Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora
Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora

Author: Abimbola Adelakun

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-07-26

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 3319913107

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This book explores the politics of artistic creativity, examining how black artists in Africa and the diaspora create art as a procedure of self-making. Essays cross continents to uncover the efflorescence of black culture in national and global contexts and in literature, film, performance, music, and visual art. Contributors place the concerns of black artists and their works within national and transnational conversations on anti-black racism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, migration, resettlement, resistance, and transnational feminisms. Does art by the subaltern fulfill the liberatory potential that critics have ascribed to it? What other possibilities does political art offer? Together, these essays sort through the aesthetics of daily life to build a thesis that reflects the desire of black artists and cultures to remake themselves and their world.

African Humanity
African Humanity

Author: Abimbola Asojo

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 9781531017569

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"African Humanity: Creativity, Identity and Personhood is a collection of thought-provoking essays from scholars around the world on topics that inform new ways of thinking while engaging critical perspectives about Africa and the African Diaspora. The essays focus on the discourse of creativity, culture, identity and well-being from multiple fields such as design, art, gender studies, education, health and museum studies in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial Africa and the African Diaspora. This multidisciplinary group of global scholars offer a critical dialogue on topics such as the creative process in Africa and the African Diaspora; gender and creative space; histories of creativity and inventions; globalized modernity and its consequence on cultural performances; politics of creativity; creativity, performance and Nollywood; social, political, and economic ramifications of creativity and design; ethical issues in creativity; and sustainability, well-being and the environment. The book's goal is to offer a comparative critical dialogue for a multidisciplinary academic audience, artists, grassroots activists, diverse communities and interested members of the general public. It has five distinct sections: Gender, Education, and Language; Design and Art in Africa and Its Diaspora; Creativity, Performance and Nollywood; Identity and Institutions of Politics and Living; and Sustainability, Health and the Environment. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin"--

Western Frontiers of African Art
Western Frontiers of African Art

Author: Moyosore Benjamin Okediji

Publisher: Rochester Studies in African H

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9781580463706

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Western Frontiers of African Art navigates the problems and prospects of prometheusis in creative cultural productions. Artists, writers, musicians, and other creative practitioners share icons, ideas, images, and paraphernalia across cultures, mediums, and disciplines in many ways including borrowing, copying, adoption, adaptation, abbreviation, distortion, and even outright pilfering. Their reasons for sharing creative elements range from admiration to subversion, pedagogical innovation, criticism, hegemony, revenge, anger, fear, malice, and even pathology. Once shared these artistic materials become links and crossroads that complicate creativity and culture with prometheusis. But what is prometheusis? How does it work and how is it evaluated? Drawing on the visual arts, this book elaborates on prometheusis as a general theory of cultural exchange, productivity, and analysis. Examples focus on the intersections and frontiers of western modernity and African art. Moyo Okediji is Director of the Center for Art of Africa and its Diasporas at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of several books on African art.

The Black Art Renaissance
The Black Art Renaissance

Author: Joshua I. Cohen

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0520309685

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Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa
Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa

Author: Ketu H. Katrak

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0253053692

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Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers the first full-length monograph on the award-winning choreographer, theater director, curator, and creative artist in contemporary global performance. Working within the contexts of African studies, dance, theater, and performance, Ketu H. Katrak explores the extent of Pather's productive career but also places him and his work in the South African and global arts scene, where he is considered a visionary. Pather, a South African of Indian heritage, is known as a master of space, site, and location. Katrak examines how Pather's performance practices place him in the center of global trends that are interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and multimedia and that cross borders between dance, theater, visual art, and technology. Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers a vision of an artist who is strategically aware of the spatiality of human life, who understands the human body as the nation's collective history, and who is a symbol of hope and resilience after the trauma of violent segregation.

Visual Arts in Cameroon
Visual Arts in Cameroon

Author: Schemmel, Annette

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG

Published: 2016-02-27

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 9956763608

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Annette Schemmel provides a highly illuminating case study of the major actors, discourses and paradigm that shaped the history of visual arts in Cameroon during the second part of the 20th century. Her book meticulously reconstructs the multiple ways of artistic knowledge acquisition - from the consolidation of the "Système de Grands Frères" in the 1970s to the emergence of more discursively oriented small artists' initiatives which responded to the growing NGO market of social practice art opportunities in the 2000s. Based on archival research, participant observation and in depth interviews with art practitioners in Douala and Yaoundé, this study is a must read for everyone who wants to better understand the vibrant artistic scenes in countries like Cameroon, which until today lack a proper state-funded infrastructure in the arts.

Art, Parody and Politics
Art, Parody and Politics

Author: Adérónké Adésolá Adésànyà

Publisher: Africa Research and Publications

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781592219179

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This pioneer book focuses on the work of dele jegede, one of the leading Nigerian artists in the last three decades, to reflect on the connections between images and the nation state, the linkages between art and humanity, and the understanding of society through means different from oral and written texts. Various chapters written by prominent art historians, based on the analysis of jegede?s cartoons, drawings, and paintings, reflect extensively on how he has defined and imagined a postcolonial state, in its nakedness and hope, but gesturing towards change and a utopian moment. The book draws on the individual experiences of scholars and professional artists in Nigeria and the Diaspora to paint a complex, multi-dimensional portrait of jegede, one that puts in context his work as a scholar, painter, curator, critic, cartoonist, and administrator. In dreaming of the ideal, jegede?s creative cadence detours from the sheer pursuit of beauty and celebrates a conscious engagement with social realism and political visual expressions. In ways never clearly explained before now, jegede?s artistry, seen in slow motion as offered here, is inevitably tied to activism, a nationalistic credo, and the elevation of the spirits of humankind.

The African Diaspora
The African Diaspora

Author: Isidore Okpewho

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 612

ISBN-13: 9780253334251

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* How black people established their identities in the African diaspora.

The Art of Africa
The Art of Africa

Author: Christa Clarke

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1588391906

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A CD-ROM and DVD set extracted from the 'The Art of Africa: A Resource for Educators.' The CD-ROM "contains a PDF of 'The Art of Africa: A Resource for Educators, ' which features forty traditional works of African art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It includes a brief overview of the Metropolitan's collection of African art; a short introduction and history of Africa; an explanation of the role of visual expression in the continent; descriptions of the featured works of art and background about the materials and techniques that were used to created them ... The DVD, 'Ci Wara Invocation, ' "presents the highlights of a dozen ci wara performances in Bamana communities in present-day Mali that were recorded by five different observers between 1970-2002. Among the Bamana, oral traditions credit a mythical being named Ci Wara, a divine being half mortal and half antelope, with the introduction of agriculture to the Bamana. The ci wara performances are part of biannual celebrations that either launch or conclude the farming season."--Container

Yoruba Art and Language
Yoruba Art and Language

Author: Rowland Abiodun

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-11-13

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1139992872

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The Yoruba was one of the most important civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa. While the high quality and range of its artistic and material production have long been recognized, the art of the Yoruba has been judged primarily according to the standards and principles of Western aesthetics. In this book, which merges the methods of art history, archaeology, and anthropology, Rowland Abiodun offers new insights into Yoruba art and material culture by examining them within the context of the civilization's cultural norms and values and, above all, the Yoruba language. Abiodun draws on his fluency and prodigious knowledge of Yoruba culture and language to dramatically enrich our understanding of Yoruba civilization and its arts. The book includes a companion website with audio clips of the Yoruba language, helping the reader better grasp the integral connection between art and language in Yoruba culture.