Download or read book Art and Museum in Africa written by Emery Effiboley and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2024-04-17 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of essays on the history of museums and art in Africa. The publication addresses the decolonization of African museums before analysing forms and encounter, a major aspect in the African artistic creation. The issue of repatriation is also addressed not only in the complexity of the phenomenon but also as resulting to conflicting sovereignties in Africa. The collection in the end discusses the role of art in nation building in the context of Benin Republic and how museum cooperation could enhance the museum sector. “Working without seeking any recognition and at times under very challenging circumstances Effiboley’s excellent efforts in trying to address the subject of African art, museums and restitution in a realistic and holistic way, grounded in tradition has often been thwarted by some who would have been expected to advocate for similar views. This collection of works of over 20 years demonstrates a commitment to a cause and speaks for itself not only in terms of recognizing the place of African heritage or African Art but the need to decolonize the mind, the practice and the narratives. Persistent on this journey of questioning the abnormal made normal, this body of works stands out as a true example of a cause sincerely in need of addressing.” Professor George Abungu, Emeritus Director General of the National Museums of Kenya “Effiboley gives us a pivotal work at a vital moment when African voices will define the future of museums in Africa. His voice of deep scholarly experience guides us how to change the ways we think about art, museums and culture in Africa.” Michael Rowlands, Emeritus Professor, Department of Anthropology, University College London.
Download or read book Authentically African written by Sarah Van Beurden and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaire (IMNZ) in the Congo have defined and marketed Congolese art and culture. In Authentically African, Sarah Van Beurden traces the relationship between the possession, definition, and display of art and the construction of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy from the late colonial until the postcolonial era. Her study of the interconnected histories of these two institutions is the first history of an art museum in Africa, and the only work of its kind in English. Drawing on Flemish-language sources other scholars have been unable to access, Van Beurden illuminates the politics of museum collections, showing how the IMNZ became a showpiece in Mobutu’s effort to revive “authentic” African culture. She reconstructs debates between Belgian and Congolese museum professionals, revealing how the dynamics of decolonization played out in the fields of the museum and international heritage conservation. Finally, she casts light on the art market, showing how the traveling displays put on by the IMNZ helped intensify collectors’ interest and generate an international market for Congolese art. The book contributes to the fields of history, art history, museum studies, and anthropology and challenges existing narratives of Congo’s decolonization. It tells a new history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities.
Download or read book African Art and Artefacts in European Collections written by Ezio Bassani and published by British Museum Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This life work of Ezio Bassani provides a unique record of over 800 artefacts in more than 100 early (pre-19th century) African collections in Europe. Extensively illustrated, the catalogue gives full descriptions of each artefact and the details of every collection, with present location and provenance provided where known. Documentation relating to the collections is given in its original language with a translation and commentary in English and there are full indexes, including categories of artefact by material used. Fully cross-referenced, it can be used in both print and electronic formats for maximum accessibility across a wide range of research interests.
Download or read book Out of the Dark Night written by Achille Mbembe and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Achille Mbembe is one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out of the Dark Night, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity, and planetarity. In a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about the world. Mbembe criticizes the blinders of European intellectuals, analyzing France’s failure to heed postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of both destruction and the birth of new societies. Out of the Dark Night reconstructs critical theory’s historical and philosophical framework for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our sense of the futures made possible by decolonization.
Download or read book Design made in Africa written by and published by Jean-Michel Place. This book was released on 2004 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book and the exhibition it accompanies are the result of an approach, initiated almost two years ago by the Association Française d'Action Artistique (AFAA), aimed at promoting one of the aspects of contemporary creation by Africa which had so far been insufficiently taken into account." --Translation of Amazon.com summary.
Download or read book The Museum of Other People written by Adam Kuper and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists, an important and timely work of cultural history that looks at the origins and much debated future of anthropology museums “A provocative look at questions of ethnography, ownership and restitution . . . the argument [Kuper] makes in The Museum of Other People is important precisely because just about no one else is making it. He asks the questions that others are too shy to pose. . . . Required reading.” –Financial Times (UK) In this deeply researched, immersive history, Adam Kuper tells the story of how foreign and prehistoric peoples and cultures were represented in Western museums of anthropology. Originally created as colonial enterprises, their halls were populated by displays of plundered art, artifacts, dioramas, bones, and relics. Kuper reveals the politics and struggles of trying to build these museums in Germany, France, and England in the mid-19th century, and the dramatic encounters between the very colorful and eccentric collectors, curators, political figures, and high members of the church who founded them. He also details the creation of contemporary museums and exhibitions, including the Smithsonian, the Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, and the famous 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago which was inspired by the Paris World Fair of 1889. Despite the widespread popularity and cultural importance of these institutions, there also lies a murky legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and scientific racism in their creation. Kuper tackles difficult questions of repatriation and justice, and how best to ensure that the future of these museums is an ethical, appreciative one that promotes learning and cultural exchange. A stunning, unique, accessible work based on a lifetime of research, The Museum of Other People reckons with the painfully fraught history of museums of natural history, and how curators, anthropologists, and museumgoers alike can move forward alongside these time-honored institutions.
Download or read book African Forms written by Marc Ginzberg and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Traditional African forms were noticed, described, and brought back to Europe as early as the statues and masks, but none of the books on the subject covers the broad geographic and stylistic range adequately or presents these beautiful objects appropriately." "This volume reaches into practically all of Africa and thus covers an area perhaps 50% greater than that of most books. Similarly, it is unique in treating a broad variety of articles: household objects and weapons, jewelry and textiles, musical instruments and devotional items. The coverage is extensive, but the purpose is not to be encyclopedic; rather it is to present a wide assortment of top-quality utilitarian objects, beautifully photographed, and to give sufficient background information, carefully researched but in a lively, readable format, to enhance the enjoyment of this material as art."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Gobero written by Elena A. A. Garcea and published by Africa Magna Verlag. This book was released on 2013 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sahara-Sahel borderland occupies a critical geographical position due to its recurrent latitudinal shifts, continually having a strong impact on humans, animals and plants. Gobero is located at the southern limits of the present Sahara, in Niger. The archaeological record at this site encompasses the re-occupation of the Sahara ca 10,000 years ago until approximately 2000 years ago. During this long period, Gobero witnessed significant fluctuations in climate and water resource availability that resulted in cycles of human occupation, abandonment and re-occupation around a natural basin occupied by a palaeolake, until desertification became an irreversible process and the area turned into a no-return frontier for its occupants. This book presents the archaeological, anthropological and environmental data collected during the 2005 and 2006 field seasons at Gobero. Various factors highlight the extraordinary significance of this site. Thanks to its geographical position, straddling the ancient shifting border(s) of the Sahara and the Sahel, the Gobero's archaeological record reveals critical population movements in this part of Africa and different economic and technological strategies its inhabitants employed to adapt to changing environmental conditions. The presence of both settlement and burial features at Gobero gives a comprehensive view of the cultural, social, economic and funerary traditions of the people who lived and died at this site during almost the entire Holocene. The results from these archaeological investigations provide a term of reference for future research and interpretations of past human occupations in the Sahara, as well as North and West Africa.
Download or read book African Art in Transit written by Christopher B. Steiner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-27 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Art in Transit is an absorbing account of the commodification and circulation of African art objects in the international art market. Christopher Steiner's analysis of the role of the African middleman in linking those who produce and supply works of art in Africa with those who buy and collect so-called 'primitive' art in Europe and America is based on extensive field research among the art traders in Côte d'Ivoire. Steiner provides a lucid interpretation which reveals not only a complex economic network with its own internal logic and rules, but also an elaborate process of transcultural valuation and exchange. By focusing directly on the intermediaries in the African art trade, he unveils a critical new perspective on how symbolic codes and economic values are mediated in the context of shifting geographic and cultural domains. He questions conventional definitions of authenticity in African art by demonstrating how the categories 'authentic' and 'traditional' are continually redefined.
Download or read book Afrique terre ancestrale written by Pierre Amrouche and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Volume 9 Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art written by Guttorm Fløistad and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-03-16 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book continues the series Contemporary Philosophy (International Institute of Philosophy), which surveys significant trends in contemporary philosophy. The new volume on Aesthetics, comprising nineteen surveys, shows the variety of approaches to Aesthetics in various cultures. The close connection between aesthetics and religion and between aesthetics and ethics is emphasized in several contributions.
Download or read book The Black Art Renaissance written by Joshua I. Cohen and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Metropolitan Fetish written by John Warne Monroe and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1880s to 1940, French colonial officials, businessmen and soldiers, returning from overseas postings, brought home wooden masks and figures from Africa. This imperial and cultural power-play is the jumping-off point for a story that travels from sub-Saharan Africa to Parisian art galleries; from the pages of fashion magazines, through the doors of the Louvre, to world fairs and international auction rooms; into the apartments of avant-garde critics and poets; to the streets of Harlem, and then full-circle back to colonial museums and schools in Dakar, Bamako, and Abidjan. John Warne Monroe guides us on this journey, one that goes far beyond the world of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, to show how the Modernist avant-garde and the European colonial project influenced each other in profound and unexpected ways. Metropolitan Fetish reveals the complex trajectory of African material culture in the West and provides a map of that passage, tracing the interaction of cultural and imperial power. A broad and far-reaching history of the French reception of African art, it brings to life an era in which the aesthetic category of "primitive art" was invented.
Download or read book Brutalism written by Achille Mbembe and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-24 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic. Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.
Download or read book What Is African Art written by Peter Probst and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the evolving field of African art. This book examines the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. It starts with a simple question: What do we mean when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Peter Probst identifies “African art” as a conceptual vessel that manifests wider societal transformations. What Is African Art? covers three key stages in the field’s history. Starting with the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the book first discusses the colonial formation of the field by focusing on the role of museums, collectors, and photography in disseminating visual cultures as relations of power. It then explores the remaking of the field at the dawn of African independence with the shift toward contemporary art and the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it examines the post- and decolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of representation, repair, and restitution.
Download or read book De Palerme Penang written by François Ruegg and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2010 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The articles collected here trace the intellectual journey of Christian Giordano, head of the Social Anthropology Institute at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. The reader will be transported to places Giordano has explored, loved, or merely visited, from Sicily to Malaysia, from Switzerland to Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Each article illustrates a facet of his work. The journey starts with biographical sketches and continues through different fields of Political Anthropology (Citizenship, Multiculturalism, Ethnicity, Rural Studies, Trust, Postcolonial Studies, Honour). It ends with reflections on the use and abuse of Anthropology.
