The Objects of Life in Central Africa
The Objects of Life in Central Africa

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-09-15

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 9004256245

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The Objects of Life in Central Africa the history of consumption and social change from 1840 until 1980 is explored. By taking consumption as a vantage point, the contributions deviate from and add to previous works which have mainly analysed issues of production from an economic and political perspective. The chapters are broad-ranging in temporal and geographical focus, including contributions on Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola. Topics range from the social history of firearms to the perception of the railway and include contributions on sewing machines, traders and advertising. By looking at the socio-economic, political and cultural meaning and impact of goods the history of Central Africa is reassessed.

Art and Power in the Central African Savanna
Art and Power in the Central African Savanna

Author: Constantijn Petridis

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Revealing the powers immanent in works that the West long regarded only as exotic or abstract, Constantine Petridis looks beneath the surface of the arts of the Luba, Songye, Chokwe and Luluwa peoples to find, literally embedded in sculpture, the forces that enable the spirit world to intervene in daily life. Ritual use of these objects is expected to ensure a healthy birth, successful hunt, or triumph over an enemy. Analysis of the scholarly record illuminates the changing visions of leadership and prestige that fostered the development of the majestic, elaborate figure styles long prized in the West. These sculptures nevertheless retain the mysterious potency of more humble objects trusted for centuries to protect, heal and harm. Art and Power in the Central African Savanna examines an artistic culture in which the sacred and the secular are indivisible, and aesthetic and moral value inseparable.

Working the Diaspora
Working the Diaspora

Author: Frederick Knight

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0814748341

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the sixteenth to early-nineteenth century, four times more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. While this forced migration stripped slaves of their liberty, it failed to destroy many of their cultural practices, which came with Africans to the New World. In Working the Diaspora, Frederick Knight examines work cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, from West and West Central Africa to British North America and the Caribbean. Knight demonstrates that the knowledge that Africans carried across the Atlantic shaped Anglo-American agricultural development and made particularly important contributions to cotton, indigo, tobacco, and staple food cultivation. The book also compellingly argues that the work experience of slaves shaped their views of the natural world. Broad in scope, clearly written, and at the center of current scholarly debates, Working the Diaspora challenges readers to alter their conceptual frameworks about Africans by looking at them as workers who, through the course of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation labor, shaped the development of the Americas in significant ways.

The Kongo Kingdom
The Kongo Kingdom

Author: Koen Bostoen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1108474187

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A unique and forward-thinking book that sheds new light on the origins, dynamics, and cosmopolitan culture of the Kongo Kingdom from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

Out of Our Minds
Out of Our Minds

Author: Johannes Fabian

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2000-06-13

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0520221230

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'Out of Our Minds' shows explorers and ethnographers in Africa during colonial expansion were far from rational - often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence.

The Lake Regions of Central Africa
The Lake Regions of Central Africa

Author: Sir Richard Francis Burton

Publisher:

Published: 1860

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The ivory porter; Zanzibar town from the sea; A town on the Mrima; Explorers in East Africa; The East African Ghauts; View in Unyamwezi

The Art of Conversion
The Art of Conversion

Author: Cécile Fromont

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-12-19

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1469618729

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries. The African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.

France's Wars in Chad
France's Wars in Chad

Author: Nathaniel K. Powell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1108488676

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines twenty years of French military interventions in Chad and Hissène Habré's rise to power between 1960 and 1982.