"PRINCE ANIABA, IL N'Y A DONC PLUS DE
DIFFERERENCE ENTRE VOUS ET MOI QUE DU NOIR AU BLANC." (LOUIS XIV)*

(2010)

Exhibition at Gilles Peyroulet Gallery, April 15-May 22, 2010.

There are rare and quite wondrous occasions when one comes across a book that crystallizes a line of work one has been engaged in. Blank Darkness; Africanist Discourse in French, by Christopher L. Miller (University of Chicago Press, 1985) has been one such book. Christiopher Miller recounts how the earliest European mentions of the African continent describe it as an unknown, fearful void, and how this came to be associated with Blackness: "in texts from the Ancients on, whether the speaker's attitude is positive or negative in regard to the black people, blackness remains a powerful negative element."

The exhibition referenced two quotes in particular:

"On the occasion of the visit of this African "prince" (who may or may not have been an impostor, a slave bought by Dominican priests, who dreamed up the whole charade), Louise XIV is reported to have said laughingly: "Prince Aniaba, il n'y a donc plus de différence entre vous et moi que du noir au blanc." ("Prince Aniaba, there is thus no more difference between you and me than from black to white.") But read the statement over. There is no difference but a total difference: the difference is only a matter of color, but the colors are complete opposites.

Black and white as tools for effacing difference cannot help but help reconfirm it. The utterance, by its involvement with the problem of color (or, more precisely, with the noncolors black and white), reads two perfectly opposite ways, and with the king's chuckle the prospect of a happy harmony becomes irony. The little speech by the Sun King to the "sun-burnt" prince may be the most condensed Africanist utterance in French: the contrast between the legitimate light of the king and the dubious darkness of the slave-prince could not be more pronounced." (p. 32)

"The history of Africanist writing is the history of the collapsing-together of black and white--of their inability to remain as meaningful opposites--and of the frustrations of meanings attached to them. The Oxford English Dictionary calls "black" a "word of difficult history; "in Old English...confused with blac, shinning, white..."; in Middle English the two words are often distinguishable only by the contrast, and sometimes not by that." The "literal" definition given is this: black is "the proper word for a certain quality particularly classed among the colors, but consisting optically of the total absence of color, due to the absence or total absorption of light, as opposite white arises from the reflection of all the rays of light" (emphasis mine.) "White" is "fully luminous and devoid of any distinctive hues." That void is the point where white and black meet and reverse; for if white is an empty fullness (fully luminous but viod), then black is a full emptiness (total absence). Both are blank, absent, the null set of color." (p.30)

* "Prince Aniaba, there is thus no more difference between you and me than from black to white." (Louis XIV)