Duane Deterville has spent the last 30 years researching the history and arts of the African diaspora and it’s influences on the larger cultural landscape. Throughout January the visual artist, writer and co-founder of the Sankofa Cultural Institute, will be presenting a series of lectures discussing his work entitled “Afriscape Cartography: Mapping Black Visual Culture.”

Throughout his career as an artist, Deterville’s paintings and photography have stood side by side with his critical and cultural work. Through the Sankofa Institute he's produced three symposiums exploring the cultural and spiritual elements of jazz music, co written a book of visual history, “Black Artists in Oakland”, and worked with critics and artists including Greg Tate, Arthur Jaffa, Raymond Saunders and Githinji Wambire.

Deterville is currently a columnist for SFMOMA.org and recently completed an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts. His thesis presentation “Drawing Down Ancestors” explored the street alters and ground markings used throughout the Bay Area to memorialize relatives and friends who have died and connects them with the historical practice of ancestor veneration found in many African Diasporic religions.

This thesis work provided some background for the lecture series, which also addresses cultural connections, spirituality in jazz and the notion of Afrifuturism. We talked a little about his work, visual criticism and the history of Oakland arts.

The series that you're doing at Joyce Gordon deals with mapping the cartography of the Afriscape, can you explain what that means?

Okay to do that means I have to do to things. I have to define what Afriscape means and for some people I have to define what cartography means. I'll start with the second. Cartography is the science and skill of map making. And the term Afriscape is one that I coined during my thesis work at CCA in order to describe African cultural presences both on and off the continent, no matter what they're geographic location.

And the reason I'm using the notion of a landscape is because oftentimes folks like myself who are these unapologetic Africanists are accused of not acknowledging the particulars of each African culture, wherever it may be. So I use Afriscape to describe the plurality of African cultures all around the world, because a landscape is such that it looks different depending on which point of the landscape you occupy, so it's all one landscape, there are just many different views of it.

Can you talk about how the study of visual culture effects our everyday lives.

I'm so glad you asked that because the advantage of visual culture is how broad it is. It examines not only the so called "art with a capitol A" and art history, where mainly people are talking just about Western painting and Western art history and sculpture. Visual culture addresses popular culture, images in media, everything from architecture to album covers to popular movies and animation. Anything that falls into the visual field is worthy of the same critical examination that "art with a capitol A" would normally get.

And one of the things that I'll touch on in the lecture is that controlling the visual is a powerful tool for controlling the populace. The connection between power and the way things are seen is a very important part of constructing narrative. So even with Oscar Grant, the reason why it's such a big issue in our news and in our lives right now is the simple new technological fact that there can be dozens of people standing around who are all carrying cameras. There's this new type of visual ability that's been given to the public.

One of your lectures is dealing with street alters and ground drawings and I thought of Oscar Grant but also of Oakland artist Casper Banjo and the Dia De Los Muertos alters. Can you talk a bit about that lecture and the memorial you did for Mr. Banjo.

What I do is take a basic central African ground drawing, a cosmogram, and I show where this cosmogram shows up in the drawings of Haiti, Brazil and other parts of the African diaspora. From there I begin to connect the dots between Congo cosmology, which addresses ancestor veneration and the ways that, when people die, we mourn their deaths.

And when a good friend of mine, a senior artist Caspar Banjo, was basically murdered by an Oakland police officer we did a mourning vigil for him out in east Oakland. I took that knowledge and I took the signs that I understood and I made a ground drawing that honored him in the form of a drawing that's usually found in an African religion called Umbanda. So what I'm talking about in that particular lecture is how one can use your artistic practice, and a knowledge of visual culture to enter into your community and use these tools for rituals. It's a demonstration of how artists use visual culture.

In the time we've known each other you've approached jazz in several ways, talking about the music, it's key players and it's relationship to spirituality. Can you talk a bit about your views on jazz's place in American culture.

One of the great narratives about the origins of jazz in the United States is the Congo Square narrative, which is partly true. Congo Square, in New Orleans, was where Africans were basically given a day off to improvise, do their music and their singing. And it's at that point in the 19th century that people say that folks like Buddy Bolden and others were around Congo Square and this is where the impetus for this new type of music came from. They were finally given the chance to pick up instruments-trumpets, saxophones, drums and things of that nature-and began improvising with them.

The reason I mention Congo Square is because often when you look at the illustrations of Congo Square often there were Vundun ceremonies happening there. My take is that the formation of jazz under those conditions and things like the jazz funerals that happen in New Orleans are all connected to ancestor veneration. The word jazz is also something that indicates it's spiritual nature.

In Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson quotes one of the greatest living Congolese scholars as saying that the word jazz is creolized Congo, from the word dzina, meaning to give forth life. So when you say the word jazz you're talking about the actual act of spewing forth life, and from my standpoint it's exemplary of what jazz does. It's a reflection of life in the moment. It is instantaneous improvisation, instantaneous creation. And giving that power to a group of people to experience the egalitarian process of creation.

The last lecture in the series is dealing with Afrifuturism, can give us a preview of what you'll be discussing?

Afrifuturism is the spelling that I prefer for a term coined by Mark Dery in the book Flame Wars where he talked about science fictions with black people in them and the notion of black folks and speculative futures associated with technology. One of the things that was missing from Dery's critique is that one can find black intellectuals as far back as the 19th century talking about speculative futures for black people. So I'm going to go to specifically the writing of Martin Delaney from the 19th century and another midcentury novel by George Schiller called ""Black Empire" to gives examples of intellectuals that are talking about Pan African ideas that are specifically embedded in the notion of speculative futures. And that's where Afrifuturism comes from, not just from the notion of black folks appearing in science fiction.

Can you talk a bit about your book Black Artists in Oakland and some of the things you discovered during the research.

A lot of the research that Jerry (co author Jerry Thompson) and I did was at the African American Museum Library in Oakland and there were a lot of vintage photos there and the cover photographs was one of the best finds we had, one of Ruth Beckford. Finding that photograph led to an interview with Ruth, who was basically Katherine Dunham's star student and a wealth of information-a library unto herself. She gave us a lot of broad history of Oakland's 7th St. where there were jazz clubs that ran up both sides of the street before they wiped out one side with the BART station and the post office.

Another gentleman we spoke to was Earl Watkins, who passed away right before the book was published. He was a jazz drummer who played with the great piano genius Earl "Fatha" Hines, right here in Oakland. His grave is located near Mills College and a lot of people don't realize that there was another jazz genius living right here in Oakland.

Editor's Note: Deterville's lecture series, "Afriscape Cartography: Mapping Black Visual Culture" will be take place every Saturday in January at the Joyce Gordon Gallery.  He will also be speaking at SFMOMA on January 17th on the work of Pablo Picasso.