent present to engage a capacity to aspire (p. 187), which, in the daily task of meaning making, shifts their center from the present to the future. These two meanings of beautys future tense represent only a few of numerous possible directions for reflection. Herein lies the hidden strength of Beautiful/Ugly: not a summa, it is an invitation to dialogue, from which Western aestheticians can learn much. For all its merits, Beautiful/Ugly is not perfect. For example, the Barnard piece on Elaine Scarrys On Beauty and Zakes Mdas The Heart of Redness reads like two independent reflections. More comparing and contrasting of the two reflections would have strengthened the article. Another weakness is the number of superfluous images. Though the images of Kentridges drawings in Two Thoughts on Drawing Beauty take the readers breath away, other images appear to be fillers, like the ones of kitchen scenes, cooking pans, peppers at street markets, spices in shops, and table settings in the three articles on the aesthetics of taste (as related to food and eating, not to the eighteenth-century philosophers of taste). But these minor blemishes do not detract from the books overall beauty and seminal contribution to the field of aesthetics. A final word should be added about the unusual collaboration between the books publisher, Duke University Press, and the Prince Claus Fund, a notfor-profit organization headquartered in the Netherlands. The Fund, led by Els van der Plas, paid the bills for the April 2001 international symposium in Cape Town, South Africa, that launched the book project, and then the Fund helped Duke in numerous ways to keep publication costs down. It is a collaboration easy on the pocketbooks of English-speaking readers.
DAN VAILLANCOURT

Department of Philosophy Loyola University lepecki, eds. The Senses in banes, sally and andre Performance. New York and London: Routledge, 2007, 216 pp., $110.00 cloth, $33.95 paper. Reading this book reminded me of a performance I once directed in which a head of lettuce was torn