Download or read book Development Modernism and Modernity in Africa written by Augustine Agwuele and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology examines the "unfinished project of modernity" with respect to the unrealized potential for economic, social, and political development in Africa. It also shows how, facing the consequences of modernism, Africans in and out of the continent are responding to these unfinished projects drawing on (a) the customary, (b) the novelty of modernity, and (c) positive aspects of modernism, for the organization of their societies and the enrichment of their lives even as they contend with the negative aspects of modernity and modernism.
Download or read book Development as Modernity Modernity as Development written by Lwazi Siyabonga Lushaba and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa written by Olúfémi Táíwò and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-11 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the idea that Africa was already becoming modern before being derailed by colonialism, the author insists that Africa can get back on track and advocates a renewed engagement with modernity. Tools toward shaping a positive future for Africa are immigration, capitalism, democracy, and globalization.
Download or read book Development as Modernity Modernity as Development written by Lwazi Lushaba and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the impact of the Western idea of 'modernity' on development and underdevelopment in Africa. It traces the genealogy of the Western idea of modernity from European Enlightenment concepts of the universal nature of human history and development, and shows how this idea was used to justify the Western exploitation and oppression of Africa. It argues that contemporary development, theory and practice is a continuation of the Enlightenment project and that Africa can only achieve real development by rejecting Western modernity and inventing its own forms of modernity. The book is divided into four sections. The first section provides an outline of the theory of modernity in the Enlightenment project. In the second section, an attempt is made to trace the genealogy of the idea of development as modernity and how the African development process gets entangled with it. Here, its evolution is mapped through three periods: early modernity, capitalist modernity and late modernity. Zeroing in on the current era of late or hypermodernity, the book contests the idea that there is something new in globalisation and its neo-liberal development paradigm. The third section turns to the complex but pertinent question of how, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Africa can transcend the impasse of modernity. The fourth and final section sums up the argument and points the way forward.
Download or read book African Modernism written by Manuel Herz and published by . This book was released on 2022-10-10 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of the most comprehensive survey of modern architecture in Africa to date. When the first edition of African Modernism was published in 2015, it was received with international praise and has been sought after constantly ever since it went out of print in 2018. Marking Park Books' 10th anniversary, this landmark book becomes available again in a new edition. In the 1950s and 1960s, most African countries gained independence from their respective colonial power. Architecture became one of the principal means by which the newly formed countries expressed their national identity. African Modernism investigates the close relationship between architecture and nation-building in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. It features one hundred buildings with brief descriptive texts, images, site plans, and selected floor plans and sections. The vast majority of images were newly taken by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster for the book's first edition. Their photographs document the buildings in their present state. Each country is portrayed in an introductory text and a timeline of historic events. Further essays on postcolonial Africa and specific aspects and topics, also illustrated with images and documents, round out this outstanding volume.
Download or read book Modernization as Spectacle in Africa written by Peter J. Bloom and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans' perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization's deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa.
Download or read book The Muse of Modernity written by Philip G. Altbach and published by Africa Research and Publications. This book was released on 1996 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture plays a central role in the well-being of any society. This is especially true in postcolonial Africa, where rich traditional cultures collide with complex modern realities. Cultural development and the integration of culture into contemporary society is of primary importance not only for African prosperity, but also for the strengthening of civil society and of societal integration. This book focuses on the role of culture in the process of development as well as on strategies for ensuring the growth of indigenous African culture and the strengthening of cultural industries in the African context. The prospects for filmmaking, the performing arts, publishing, radio, museums, art, and traditional storytelling in Africa are creatively examined and explored by some of Africa's most creative cultural figures. This book combines thoughtful analysis of problems and a "state of the art" assessment of key cultural industries with practical suggestions for improvement and progress.
Download or read book Born in Blackness Africa Africans and the Making of the Modern World 1471 to the Second World War written by Howard W. French and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
Download or read book Ben Enwonwu written by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intellectual biography of a modern African artist and his immense contribution to twentieth-century art history. The history of world art has long neglected the work of modern African artists and their search for forms of modernist expression as either irrelevant to the discourse of modern art or as fundamentally subservient to the established narrative of Western European modernist practice. With this engaging new volume, Sylvester Ogbechie refutes this approach by examining the life and work of Ben Enwonwu (1917-94), a premier African modernist and pioneer whose career opened the way for the postcolonial proliferation and increased visibility of African art. In the decades between Enwonwu's birth and death, modernization produced new political structures and new forms of expression inAfrican cultures, inspiring important developments in modern African art. Within this context, Ogbechie evaluates important issues such as the role of Anglo-Nigerian colonial culture in the development of modern Nigerian art, andEnwonwu's involvement with international discourses of modernism in Europe, Africa, and the United States over a period of five decades. The author also interrogates Enwonwu's use of the radical politics of Negritude ideology to define modern African art against canonical interpretations of Euro-modernism; and the artist's visual and critical contributions to Pan Africanism, Nigerian nationalism, and postcolonial interpretations of African modernity. First and foremost an intellectual biography of Ben Enwonwu as a modern African artist, rather than an exhaustive critical exploration of the discourse of modernism in African art history or in modern art in general, Ben Enwonwu situates the artist historically and interprets his work in ways that surpass traditional discourse around the canon of modern art. Sylvester Ogbechie is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Download or read book Modern Architecture in Africa written by Antoni S. Folkers and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-22 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers unique insights into modern African architecture, influenced by modern European architecture, and at the same time a natural successor to existing site-specific and traditional architecture. It brings together the worlds of traditional site-specific architecture with the Modernist Project in Africa, which to date have only been considered in isolation. The book covers the four architectural disciplines: urban planning, building technology, building physics, and conservation. It includes an introduction with a historical outline and an analysis and comparison of a number of projects in various countries in Africa. On the basis of examples drawn from practice, the author documents and describes the hybrid architectural forms that have emerged from the confrontation and fusion with (pre)modern Western architecture and urban planning, and in so doing he also narrates the history of African architecture.
Download or read book Modernist Art in Ethiopia written by Elizabeth W. Giorgis and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia’s inimitable historical condition—its independence save for five years under Italian occupation—mean for its own modernist tradition? In Modernist Art in Ethiopia—the first book-length study of the topic—Elizabeth W. Giorgis recognizes that her home country’s supposed singularity, particularly as it pertains to its history from 1900 to the present, cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy. She uses the evolution of modernist art in Ethiopia to open up the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of it in a pan-African context. Giorgis explores the varied precedents of the country’s political and intellectual history to understand the ways in which the import and range of visual narratives were mediated across different moments, and to reveal the conditions that account for the extraordinary dynamism of the visual arts in Ethiopia. In locating its arguments at the intersection of visual culture and literary and performance studies, Modernist Art in Ethiopia details how innovations in visual art intersected with shifts in philosophical and ideological narratives of modernity. The result is profoundly innovative work—a bold intellectual, cultural, and political history of Ethiopia, with art as its centerpiece.
Download or read book Expectations of Modernity written by James Ferguson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline." Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives—the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies. Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.
Download or read book Black Modernity written by Ntongela Masilela and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the extraordinary events of the twentieth-century has been the emergence of Black modernities across the oceanic divide. These modernities took on particular historical forms as well as singular cultural configurations. Invariably, in their formation, realization, and actualization's, whether in Africa or in the African Diaspora, they have constituted themselves as historical discourse, usually across the Atlantic, about cultural identities, historical survivals, invention of traditions, and the formulation of new nationalities. At the center of these reciprocal exchanges and interactions in the Black world has been the "New Negro" modernity, which orchestrated the deeper strains of the cultural splay of Black historical avant-gardes globally. "New Negro" modernity and modernism found its perfect realization in the Harlem Renaissance (1924-30). Through one of its eminent figures, Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance had a profound impact on Black modernist cultural formations. In contrast to these complex diasporic and African exchanges, the effect of the influence and impact of United States modernity on the making of South African modernity resulted in something very spectacular and very unique: the transformation of a whole national culture, and the re-vitalization and re-invigoration of the national consciousness of Africans in South Africa. This anthology consists of contributions by African American scholars, writers and artists (Ishmael Reed, Joyce F. Kirk, John Higginson, Robert Hill, Gregory A. Pirio, Sonia Sanchez, Robin D.G. Kelley, Molefi Kete Asante, David H. Anthony, Houston A. Baker, Elliott Butler Evans, Sterling Plumpp, Stanley Crouch, Garth Fagan, GregTate, Cedric J. Robinson, Primus St. John, Dolores E. Cross, Gerald Horne and Sidney J. Lemelle); and African scholars, writers and artists (Mazisi Kunene, Ntongela Masilela, Bernard Makhosozwe Magubane, Nomazengele A. Mangaliso, Alosi J.M. Moloi, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Es'kia Mphalele and Cecil Abrahams) jointly examining the historical conjuncture between United States and South African modernity.
Download or read book Modern Architecture in Africa written by Antoni Folkers and published by Sun. This book was released on 2010 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summary: "Modern architecture in Africa" is one of the few Western studies of modern African architecture. The architect Antoni Folkers calls into question the moralistic, simplified Western Modernism that has become stranded in the African savannah. The critique of the one-sidedness of Western architecture is not only theoretical, but also assumes a practical form in the pluriform and multi-coloured architecture of Africa. After studying at the TU Delft, Antoni Folkers went to Africa in 1984 to become acquainted with the critique of the practice of Western Modernism. His "Modern architecture in Africa" shows both the clash and the blending of 'original' African architecture with Modernism. On the basis of his experiences, he sets the potential and limitations of Modernism in a cultural context and links them with the history and development of Africa.
Download or read book In Senghor s Shadow written by Elizabeth Harney and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA study of art in post-independence Senegal./div
Download or read book The Idea of Development in Africa written by Corrie Decker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging history of how the idea of development has shaped Africa's past and present encounters with the West.
Download or read book The Arts and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a Modernized Africa written by Runette Kruger and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection derives from a conference held in Pretoria, South Africa, and discusses issues of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) and the arts. It presents ideas about how to promote a deeper understanding of IKS within the arts, the development of IKS-arts research methodologies, and the protection and promotion of IKS in the arts. Knowledge, embedded in song, dance, folklore, design, architecture, theatre, and attire, and the visual arts can promote innovation and entrepreneurship, and it can improve communication. IKS, however, exists in a post-millennium, modernizing Africa. It is then the concept of post-Africanism that would induce one to think along the lines of a globalized, cosmopolitan and essentially modernized Africa. The book captures leading trends and ideas that could help to protect, promote, develop and affirm indigenous knowledge and systems, whilst also making room for ideas that do not necessarily oppose IKS, but encourage the modernization (not Westernization) of Africa.
