Paper short abstract:

This paper explores interconnections between power, violence, sexuality and bodily aesthetics in representations of equatorial Africans, including oral literature, fiction, European explorers' and missionary accounts, ethnography, photography, the religious imagination and modern dance music.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores interconnections between power, violence, sexuality and representations of beauty in several moments of Gabonese and Cameroonian cultural production: the Mvet epic, nineteenth-century explorers' accounts, colonial and missionary ethnography, ethnographic fiction, imaginations of women spirits, and a popular genre of Cameroonian dance music, Bikutsi. On the one hand, the Mvet, spirit imaginaries, and Bikutsi might be said to said to express "African" formulations of power, violence, beauty, and what Joseph Tonda has called the "sex-body" (corps-sexe). On the other, European explorers' accounts, colonial and missionary ethnography, and French anthropologist Philippe Laburthe-Tolra's 1986 novel, Le tombeau du soleil, set in the nineteenth-century southern Cameroon rain forest, convey a range of contradictory, racialized understandings of beauty, sex, violence, and power—ranging from portraits of African women as lascivious reprobates to sanctified 19th-century Presbyterian and 21st-century Pentecostal converts. At the same time, this dichotomy is far too neat as Africans, both males and females, have drawn on the beauty and power of potentially violent white female spirits, while Euro-American (male) authors have also converted African women into obscure objects of desire. My analysis draws on Elaine Scarry (sublime beauty and justice), James Fernandez (arguments of images), Simon Gikandi (western taste vs. the abjection of African bodies), Sévérin-Cécile Abega (sexual violence and the state), and what Tonda calls the colonization and seduction, not only of Africans but of le blanc, through violent, fetishized, bedazzled imaginaries.