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In interviews Fani-Kayode states that his life experiences inform his work. He also speaks on his experience of being an outsider in terms of the African diaspora, but it's also important to note that it was forced migration. His exile from Nigeria at an early age affected his sense of wholeness. He experienced feeling like he had "very little to lose." (cotter) But his identity was then shaped from his sense of otherness and it was celebrated. In his work, Fani-Kayode's subjects are specifically black men, but he almost always asserts himself as the black man in most of his work, which can be interpreted as a performative and visual representation of his personal history. Using the body as the centralized point in his photography, he was able to explore the relationship between erotic fantasy and his ancestral spiritual values. His complex experience of dislocation, fragmentation, rejection, and separation all shaped his work. (kobena)
One of his notable references is to the Yoruba religion. Fani stated that his parents were devotees of Ifa, the oracle orisha, and keepers of Yoruba shrines, an early experience that definitely informed his work. With this legacy he set out on the quest to fuse desire, ritual and the black male body. His religious experiences encouraged him to emulate the Yoruba technique of possession, through which Yoruba priests communicate with the gods and experience ecstacy. His goal was to communicate with the audience's unconscious mind and to combine Yoruba and Western ideals (specifically Christianity). This practice of fusing aesthetic and religious eroticism compelled the viewer visually and provocatively.
He was born in southern Nigeria to the Balogun of Ife. This can be seen in his early work, specifically Sonponnoi (1987). Sonponnoi is one of the most powerful orishas in the Yoruba pantheon; he is the god of smallpox. As a result of his great power, he induces fear to the point where people are afraid to speak his name, and he becomes an outsider, abiding in the countryside instead of the main cities. In the image is a headless black figure, decorated in white and black spots, holding three burning candles on his groin. Fani-Kayode adorned the figure with spots to represent a Sonponnoi's smallpox and Yoruba tribal marks. The triple-burning candle on his groin evokes the sense that sexuality continues even in sickness/otherness. It also represents how the Christian faith replaced the Yoruba tradition while also bringing disease with it during colonialism. (worton) In a way, Fani-Kayode identified with this orisha being an outsider, but he extended the symbolic message of the image, speaking to him having a condemned sexuality while living in a Western world that clashes with his ancestral religion.
He especially referenced Esu, the messenger and crossroads diety who is often characterized with an erect penis, frequently in his images. He would engrave an erect penis in many of his images to describe his own fluid experience with sexuality. Fani-Kayode's mid-1980s portfolio Black Male, White Male intersects his racial and sexual themes with subtle displays of a devotee-deity relationship. Much of that work expresses an ambiguity that can be associated with Esu, who embodies opposing forces. [3] Speaking on Esu, he insists, "Eshu presides here [...] He is the Trickster, the Lord of the Crossroads, sometimes changing the signposts to lead us astray [...] It is perhaps through that rebirth will occur." (charlotte)
Fani-Kayode's fragmented sense of being can be examined in his 1987 Bronze Head. In the photo, he crops a figure's black body to reveal his legs and butt as he is about to sit on top of a bronze Ife sculpture. It represents both his exile and homosexuality, two core parts of his world. The cropped body symbolizes his fragmented identity, the position references his sexuality and the sculpture symbolizes the ancient and lifelong social norms that he's attempting to deconstruct. (nelson steven)
His last project, posthumously entitled Communion (1995), reflects his complex relationship with Yoruba religion. It seems to emit the Yoruba concepts of coolness and power. He reflects that it is a "tranquilitiy of communion with the spiritual world." One of the images in the series, Golden Phallus, is of a man with a bird-like mask looking at the viewer, with his penis suspended on a piece of string. The image has been described as an ironic representation of how black masculinity has been burdened by the Western world. (kobena)
Fani-Kayode challenged the invisibility of "African queerness", or the denial of alternative African sexualities, in both the Western and African worlds. In general, he sought to reshape the ideas of sexuality and gender in his photography, showing that sexuality and gender appear rigid and "fixed" because of cultural and social norms but are actually fluid and subjective. However, he specifically sought to develop queerness in contemporary African art, which required him to address the colonial and Christian legacies that suppressed queerness and constructed harmful notions of black masculinity. In a time when African artists were not being represented, he provocatively approached the issue by addressing and questioning the objectification of black bodies. (charlotte) His homoerotic influences in using the black male body can be interpreted as an expression of idealization, of desire and being desired, and self-consciousness in response to the black body being reduced to a spectacle. (enzewor)
Not only is Fani-Kayode praised for his conceptual imagery of Africanness and queerness (and African queerness), he is also praised for his ability to fuse racial and sexual politics with religious eroticism and beauty. One critic has also described his work as "neo-romantic," with the idea his images evoke a sense of fleeting beauty. (kobena)
Source(s): (5) Baker, Charlotte. Expressions of the Body: Representations in African Text and Image. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009. Print.
Cotter, Holland. Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Nothing to Lose. New York Times Company, New York, N.Y, 2012.
Enwezor, Okwui. "The postcolonial constellation: Contemporary art in a state of permanent transition." Antinomies of art and culture: Modernity, postmodernity, contemporaneity (2008): 207-234.
Gaafar, Rania. "Migrating Forms: Contemporary African Photography at The Walther Collection." Third Text 25.2 (2011): 241-247.
Mercer, Kobena. "Eros & Diaspora." Reading the Contemporary: African Art From Theory to the Marketplace (1996): 289-93.
Mngadi, Sikhumbuzo. "Rereading and Resistance." Afterimage, vol. 26, no. 3, November/December 1998, pp. 7-8. EBSCO
Moffitt, Evan. "Rotimi Fani-Kayode's ecstatic antibodies: libidinal politics, race, and desire." Transition: An International Review 118 (2015): 74+. Literature Resource Center.
Nelson, Steven. “Transgressive Transcendence in the Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode.” Art Journal, vol. 64, no. 1, 2005, pp. 4–19
Oguibe, Olu (1999). "Finding a Place: Nigerian Artists in the Contemporary Art World". Art Journal. 58: 35–36
Worton, Michael. "Behold the (sick) man." National Healths: Gender, Sexuality and Health in Cross-cultural Context (2004): 151-165.
Quotes: "On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation; and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for." (charlotte)
"I try to be bring out the spiritual dimension in my pictures so that concepts of reality become ambiguous and are open to reinterpretation. This requires what Yoruba priests call a technique of ecstasy." (nelson)
"I make my pictures homosexual on purpose. Black men from the Third World have not previously revealed either to their own peoples or to the West a certain schocking fact: they can desire each other." (charlotte)
Exhibitions
Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity at the Walther collection (raafia) Ramzi Fawaz[edit source] Ramzi Fawaz is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he teaches courses in queer and feminist theory, American cultural studies, and LGBTQ literature. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, published in January 2016 by NYU Press, which received the 2012-3 Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship Award for Best First Book Manuscript in LGBT Studies. His essays have been published in American Literature, GLQ, Feminist Studies, Callaloo, and ASAP/Journal. (1)
Life and Career He recieved his Ph.D. in American Studies at George Washington University.Fawaz is a former fellow of the Social Science Research Council and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, which awarded him the 2012-3 CLAGS Fellowship Award. He is also a co-organizer of the Sexual Politics/Sexual Poetics Collective (SPSP), a group of early queer studies scholars working in new directions of the field.
Work Fawaz states that his work is influenced by queer theory and LGBTQ writers and artists. He is drawn to the idea of cultural production, the making of visual and written media (e.g. movies, books, comics), and he often explores this through the lens of marginalized and queer groups. Having been denied civic engagement in other settings, cultural production has become a way for queer people to engage in social and political discourse. (2) He advocates for the importance of comics in society, as they reflect and explore issues like gender and sexuality before the mainstream culture does. Although comics are often disregarded in popular culture, they are able to address these societal issues in an alternative way while staying under the radar. (3)
His first book The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics explores how the American superhero came to embody the political aspirations of racial, gender, and sexual minorities in the post-WWII period. He argues that the superhero transformed from a symbol of white masculinity in the 1940s and 50s to a social outcast (often depicted as a mutant) in the early 60s. This transformation encouraged comic book writers and artists to develop various left-wing political ideals that were not socially acceptable in their work. (2) The powerful mutants and freaks, who were social outcasts, became symbols of social and political aspirations for marginalized groups, including racial and sexual minorities, working class and women, in the United States. (4)
Selected Publications The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (New York: NYU Press, January 2016).
"'I Cherish My Bile Duct as Much as Any Other Organ': Political Disgust and the Digestive Life of AIDS in Tony Kushner's Angels in America," Special Issue On the Visceral, edited by Marcia Ochoa, Sharon Holland, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins. GLQ 21.1 (2015): 121-152.
"Space, That Bottomless Pit: Planetary Exile and Metaphors of Belonging in American Afrofuturist Cinema." Callaloo 35.4 (2012): 1103-1122.
"'Where no X-man has Gone Before!' Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America." Special Issue on Speculative Fictions, ed. Priscilla Wald and Gerry Canavan. American Literature 83.2 (Summer 2011): 355-388.
Sources: (1) https://www.ramzifawaz.com/bio (2) https://english.wisc.edu/faculty-fawaz.htm (3) https://www.inverse.com/article/10379-the-intellect-of-superheroes-comics-scholar-ramzi-fawaz-on-the-genre-s-future (4) https://nyupress.org/books/9781479823086/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dobanla (talk • contribs) 22:56, 28 April 2017 (UTC)