Inscribing Meaning by Christine Mullen Kreamer

These range from formal inquiries designed to elicit specific information, such as those proceeding from questionnaires, to the casual, meandering conversations that take place with one or many individuals in person, over the telephone, or via the internet. Building from the most basic understanding of interviews as exchanges from which we glean information, we envisage them broadly, and in positing interviews as bodies of knowledge, we underscore the multiple forms an interview might take. Read from several angles, interviews represent bodies of knowledge that generate other bodies of knowledge. In researching and writing about art and artists, we attribute to interviews many capacities to work toward making meaning. To do so, we begin with the theorization that interviews do productive and constitutive work. It is time to unsettle this relationship, open it up, and examine its possibilities more explicitly. Interviews are so fundamentally embedded in the scholarly projects of African art studies that the relationship between them appears implicit and even naturalized.

We use interviews to generate and acquire perspectives, gird our interpretations, authorize our claims, and expand the purview of objects and other creative expressions. For those of us writing about cultural production in Africa, interviews figure across the strata of our scholarly projects, from the research process to its formal presentation in publications and exhibitions. Who could deny that interviews occupy an exalted place in our research imagination? This is the place where one of the most ordinary of human activities-dialogue-becomes a research instrument, a tool to both extract and produce understandings, and an indispensable resource to be put toward our interpretive undertakings.

Inscribing Meaning by Christine Mullen Kreamer