Download or read book African Culture Identity and Aesthetics written by Uche Lynn-Teresa Ugwueze and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2011-01-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Culture, Identity and Aesthetics: The Igbo Example is a trailblazing tale of the enduring culture and worldview of African/ Igbo people. It also fulfills the need in Africana Studies for greater understanding of African culture as the foundation of African centered thought and practice. The book provides an essential framework to the serious revaluation of the intellectual philosophy/construct of Africana Studies on the basis of African knowledge systems. Dr. Uche Ugwueze's African Culture, Identity, and Aesthetics: The Igbo Example, is a revolutionary masterpiece in finding meaningful pathways to the upheaval damaging the African world. In a piercing scrutiny, she constructs thresholds that can bring the African world together in order to heal the rips in contemporary African communities. Dr. Ugwueze's sharp frame of modern thought and intricacy reveal an enthusiasm to lead the way. Dr. Chris N. Okeke Professor of Law Director LLM/SJD in Int'l Legal Studies Director, Sompong Sucharitkul Center for Advanced Int'l Legal Studies Golden Gate University School of Law San Francisco California.
Download or read book Black Aesthetics written by John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji and published by Africa Research and Publications. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Since its original publication in 2003, Beauty and Culture has remained the only full-length major book contribution to the area of philosophy of art and aesthetics by an African philosopher. This is an area which has had very little or no critical systematic philosophical discussion from an African and African Diaspora perspective to date, either by African or African Diaspora thinkers or, for that matter, by non-African philosophers and intellectuals, leaving the assessment and discussion of African and Diaspora art and artistic experience to Euro-American intellectuals with scant or warped understanding of the sensitivities and sensibilities that under-gird the art they are commenting on. This book which harks back to the ideas of values relating to the concept of beauty in Africana art and aesthetics globally--starting from ancient Africa, the Americas to Europe and to Asia--is predicated on the fact that there is a need for Africana peoples to begin to take a closer look at aesthetics from the Africana perspective or whatever is left of it; especially, the relationship this has to notions of morality, politics, religion, and culture generally. Over the last decade there has grown recognition of the importance of taking African aesthetics into consideration on its own terms, but the nature of the issues discussed in this book has made it necessary to provide non-philosophers a background introduction to the challenge of African philosophy of art. This accounts for the careful effort made in the first three chapters (Introduction, Biographical Details, and The Nature of the Philosophic Enterprise: Initial Issues) to introduce the readers interested in Africana aesthetics, to the rudiments of debates in African philosophy and the nature of scholarship in the discipline, using the experience of the author as illustration. The fourth chapter (Contemporary Scholarship on (Africana) Arts) reviews the discussion of African art in extant literature, while in chapter five (Artistic Expression in Africa) the author explores the nature of art and artistic expression in Africana societies; and chapter six (Philosophy and Artistic Expression in Africa) deals with the problematic of philosophizing the arts and values relating to artistic expression in Africana societies, with chapter seven (Arts, Memory and Identity) considering the critical issues involved in the relationship between art, memory, culture and identity structuring and development in all human societies, but especially in Africana societies. The last chapter (Conclusion) harnesses the inferences of this book, indicating further the challenges which Africana philosophers face in the proper appreciation of Africa and Diaspora art" ABOUT THE AUTHOR JOHN AYOTUNDE ISOLA BEWAJI, is the Jay Newman Visiting Professor of Philosophy of Culture, Brooklyn College and Professor of Philosophy, University of the West Indies; founding President of the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies and John Simon Guggenheim Research Fellow (2010-2011). Publisher's note.
Download or read book The African Aesthetic written by Kariamu Welsh-Asante and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1993-02-18 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the field of aesthetics has long been dominated by European philosophy, recent inquiries have expanded the arena to accommodate different cultures as well as different definitions and meanings. Aesthetics often establishes the pattern that connects culture functions in a society. In African and African American societies it functions as the keeper of the traditions. The African aesthetic is visible from popular culture to the classical cultures. In all art forms, including body adornment arts, there emerge symbols, colors, rhythms, styles, and forms that function as artistic instruments and cultural histories. While acknowledging African cultural diversity, the focus here is on the commonalities in the aesthetic that make an Ibo recognize a Kikuyu and a Jamaican recognize a Chewa and an African American recognize a Sotho. The deep structure manifest in African cultures in the diaspora is proof of the aesthetic continuity. The debate continues over the exact nature of African aesthetics, and in this volume scholars and teachers in the fields of African and African American studies approach the subject from a broad range of disciplines. Dance, music, art, theatre, and literature are examined in order fully to appreciate and delineate what the specific qualities and aspects of an African aesthetic might be. Additionally, theoretical concepts and issues are discussed in order to define more clearly what is meant by an African aesthetic. The term African here applies to all Africans, both continental and diasporan, and encompasses historically used terms such as Negro, Black, and Afro-American. This thoughtful and thought-provoking volume will be a valuable addition to the readings of scholars and students in fields ranging from African studies to general philosophy and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Black Aesthetic Unbound written by PH D April C E Langley and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the era of the slave trade, more than 12 million Africans were brought as slaves to the Americas. Their memories, ideas, beliefs, and practices would forever reshape its history and cultures. April C. E. Langley's The Black Aesthetic Unbound exposes the dilemma of the literal, metaphorical, and rhetorical question, "What is African in African American literature?" Confronting the undeniable imprints of West African culture and consciousness in early black writing such as Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative or Phillis Wheatley's poetry, the author conceives eighteenth-century Black Experience to be literally and figuratively encompassing and inextricably linked to Africa, Europe, and America. Consequently, this book has three aims: to locate the eighteenth century as the genesis of the cultural and historical movements which mark twentieth-century black aestheticism--known as the Black Aesthetic; to analyze problematic associations of African identity as manifested in an essentialized Afro-America; and to study the relationship between specific West African modes of thought and expression and the emergence of a black aesthetic in eighteenth-century North America. By exploring how Senegalese, Igbo, and other West African traditions provide striking new lenses for reading poetry and prose by six significant writers, Langley offers a fresh perspective on this important era in our literary history. Ultimately, the author confronts the difficult dilemma of how to use diasporic, syncretic, and vernacular theories of Black culture to think through the massive cultural transformations wrought by the Middle Passage.
Download or read book Black is Beautiful written by Paul C. Taylor and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time – philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another– from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology – producing mutually illuminating approaches that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each Well-balanced, up-to-date, and beautifully written as well as inventive and insightful Winner of The American Society of Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize 2017
Download or read book African and Diaspora Aesthetics written by Sarah Nuttall and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cameroon, a monumental "statue of liberty" is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness. Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans' Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising "morality" plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly "African" aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope. Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès
Download or read book The African Jamaican Aesthetic written by Lisa Tomlinson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-01-23 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The African- Jamaican Aesthetics Cultural Retention and Transformation Across Borders centres on the use of African Jamaican Aesthetics in Jamaica’s literary traditions and its transformation and transmission in the diaspora.
Download or read book The SAGE Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America written by Mwalimu J. Shujaa and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 1830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America provides an accessible ready reference on the retention and continuity of African culture within the United States. Our conceptual framework holds, first, that culture is a form of self-knowledge and knowledge about self in the world as transmitted from one person to another. Second, that African people continuously create their own cultural history as they move through time and space. Third, that African descended people living outside of Africa are also contributors to and participate in the creation of African cultural history. Entries focus on illuminating Africanisms (cultural retentions traceable to an African origin) and cultural continuities (ongoing practices and processes through which African culture continues to be created and formed). Thus, the focus is more culturally specific and less concerned with the broader transatlantic demographic, political and geographic issues that are the focus of similar recent reference works. We also focus less on biographies of individuals and political and economic ties and more on processes and manifestations of African cultural heritage and continuity. FEATURES: A two-volume A-to-Z work, available in a choice of print or electronic formats 350 signed entries, each concluding with Cross-references and Further Readings 150 figures and photos Front matter consisting of an Introduction and a Reader’s Guide organizing entries thematically to more easily guide users to related entries Signed articles concluding with cross-references
Download or read book Black Religion and Aesthetics written by A. Pinn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great deal of attention has been given to the sociopolitical and theological importance of Black Religion. However, of less academic concern up to this point is the aesthetic qualities that define much of what is said and done within the context of Black Religion. Recognizing the centrality of the black body for black religious thought and life, this book proposes a conversation concerning various dimensions of the aesthetic considerations and qualities of Black Religion as found in various parts of the world, including the the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. In this respect, Black Religion is simply meant to connote the religious orientations and arrangements of people of African descent across the globe.
Download or read book Beyond Aesthetics written by Wole Soyinka and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate reflection on culture and tradition, creativity and power, that draws on a lifetime’s commitment to aesthetic encounter The playwright, poet, essayist, novelist, and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is also a longtime art collector. This book of essays offers a glimpse into the motivations of the collector, as well as a highly personal look at the politics of aesthetics and collecting. Detailing moments of first encounter with objects that drew him in and continue to affect him, Soyinka describes a world of mortals, muses, and deities that imbue the artworks with history and meaning. Beyond Aesthetics is a passionate discussion of the role of identity, tradition, and originality in making, collecting, and exhibiting African art today. Soyinka considers objects that have stirred controversy, and he decries dogmatic efforts—whether colonial or religious—to suppress Africa’s artistic traditions. By turns poetic, provocative, and humorous, Soyinka affirms the power of collecting to reclaim tradition. He urges African artists, filmmakers, collectors, and curators to engage with their aesthetic and cultural histories.
Download or read book African Somaesthetics Cultures Feminisms Politics written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, Catherine F. Botha brings together original research on the body in African cultures, interrogating the possible contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa.
Download or read book The De Africanization of African Art written by Denis Ekpo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for a radical new approach to thinking about art and creativity in Africa, challenging outdated normative discourses about Africa’s creative heritage. Africanism, which is driven by a traumatic response to colonialism in Africa, has an almost unshakable stranglehold on the content, stylistics, and meaning of art in Africa. Post-African aesthetics insists on the need to move beyond this counter-colonial self-consciousness and considerably change, re-work and enlarge the ground, principles and mission of artistic imagination and creativity in Africa. This book critiques and dismantles the tropes of Africanism and Afrocentrism, providing the criteria and methodology for a Post-African art theory or Post-African aesthetics. Grounded initially in essays by Denis Ekpo, the father of Post-Africanism, the book then explores a range of applications and interpretations of Post-African theory to the art forms and creative practices in Africa. With particular reference to South Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers across the disciplines of Art, Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and African Studies.
Download or read book African Aesthetics and the Harlem Renaissance 1920 1940 The Case for Essentialism Authenticity and Identity written by Bridgitte Renea Montgomery and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of my thesis explores how the visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance were inspired by their own African ancestral legacy, folk culture, abstraction, and European Modernism to create their own unique, modern artworks. Through being inspired by African aesthetics and mining vestiges of African folk culture in the southern states, black artists also found their own history, religion, and culture. From this discovery, these artists also developed a sense of identity as Africans in America. This information spread to black communities and it inspired a sense of cultural confidence that became a driving force behind the aalready evolving civil rights movement. Unfortunately, art critics judged the art of the Harlem Renaissance as being inappropriate, inauthentic, imitative, and low in quality. My research is original because this unfounded criticism is finally addressed. I demonstrate how art critics only referred to old stereotypes, new stereotypes, and Minstrel shows to describe and review the visual art of the Harlem Renaissance. My research is significant because this art criticism did not represent the black art of the era, yet it has followed black artists until contemporary times. Also, during the 1913 Armory Show, the Regionalist artists, Scene Painters, landscape artists and most Americans in general rejected Modernism. Therefore, I assert that the art critics of the era were not fully informed enough to critique black art that had displayed modern leanings since 1906. Inspired by either crossing the color line or marginalization, during this era is when the cases for and against black essentialism in art began. I analyze examples and demonstrate how these cases can often become social, economic, and political choices rather than essentialist choices alone.
Download or read book Africa and Its Significant Others written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When did the intimate dialogue between Africa, Europe, and the Americas begin? Looking back, it seems as if these three continents have always been each other’s significant others. Europe created its own modern identity by using Africa as a mirror, but Africans traveled to Europe and America long before the European age of discovery, and African cultures can be said to lie at the root of European culture. This intertwining has become ever more visible: Nowadays Africa emerges as a highly visible presence in the Americas, and African American styles capture Europe’s youth, many of whom are of (North-) African descent. This entanglement, however, remains both productive and destructive. The continental economies are intertwined in ways disastrous for Africa, and African knowledge is all too often exported and translated for US and European scholarly aims, which increases the intercontinental knowledge gap.This volume proposes a fresh look at the vigorous and painful, but inescapable, relationships between these significant others. It does so as a gesture of gratitude and respect to one of the pioneering figures in this field. Dutch Africanist and literary scholar Mineke Schipper, who is taking her leave from her chair in Intercultural Literary Studies at the University of Leiden. Where have the past four decades of African studies brought us? What is the present-day state of this intercontinental dialogue?Sixteen of Mineke’s colleagues and friends in Europe, Africa and the Americas look back and assess the relations and debates between Africa-Europe-America: Ann Adams, Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, Liesbeth Bekers, Wilfried van Damme, Ariel Dorfman, Peter Geschiere, Kathleen Gyssels, Isabel Hoving, Frans-Willem Korsten, Babacar M’Baye, Harry Olufunwa, Ankie Peypers, Steven Shankman, Miriam Tlali, and Chantal Zabus write about the place of Africa in today’s African Diaspora, about what sisterhood between African and European women really means, about the drawbacks of an overly strong focus on culture in debates about Africa, about Europe’s reluctance to see Africa as other than its mirror or its playing field, about the images of Africans in seventeenth-century Dutch writing, about genital excision, the flaunting of the African female body and the new self-writing, about new ways to look at classic African novels, and about the invigorating, disturbing, political art of intercultural reading.
Download or read book Spectacular Blackness written by Amy Abugo Ongiri and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the interface between the cultural politics of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements and the production of postwar African American popular culture, Amy Ongiri shows how the reliance of Black politics on an oppositional image of African Americans was the formative moment in the construction of "authentic blackness" as a cultural identity. While other books have adopted either a literary approach to the language, poetry, and arts of these movements or a historical analysis of them, Ongiri's captures the cultural and political interconnections of the postwar period by using an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from cinema studies and music theory. She traces the emergence of this Black aesthetic from its origin in the Black Power movement's emphasis on the creation of visual icons and the Black Arts movement's celebration of urban vernacular culture.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Mand Hunting Tradition in African Fiction written by Amadou Ouédraogo and published by Sans Souci Books. This book was released on 2017 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its medieval origins to the present, Mandé culture in West Africa is known for its highly intriguing art and tradition of hunting; undeniably one of its most conspicuous distinctive features. Totally entrenched in myth, legend and history; firmly grounded in the supernatural, the divine and the abstruse, hunting is altogether a cult, a ritual gesture, a token of allegiance to divine forces. Considered to be a dauntless intrusion of man into the realm of metaphysics and the “unknown”, the hunting vocation transcends by far the confines of human and tangible spheres. This study examines various articulations of the hunting art and tradition as they are conveyed in numerous African literary and cinematographic works. It elucidates the mythical and supernatural magnitude of the hunting activity by showing how it is presided over by immutable deities and tutelary figures. Held to be endowed with infrangible supernatural and esoteric proportions, hunting is deemed to be a reflection of Mandé people’s worldview, a vibrant expression of how they perceive and articulate their existence as part of, and in relation to the world. From all perspectives, traditional hunting in Mandé society is viewed as a noble, dignified and revered activity; sustained by a vehement sense of brotherhood, esprit de corps, faithful loyalty, compassion, munificence. It encompasses a set of principles and values enjoined by transcendent forces, in illo tempore, and meant to serve as timeless paradigmatic ideals to be preserved and handed down along generations. By persistently echoing the magnificence of the hunting art and tradition, African artists place the vocation at the heart of contemporary Africans’ yearning quest for origins, identity and plenitude.
Download or read book Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics written by Akinwumi Adesokan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-21 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.
