Voyages d’une reine bangwa dans l’imaginaire occidental

Abstract

The status of the bangwa sculpture in question here has changed many times as it moved from the Grassfields of Cameroon to Berlin, from Paris to New York and Washington and back to Paris: first a religious artifact linked to a cult, it became the object of ethnographic studies, the symbol of Cameroonian people’s submission to the German power before it was celebrated as an exceptional work of art. Its displacement in the Western imaginary is fairly representative of the reception of African arts in the West and enables to rethink the issue of their perception a few months after the opening of the musée du quai branly dedicated to the arts of Africa, America, Asia and Oceania in Paris.

Keywords

• African American
• arts
• Bangwa
• Eliot Elisofon
• Walker Evans
• Helena Rubinstein