Aesthetic Theologies of Resemblance, the Production of Colonial Difference, and Possibilities of Ethical Translation

This chapter seeks to examine V.Y Mudimbe’s critical aesthetic method concerning how the colonial power/knowledge nexus seeks to invent, objectify, and explain “Africa” and its people through colonial discursive frames. As a result, Mudimbe illustrates that for Africa, its local cultural, linguistic, and aesthetic life worlds are not understood through the rationality of their own norms and internal rules. However, a close reading of Mudimbe’s thought reveals that he does not in fact start with difference and otherness, but rather resemblances tied to the Latin Christian tradition. To illustrate this, I foreground Mudimbe’s novel critical aesthetic method to show how resemblances eventually articulates radical African otherness through a series of European aesthetic forms. With this, I examine religious motifs of resemblances in German artist Hans Burgkmair’s 1508 painting entitled “Exotic Tribe,” Peter Paul Rubens’ 1620 painting entitled the “Study of Four Black's Heads,” and others. This demonstrates, paradoxically, that radical difference vis-a-vis Africa emerges through theologically grounded forms of resemblances. Finally, I examine Mudimbe’s thought concerning dissolving imposed colonial discourses vis-a-vis Africa and its people, and the possibilities of ethical translation.