Communicating creativities: interculturality, postcoloniality and power relations

Abstract

Lingering legacies of colonialism continue to disrupt the postcolonial condition of Southern spaces including their ontologies, knowledges and creativities. The interdependence of modernity and coloniality further constructs a complex array of overlapping systems of exclusion and marginalisation. In particular, the parameters of the coloniality of power, knowledge and being influence how artistic expressions and creativities are unequally appreciated in cross-cultural situations. The restrictive hegemony of Western-Northern artistic theory maintains the status of the periphery as derivative or exotic in some cases. Although colonialism inculcated the modernising consciousness in the imagination of the colonised, Southern creativities’ attempts to join modernity have not often been successful as they remain situated within the margins of the Western grand narrative of modernity. This paper examines (a) how cultural differences in creative expressions are shared, received and interpreted across borders in an intercultural experience; (b) the influence of imbalanced power relations on artistic productions and the communication of creativities; and (c) the contribution of postcoloniality and decolonial knowledges in resisting the Western artistic hegemony and granting visibility to Southern creativities. The main argument here is that communicating creativities is bound into power relations.

Keywords:

• Creativities
• decolonial knowledges
• postcolonial theory
• interculturality
• power relations
• cultural productions

Introduction

Interculturality, postcoloniality and history scholarships often argue that the historical suppression of the structures, epistemologies and ecologies of the Global South is accompanied by the repudiation of the cultural specificity of Southern trajectories and postcolonial narratives in creative practices. For instance, the colonial art educational projects in Morocco exemplify the colonial pedagogies in African art education (Benjamin 2003; Irbouh 2005) that still impinge the Southern contexts’ struggles not only to realise their specificities, ontologies and creativities in their cultural productions but also to support their visibility and appreciation in the Global North’s perceptions. French art education in the Protectorate of Morocco (1912–1956) contributed to the consolidation of the colonial agenda. Based on original archival sources, Irbouh (2005) probed into how French colonial decision makers used French women to inculcate colonial ideology by setting up new arts and craft schools for notable and poor families in Moroccan cities. These vocational schools would prepare students to earn their living by selling their works to keep the Moroccans separated from the French by strengthening their traditional crafts economy. The French were determined to transform the popular understandings of Moroccan art by teaching modernised versions of old Moroccan crafts. These endeavours were successful in instilling new work habits and a modern conception of art, originality and time into young Moroccans (Irbouh 2001). French administrators sought to establish art schools that would form generations of Moroccan craftsmen and artists who embraced the French theorisations of creativity. These programmes were developed to reshape the formation of Moroccan art production and promote French recommendations and their modes of production.

These historical practices continue to permeate arts exhibitions and creative industries worldwide (Harris 2013; Bilbao 2019) due to the lingering colonial power structures (Seppä 2010). This assumption can be extended to argue that Southern creativities are frequently overshadowed and neglected since they are often understood under the rubrics of Western rationalities of creativity and thus marginalised as derivative or inauthentic (Araeen 2010). The theory of creativity itself needs a radical reconstruction (Glăveanu and Sierra 2015); therefore, it is necessary to consider ‘marginal’ cultural forms and establish a critical intervention that relates creativity to interculturality, decolonial theory and the epistemologies of the South (de Sousa Santos 2018). The themes of structural power inequalities (Mignolo and Walsh 2018), coloniality of power, knowledge and being (Quijano 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2007), pluriversality and geopolitics of knowledge in relation to arts (Simbao 2017; Mignolo 2018) are also pertinent to this discussion of creativity and intercultural communication.

This paper argues for the plausible need to stretch the boundaries of intercultural communication to cover/examine the process of communicating and the communicability of creative practices from different cultural backgrounds both in intercultural spaces and across spatial boundaries. The main question here is whether creativity is communicable or restricted by not only local cultural understandings but also legacies of European colonialism and modern forms of power. This includes going beyond interpersonal interaction to explore how creativities, in both North and South contexts, are communicated and employed. This article explores how geo-cultural difference may influence how creativities are conceptualised, received, appreciated and consumed in the global context, in which non-Western cultural productions are often othered and marginalised. It explores the ability to communicate creativities beyond Western modernity and its underlying assumptions about what counts as innovative and original creative expression.

The focus is on discussing creative practices, within the scope of postcolonial cultural politics, as manifestations of a spatial challenge and contestation with the underlying powers of the West in the cultural, political and aesthetic forms of the marginalised. This type of argumentation recognises the value of creative practices as an emerging liberating force within modernity. The article’s concern is to consider not only the alienation of Southern creative ontologies within the grand narrative of Western modernity, but also the potential of artistic expressions in delivering a changing and transformation function. Non-Western creative practices can serve as sites of epistemology generation and political activism that contribute to the construction of artistic modernism, modernity and contemporaneity (Nzewi 2013). That is why it is important to speak of creativity within the conditions of the epistemologies of the South (Glăveanu and Sierra 2015), including the originative logics they offer.

The consideration of postcolonial cultural agendas has to engage with artistic expressions as sources of knowledge production and epistemology construction. It is useful to accentuate the relation of creativity to knowledge (Gaut 2010) while underscoring the relative engagement of postcolonial art (McCarthy and Dimitriadis 2000) with the imbalanced sociopolitical realities. The aims are, therefore, (a) to push forth criticism with the continuing residential marginalisation of many Southern ontologies including non-Western art, (b) to support an understanding of creative practices in alignment with decolonial and postcolonial theories¹ and socio-politically sensitive research on interculturality, (c) to argue for the presence of multiple ‘creativities’ that are formed as legacies of different cultural infrastructures, and (d) to examine the ways that art serves both as a medium of exclusion and as a means for resisting authority and challenging power relations (DeMarrais and Robb 2013).

Postcolonial and decolonial interventions in intercultural communication of creativities

To decentre narratives of creativity from the Euro-American perspective, it is important to (a) situate intercultural sharing of cultural productions within historical contexts and (b) consider it an inter-epistemic matter as well, and that is where postcolonial and decolonial theories help to clarify the range of conditions and processes that characterises different contexts with different local histories in relation to global relations. This paper is encouraging scholars to think of postcolonial and decolonial theory as a source of further insights and a possible pathway to engaging more deeply with historical processes of both Western domination of creativities and, more importantly, creative and epistemic disobedience in terms of understanding and appreciating different creativities. Both postcolonial and decolonial theories are important to Northern epistemes because it allows for an ‘other thinking’ from the outside. Northern scholars can make use of these theories to develop a better understanding of the concerns and conditions of any thinking, knowledge and form of creativity produced in the Global South.

This paper attempts to bring together the various trajectories of postcolonial studies and decoloniality to further problematise relations within knowledge about creativities and produce an inclusive counter-hegemonic critique that draws on the diverse geographical regions within the Global South as well as the epistemological affordances of the two theories. This endeavour is in alignment with Bhambra’s (2014) ‘connected sociologies’ that examines the radical potential of postcolonialism and decolonial thinking in unsettling and restructuring the underlying processes of knowledge production. This is again meant to produce a nuanced understanding of relations within interculturality, power and creativity which assumes that complexity and inclusivity are necessary elements in undermining the Western hegemony on conceptualising and constructing the parameters of creativity, ingenuity and originality.

Cultures’ increasing proximity to each other caused by the effects of globalisation may alleviate feelings of estrangement and peculiarity, especially when non-Western arts are introduced to Western audiences. Art objects continue to travel across borders and networks by ‘re-producing transnational, specifically trans-local, geographies’ (Rogers 2011, 663). A manifestation of active interculturality may be reflected in the cultural creolisation and hybridity scholarships that emphasise the possibility of the cultural mixing of different cultural arts, eg Afro-Brazilian art form (Capoeira Angola) in Russia (Lipiäinen 2015). This particular analogy is made more explicit due to the increasing density of cultural encounters; despite cross-cultural variability ‘in many aspects of art, numerous strong regularities in artistic expression also exist’ (Kozbelt 2016). That is why translocal circulation of artworks might repudiate the assumption that ‘art and its creative practices are tied to particular contexts’ (Rogers 2011, 663); an attitude of playfulness can enrich encounters with new cultural forms (Lipiäinen 2015). Discussing communication of creativities entails the commodification of otherness through their distinct engagement with creativity. A meaningful example here is multicultural festivals as sites for cultural consumption and organised cultural encounters for interculturality (Christiansen, Galal, and Hvenegaard-Lassen 2017).

Arts produce forms of knowledge that may go beyond interpretation, rendering communication of creativities an experience of unmediated ‘presence’ (Ashcroft 2015). This is particularly relevant in the case of exhibitions as they are sites of knowledge production that construct narratives of different epistemologies, ecologies and ontologies; creativities are indeed expressions of a sophisticated knowledge system. If an artwork is to be communicated across cultural borders, individuals are expected to consider not only the artistic value of the work but also its spatial, temporal and societal junctures. Art objects have to be communicated as if they are ‘live social beings whose aesthetic value, significance, and emotional efficacy are subject to change in the course of their mobility through time and space’ (Maihoub 2015). Moreover, the meeting of at least seemingly different cultural worlds further problematises this process of communication since a legitimate question should be asked: What we can know of the other through the materiality of their creativities, and what we can understand beyond their surface structure/image?

Artworks articulate and communicate a particular consciousness (Barber 1986) that may be anchored in a societal and cultural infrastructure. The anthropological insights into the expressiveness of art objects, aesthetics and artistic behaviour are inevitably intertwined with the dynamics of interaction between the artist and society. Therefore, to assume a profound understanding of a particular art object, it is necessary to engage with the relational aesthetics of its social mediation (Maihoub 2015). It is important to examine how art is used to ‘create and assert representational models for social relations’ (DeMarrais and Robb 2013, 3); this is again problematic since it may indicate the boundedness of art objects by a particular context and thus relatively legitimise all the assumptions that support the unpredictability of communicating creativities. Importantly, the art object’s significance is dependent not only on its cultural context and history but also on its intrinsic properties. That is why some forms of Indigenous ‘art’ were constructed under certain rubrics that are different from what Westerners habitually consider to be art (Fowles and Arterberry 2013). Judgements on aesthetics might occupy an important place in the process of communicating creativities. However, thinking about art purely in aesthetic terms does not ensure a profound understanding of both the creative practice and its production; it does not engage with the inherent value of art objects that can be embedded in particular ontological representations, cultural understandings or simply an individual’s worldview.

While examining how ‘creative activity is discursively facilitated’ (Hocking 2018, 25) is interesting, potential obstacles might arise due to the divergent thinking lenses. For example, humour and jokes are often culturally restricted as certain topics and themes are considered inappropriate or even taboos. A stand-up comedy routine that includes jokes on sex, religion and politics is certainly unacceptable in some contexts, and thus it would be received with unacceptance and potentially deemed vulgar and risqué humour. Cultural knowledge contributes to the accurate communication of creativities in some cases but not all of them. Nevertheless, situating creative practices within a limited scope of culturality that dictates knowledge of cultural specificities as a prerequisite to communicating creativities does not account for the other aspects of artworks. For instance, communicating creativity can be tied to some contemporary patterns including trends in the arts. With the hegemony of the Western theory of creativity, Southern creativities may be subjected to unfair interpretation that places such works within the grand narrative of Western modernity. Communicating creativities is a matter not only of divergent cultural logics but also of power imbalances and the predominance of certain Northern understandings.

A particular challenge to intercultural communication of creativities is coming with preconceived ideas and making judgements on individuals’ creative potential and achievement as being largely influenced by their society of origin and culture. Another instance is the belief that the East prioritises usefulness over novelty, whereas the West assigns the same importance to novelty and usefulness while engaged in creative endeavours (Shao et al. 2019). Also, while creativity is the dominant pattern of creativity in the West (Shen et al. 2018), East Asian cultures have a strong desire for creativity accompanied by uneasiness towards/rejection of radical creativity (Paletz and Peng 2008). Rinne, Steel, and Fairweather (2013) found a strong positive relationship between individualism and national ranking on the Global Creativity Index (GCI) and the Design and Creativity Index (DCI). This finding suggests that ‘autonomy, independence, and freedom – beliefs associated with individualism – are needed for a nation to be creative’ (129). As can be seen, the issue here is that these conclusions are assumed to explain the cultural differences in creativity which, in a way, may provide ready-made conclusions while communicating creativities.

Intercultural communication scholarship and the dominance of Western episteme: communicating creativities

To clarify the types of inequalities reproduced in the intercultural treatments of creativity, it is important to realise a close reading of the dominance of Northern knowledge in intercultural communication scholarship. The lack of polyvocality in intercultural communication knowledge has been deconstructed in the recent critical literature. R’boul (2022) examined the national diversity and affiliation of the editorial board of three leading academic journals in intercultural communication. Findings revealed that the majority of managing editors and international editorial boards are based in the Global North, with an insignificant representation of the Global South (14.7% in Asia, 2.17% in Latin America, and 0.86% in Africa).

Since the 2000s, several critical works have demanded de-Westernising and decolonising intercultural communication knowledge (Chasi and Rodny-Gumede 2018; Dervin and Simpson 2021; Gunaratne 2010). These calls bring scholars’ attention to the necessity of conducting a closer inspection of possible representations of epistemic singularity in the scholarship which excludes under-represented sociocultural perspectives from the Global South (Oliha 2012; Shome 2016). The complexity of undermining these historical colonial-like dynamics is ascribed to the fact that the non-visibility of Southern epistemologies is entangled with power imbalances and skewed geopolitics of knowledge. The asymmetrical interactions between Northern and Southern spaces have led to discussions of the problem of non-Western authenticity (Vieira 2019) and whether non-Europeans can think (Dabashi 2015). These assumptions prompt scholars to realise how the dominant Western episteme in intercultural communication reflects ‘the ascendancies and silences produced by modern science that grants credibility to northern regimes of truth’ (R’boul 2022, 75).

It is safe to argue that these inequalities in intercultural communication scholarship are expected to shape the production of knowledge about creativities and how they are communicated and received. That is why it remains important to not only critique how Southern creativities are required to embrace Western creative standards in order to be valued worldwide but also how intercultural treatments of creativity in literature are mainly underpinned by Northern perspectives. Therefore, the sources that are supposed to undermine power imbalances in communicating creativities might be uncritical of the dynamics shaping intercultural communication of cultural production. A particular realisation that should be addressed with careful attention and nuance in intercultural studies is that art historians, anthropologists, curators and collectors categorise objects through an assessment not only of an object but also an assessment of the object’s maker. In other words, the artwork’s intrinsic formal and conceptual merit, its ontology, the artist’s location in the world, and their engagement (or lack thereof) in particular art world discourses are deciding factors in how their artworks are apprehended, interpreted and circulated (Gilvin 2014).

Power relations and communication of creativities

Colonial structures of power are still influencing all aspects of social life even after the end of administrative colonialism; this is indeed illustrative of how coloniality survives colonialism and gets more ground under the guise of modernity. Coloniality is indeed still ‘maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns … as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243). Particularly, coloniality of power signifies the interrelation among modern forms of exploitation and domination (Quijano 2000, 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2007). This idea can be extended to argue that colonial relations of power have a profound impact not only on economy and knowledge but also on forms of cultural production and creative expressions. In the context of communicating creativities, the mechanisms of modernity can be argued to be specifically influential at the level of conceptualisations of the other by constructing ready-made conclusions.

Modernity is not only ‘a hierarchical and homogenizing western influence’, but also ‘multiple and rhizomic, the consequence of a continual dialectic of local and global’ (Ashcroft 2015, 417). The dependence of modernity on colonial relations of power can situate non-Western creativities at not only the margins of the global art scene but also the exteriority of modernity (Mignolo 2018). There is not a generally agreed-upon understanding of creativity, but it is necessary to admit that what constitutes creativity has always been formulated by Western minds (Brown 2008). These lingering power systems permeate the institutional structures; the modern museums and galleries’ frame of reference is anchored in the ideas of modernity which in turn determines what is valuable and not. In alignment with these notions, the concept of modernism in art ‘represents a dominant structure of art institutional power in the West, a bastion of white intellectual supremacy, and this power has been maintained by the exclusion from it of non-whites’ (Araeen 2000, 5). Another example here is how Andean art has been assumed and misunderstood in the narratives of Western Modernist art history (Herring 2013). A problematic assumption that arises from the intervention of the modern and the art world is that ‘Euro-American aesthetic systems and ways of seeing and making should be privileged’ (Lau, Sekules, and Thøfner 2013, 163).

Current research on creativity and culture tends to designate Western conceptions as more important. By building on the Western-based view of creativity in research, it is clear that ‘the West shows greater creative performance than the East. The East, in contrast, emphasizes the value of re-interpreting existing practices and de-emphasizing originality’ (Kim et al. 2012, 75). In other words, they are propagating an assumption of Western creativities being more creative and aesthetically pleasing artwork. Postcolonial accounts argue that Southern epistemologies are often relegated to the status of marginal alternative perspectives (de Sousa Santos 2018) while Western ones are historically superior (Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Garcia and Baca 2019). Power imbalances among Northern and Southern contexts are indeed pervasive if they might extend to orient communication of creativities towards a more Western-centric state of mind. A precise instance of the utilisation of power in communicating and interpreting creativities can be seen in how ‘our current theories of creativity are predominantly the product of Western thinking about this phenomenon’ (Glăveanu and Sierra 2015, 340). Even the globalisation of the arts is believed to retain ‘much of the old colonial power structures, although this power makes itself visible in partly new forms’ (Seppä 2010).

Apprehending power relations as framing our encounters and experiences with other creativities can be seen in art exhibitions and shows. For instance, the international shows and markets for contemporary art ‘have been created and cornered by Western institutions – auction houses, dealing galleries, museums’ (Harris 2013, 440). Even museums that feature the indigenous art and cultures of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America can reaffirm and reinforce a particular type of coloniality. For example, Khrebtan-Hörhager (2018) examined the cultural and rhetorical significance of the French Musée du Quai Branly (MDQB) that communicates a vision of Frenchness that is contrasted by a particular memory of Otherness. She concluded that although the materiality of MDQB promotes ‘cultural dialogues’, it still ‘exoticizes the Other as inferior to the French and invites a colonial gaze on the majority of the cultures of the world’ (315). Such colonial othering further radicalises and complicates dialogue between the French and the Others.

In multicultural festivals where non-Western creativities are shared, differences might be interpreted on the basis of ‘the exotic South/East’. Although the construction of the exotic East/South may be seen as a form of communication, this very process of commodification is perpetuating power imbalances and is further situating Southern creativities on the margins that are not worthy of sincere appreciation for its artistic vision and originality. Therefore, communicating creativities may come ‘as a desire for the primitive or fantasies about the Other where members of the dominating group reaffirm their power over the exotic Other’ (Simonsen, Koefoed, and de Neergaard 2017, 639). Western hegemony acquires its self-ascribed superiority from the exoticisation of the Other, rendering non-Western creativities a source of peculiar imaginations that serve some pleasure. Oren (2014) noted that multiple shows have tried to engage artists from non-Western countries to increase their recognisability, for example the 3rd Havana Biennial (1989), ‘The Other Story’ (London) and ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (Paris). However, it was concluded that it is indeed difficult to stymie Western hegemony and viewpoint in a Biennial organised by Western curators and taking place in a Western context (Weiss 2011, 8, 14). Western cultural hegemony is also manifested in the global art market; this is particularly reflected in how the most prominent artists ‘on the international contemporary art scene, and whose work sells for the highest amounts at auctions, are from a very small number of Western countries’ (Quemin 2013, 166).

Postcolonial conditions and tendencies in artwork

Western interpretations and presentations of Southern art may rely on essentialising notions of ‘traditional’ and ‘Indigenous’. The Western artistic superiority establishes hierarchies in which Southern creativities are at the bottom on the basis of their Otherness. In particular, ‘the image of African art and artists as “primitive” and incapable of producing great art is a true reflection of unequal power structures’ (Maihoub 2015). The fact that certain aesthetic values are specific to Southern spaces is an excuse for assuming their incommensurability with the Western understanding of modernity. It is problematic for the Global South to produce creativity that is anchored in modernity and at the same time takes the very assumption of being artistic in the Southern way as an excuse to be situated at the margin of modernity.

The exclusion of these artists from the contemporary art scene has been critiqued for a while, which led artists of younger generations to be recognised and included. Yet this practice remains a façade of the underlying mechanism of colonial modernity because although some Southern artists are successful and praised in the West, they were not taken into the mainstream discourse and history of modernism. Their exclusion is a result of the American-Eurocentric logics that have othered those artists based on not only power imbalances but also racial and cultural differences. Such realities reify the dichotomy of the Self (Northern artist) and Other (Southern artist) which in turn renders the possibility of including one’s art conditioned on their position (race, culture …) rather than the type or the originality of art they do. To speak of intercultural communication of creativities, it is necessary to construct one’s rhetoric on the dialectical exchange between the centre and periphery. Considering the current efforts to include ‘other artists’ in international biennials, exhibitions and festivals, it is still early to celebrate how Southern artists are no longer completely excluded, because the issue now is not about ‘the exclusion of others from the contemporary art scene and their recognition. Although there have been deliberate exclusions, the real issue is the way others are accepted and accommodated by the dominant culture’ (Araeen 2000, 6).

The shift from colony to post-colony creates some complexities mainly generated from the struggle to distinguish oneself from the remnants of colonialism, especially if the postcolonial is ‘inscribed as a sign of a national emergence or the consciousness of the self as opposed to otherness’ (Flores 2011, 77). As African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean nations gained their independence, their aspirations and imaginations were unleashed after they had been suppressed by colonial regimes. There was an upsurge of modernisation of productive forces in those spaces. Nevertheless, the importation of ideas and principles of modernity from the West has created a fundamental ontological problem that has disturbed Global South aspiration for its ‘postcolonial identity, its own worldview and modern vision’ (Araeen 2005, 411). Moving from colony to post-colony should not be perceived in terms of a temporal end, but instead should be grounded in the efficiency of decolonial knowledges that have been embraced. The struggle against the ethos of modernity should not necessarily result in aesthetic disagreement, but rather situate creativities of nations within the context of their colonial mutations. The aim is not to engage in struggles so as to impose one’s interpretations and understanding of what constitutes ‘art’; it should be about creating a space of communication where the inclusion of other perspectives resonate in interpretations of art. In some cases, it is possible to have cross-culturally pollinated artworks that are neither entirely local nor entirely Western, such as intercultural creativity in Joshua Uzoigwe’s music in Sadoh (2004).

To present a new interpretation of modernity, it is important to deconstruct the colonial artistic discourse on the international level by moving from discussing not only the effects of administrative colonialism but also how modernity hides coloniality and current structures of power. It is useful to deconstruct the interconnectedness of coloniality and modernity through reflecting on ‘the dependence of the modern on its own incarnations’ (Brown 2008, 556). Importantly, decolonialising and decolonial knowledges are necessary trajectories in developing nonimperial/colonial societies (Mignolo 2009). Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean should claim a central role in the global discourse of modernity and creativity. This also implies analysing how arts may represent a necessary element in understanding the transformation of a particular place from colony to post-colony in a way that further clarifies the socio-political changes and the dynamics of power relations within that place and with other places. For art to form the emancipation of the post-colony, modernity has to repurpose a non-Western tradition which ‘intimate the foreign and the global in crafting contingent identifications’ (Flores 2011, 75). In the context of the art market, it is important to recognise that without the interventions of Southern artists and curators, the representation of contemporary African, Asian and Latin American art would still be in the hands of Western curators (Chikukwa 2011).

Since artistic expressions can operate outside the confines of Western logic, they can also serve as a way of pointing out epistemological and social inequalities and, thus, resisting hegemonic practices (Khrebtan-Hörhager 2018). By highlighting layered meanings in some artworks, it can be recognised that art serves not only as a medium of exclusion but also as a means for exercising resistance against authority and challenging power relations. For example, arts of protest and resistance may be expressed through unconventional and counter-authoritarian genres (DeMarrais and Robb 2013), such as graffiti arts. This can represent a remarkable manifestation of creative dissonance emanating from the Global South within the local complexities of each space as ‘communities and artists in societies under stress make new forms of commentary through performance, which hold within them the penumbra of the past’ (Gunner and Penfold 2017, 155). Art can become a symbolic weapon in making variety heard through representing distinctive creative expressions that exude different cultural and ontological frames of mind. Ngugı wa Thiong’o (1981) argues that many African musicians in the postcolonial era have exercised resistance against mental colonisation by simultaneously maintaining indigenous musical practices while promoting innovation (eg the South African singer Makeba). The practice of singing in one’s native language is not only a creative expression but also a ‘reclamation of indigenous culture and identity’ (Carter-Ényì and Carter-Ényì 2019, 58). Another relevant instance is that Jamaicans have made use of art in their postcolonial phase to ‘recall historical resilience in the face of slavery and colonization in order to construct contemporary neoliberal-led development goals focused on creative practice’ (Frauts 2019, 391).

Decolonial aestheSis for postcolonial aspirations

AestheTics become Eurocentred in eighteenth-century Europe as it underpinned the theory of sensibility, sentiment and sensations in contrast with the obsession for the rational. In this way, ‘modern aestheTics’ emerged from the European experience and became, according to Kant, ‘the regulator of the global capability to “sense” the beautiful and the sublime’ (Mignolo and Vásquez 2013, 6). Following these pre-defined understandings of creativity, aestheTics colonised aestheSis by establishing Euro-centred standards that are projected to the entire population of the planet. Today, decolonial aestheSis represents a confrontation with modern aesthetics. It challenges the underlying enunciations of modern aesthetics in order to decolonise the regulation of sensing all the sensations to which our bodies respond. Also, it stands as an active critical intervention in the lingering colonial structures as the artist and the curator are struggling to undermine the hegemonic normativity of modern aestheTics. For instance, Cai (2013) has clarified, in her analysis of French–Singaporean museum relationships, the possibility of appropriating the activities that are commonly seen as apolitical at an institutional level to serve wider national agendas.

Mignolo (2013) has shown, in his analysis of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, that museums’ decolonial work can include becoming an agent ‘to enact derogated archives, memories and identities’. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha exemplifies the power of contemporary art practices to reclaim Third World identity through site-specific contingencies and decolonial impulses. Mignolo maintains that this particular museum represents the very attempt of adjusting Western cultural standards to local and regional sensibilities, ontologies, needs and visions; the entire experience of showcasing decolonial arts that despite its alignment with modern creative narratives, it is not ‘merely an imitation of westernization, but an enactment of de-westernization in that western cultural standards’ which indicates a significant departure in the sphere of civilisations and museums. (2013).

While culture is represented through different levels, including objects, rites, culinary practices, ingredients of recipes and sounds, the history and culture of the subaltern and the oppressed are rarely embodied in material objects (Verges 2014). Another colonial representation in the contemporary creative workings is the assumption that the five centuries in which Europe dominated much of the rest of the world are represented in the modern Western museum form. Appadurai (2021) argues that one must consider the coeval emergence of the modern museum and the colony (and the same binocular urge that drives them) as nonhuman objects and human subjects were trafficked in connected ways. He further maintains that there is a possibility to collect, curate and display otherwise outside the empire of the modernist museum in order to account for the specific demands of the planetary epoch.

Postcoloniality, decolonial knowledges and Southern creativities

The ideological underpinnings of some practices of receiving and interpreting creativities may be formed by the ideas of modernity. These practices tend to project Western aesthetic preferences on Southern arts and creativities. The Western category of ‘art’ is often applied for the interpretation and understanding of other creativities. This again results in the marginalisation of ontologies, ecologies and creativities of the inhabitants of the Third World and the periphery of the First. That is why the significance of colonial and imperial histories for the construction of modernity is manifested in how Southern creativities are situated within the ‘not yet’ of modernity temporality (Brown 2008). In the context of arts and creativities, this genealogy of thoughts produces a horizontal network of relations that are based on the Paris–New York narrative. This forces Southern creativities to insert themselves, in any way possible, within the narrative of modern arts.

Developing a postmodern perception of creativities and their communication informed by post- and decolonial theories is important since they offer critical understandings of structural power inequalities (Mignolo and Walsh 2018; de Sousa Santos 2018). Making a case for creativity as a type of socio-cultural critique necessitates first ascertaining that it is grounded in alternative decolonial thinking that challenges the grand narrative of modernity with its foundational Western models. Pre-defined directives of Northern leadership situate less global spaces with their languages, epistemologies and creativities within ‘the sociology of absences’; therefore, a reimagining of global frameworks of cross-cultural communicating of cultural productions would generate ‘the sociology of emergences’ with the concomitant demands for ‘cognitive justice’/’plurinational states’ (de Sousa Santos 2018). Attending to less popular and accepted versions of what ‘creative’ is would contribute to ‘the changing of the balance of power in the international art world by focusing critical attention away from the dominant cultural centres and towards the periphery’ (de Duve 2007, 682). Moving from abyssal thinking (de Sousa Santos 2007) into postabyssal epistemologies (de Sousa Santos 2018) can be applied with similar parameters to creativities by presenting them as sources of knowledge generation. Proposals for epistemological delinking, including Mignolo and Walsh’s (2018) ‘thinking Otherwise’ and de Sousa Santos’ (2014, 2018) ‘alternative thinking’, emphasise the development of centre–periphery relations based on the active inclusion of alternative perspectives, especially the ‘Epistemologies of the South’ (de Sousa Santos 2014). Moving from epistemological coloniality that also relates to artistic knowledge can contribute to the reinforcement of subaltern knowledges and creativities.

Decolonial projects such as the ‘Ecology of Recognitions’ (de Sousa Santos 2014) recognises the postcolonial state of dependency as a reflection of the continuing power of colonial legacies. The idea of decolonial disobedience, presented by Mignolo, is an epistemological proposal that seeks to foreground ‘this wounded sensibility and subjectivity of the colonized away from structures of recognition within colonial aesthetics and politics and towards hope and determination for bringing change’ (Costa 2019, 504). Decolonial aesthetics is expected to stymie the hegemony of Western aesthetics as a criterion of ‘quality’. In order to rethink artistic authorship and hegemony, the aesthetic creations of the Third World should recognise that Western cosmology is imbued with a high sense of universality (Mignolo 2018, x). The work of postcolonial artists is expected to foreground ‘modes of critical reflexivity and thoughtfulness as elements of an emancipatory practice’ (McCarthy and Dimitriadis 2000, 235).

Another important dimension here is the necessity of examining how art biennials, as a way of marketing artworks, have played an important role in making contemporary art what it is today (Smith 2018). Systems of exclusion have been argued to permeate art biennials and further reinforce how the West makes an abusive usage of them as a mode of externalisation of its production or its aesthetic options (de Duve 2007). Therefore, some biennials may be perceived as ‘hegemonic machines that link the local to the global within the field of symbolic struggles for legitimation’ (Marchart 2014, 263). Postcolonial biennials have the possibility of, at least, drawing some attention to the artistic decentralisation of the West. Smaller and more innovative art biennials may offer ‘a better chance for what postcolonial theory has termed an “emancipatory politics” – one relatively free from Western hegemony, whether of global capitalism or the Euro-American art world’ (Oren 2014, 277). For instance, peripheral biennials such as the Havana Biennial have managed to relatively decentralise Western artistic authority by granting visibility to contemporary art and artists from spaces that are commonly unpopular. Such events can at least present the local as a deconstructing mechanism as the conception of the global continues to place the West at the centre (Bilbao 2019, 189).

Because aesthetic qualities are important, it is more useful to engage with the material realities of art including objects and images in their social contexts; art can produce a narrative of social action and activism, rather than simply continuing to exist as a passive object of viewership (DeMarrais and Robb 2013), for example via Budhan Theatre’s decolonising cultural production (Costa 2019) and ‘Decolonizing the Mind Through Song’ (Carter-Ényì and Carter-Ényì 2019). Artists should use their creative forms of expression to criticise enduring power imbalances and redress social inequalities. It is even argued that performed lyrics and sounds may offer better guidance on the conceptual work of postcolonial studies (Eckstein 2016). Examining the development challenge posed by colonialism and hegemony should necessarily entail a discussion on ‘the potential of Creative Resilience as part of the societal and individual responses in context the societies of the global south’ (Dunn 2020, 4). Such a perception may render contemporary artistic expressions ‘a tool of political resistance against existing and emerging ideologies as well as controversial and discriminatory cultural norms’ (Khrebtan-Hörhager 2019, 435).

Despite these postcolonial tendencies and decolonial impulses in Southern creativities, colonial legacies may still have been undermining post-independence aspirations. During the Moroccan Protectorate (1912–1956), the French administrators reinforced their hegemonic policy through a systematic modernisation of local arts and crafts (Irbouh 2001). The discrepancies between the Moroccan and French landscape of arts and creativity, between French reformist goals and the Moroccan old order, precipitated social dislocations that prompted rebellion against French domination. As French women intruded on the feminine Moroccan milieu to reinforce colonial ideology, Moroccan women and their daughters exhibited a voiced rejection of traditional passive roles and thus undermined colonial plans. French artistic legacy in Moroccan arts and crafts led to movements of speaking-back in the postcolonial period. To reflect the post-independence aspirations, local artists searching for their own identities were determined to reclaim their originality and authenticity. As the endeavour to define a pristine visual heritage is still in progress, artists and critics have made a case for the realisation of an unadulterated art freed of all foreign imposed influences. However, it has been argued that, by emphasising French contributions to Moroccan artistic and craft production, the legacies of colonial French policy remain heavily present (Irbouh 2005).

If these hierarchies are not addressed, postcolonial art will continue to reflect the enduring mechanisms of silence and marginalisation produced by colonialism, resulting in implicitly more hegemonic art narratives of the West. Existing colonialities capitalise on decolonisation struggles which are enduring articulations of colonial violence across spaces. With the current hegemony of Western episteme under the assumption of modernity, the critique of self-ascribed Western universality (Mignolo 2018) is also a critique of the modern (Brown 2008). The critique of hegemonic representation in traditions of colonialist aesthetics (McCarthy and Dimitriadis 2000) may also benefit from the input of interculturality theory as it delves into the complexities entailed when one is troubled with the necessity of transmitting a message/idea which is simultaneously one’s own and shaped by the current guidelines to a more popular frame of reference. However, due to power imbalances, juxtaposing two possibly contending realms in terms of creative ontology is running the risk of reproducing the normative hierarchies that constitute the logic of modern art (Brown 2008). Postcolonial struggles are about having more recognition, rather than proving their merit or long-suppressed superiority; the objective is to achieve an equal redistribution of cultural power among privileged and ‘emergent’ spaces of the world (de Duve 2007, 681).

Conclusion

Power relations among nations continue to influence how knowledges, ontologies and creativities are shared and appreciated. The unequal distribution of power results in colonial-like relations among spaces, which in turn continue to build on the themes of otherness, differences and constructing hierarchies. Modernity hinders the cross-cultural pollination among creativities since the adoption of other artistic insights remains largely an endeavour by Southern creativities to be granted a place in the Western grand narrative of modernity. The process of modernisation is associated with the subjectivities determined by the overseas colonial rule. The pressure placed on Southern creativities to conform to the Western taste and quality does not ascertain gaining visibility. Although hybridity is often presented as a postcolonial condition, it is important to recognise that globalisation and modernity have aggravated the West’s hegemony over aesthetic taste and value.

Cultural variation can be explained in terms of the distinct Western and Oriental perspectives on the definition of creativity and how culture channels creative activity by emphasising certain understandings, worldviews and characteristic ways of approaching the world. Another important dimension here is that perceptions of art are often shaped by the contextual aspects of ‘the production, circulation, and consumption of objects and artefacts over time and across different societies, nations, and civilizations’ (Maihoub 2015). Art should be examined in terms of global participation – engagement with other people and contexts – rather than simply as creative works to be passively viewed (Morphy and Perkins 2006; DeMarrais and Robb 2013). The interpretive component of creativity renders communicating creativities conditioned by sociocultural and geopolitical factors that favour cultural productions from the Global North.

Creativity without borders cannot be made possible as long as the Western artistic superiority is promoted and maintained. A first step is to recognise that ‘the writing of art history is still largely being done from Western sites’ (Clarke 2002, 241). For equal cartography of our world, it is necessary to exercise resistance to the cultural homogenisation promoted by modernity and the global art market and creative industries. If intentions to include alternative perspectives are serious, then the existing terms of modernity and modern arts have to be reformulated to (a) recognise the illegitimacy of their canons by which creative productions from the periphery remain derivative and (b) seek to situate Southern creativities within the interiority of modernity but with their terms that are relevant to their needs and particularities. Examining the communication of creativities across geographical and cultural boundaries is a legitimate case of intercultural communication. Critical engagement with these themes would offer deeper insights into the relational consequences of imbalanced power relations as they apply to different fields; it is indeed important to examine the role of creativity and its resilience as ‘key ingredients in a search for a deeper understanding of globalization, communications and innovation in the developing world’ (Dunn 2020, 4).

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the journal’s editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous drafts of this essay. “Open access funding provided by Universidad Pública de Navarra”

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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Hamza R’boul

Hamza R’boul is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities and Education Sciences at the Public University of Navarre. He is also an Affiliated Researcher with I-COMMUNITAS – Institute for Advanced Social Research at the same university. His works examine the Western hegemony on knowledge production and dissemination in different contexts, including intercultural communication and English-language teaching. His research interests include intercultural communication and education, cultural politics of language teaching, postcoloniality and geopolitics of knowledge.

Notes

1 While this paper recognises that these theories belong to different geo-genealogies, meaning that the sites of enunciation (geographical placing) are fundamentally important to decolonial critique, these theories are basically two decolonising habits of thought that seek similar objectives. They are two theories framing the politics of resistance both within and outside dismantling Western hegemony under the rubrics of different lenses. That is why although these theories are different, the paper is not calling for their coalition, but rather their use as two possible trajectories of decolonial critique that both aim at transforming the work that we do about creativity and how creativities are perceived.