Download or read book The Artfulness of Death in Africa written by John Mack and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If weddings are the most lavish events in many parts of the world, in Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, it is funerals. Funeral celebrations can be flamboyant occasions, particularly those honoring prominent people. Artworks of many kinds are created to commemorate the dead from mortuary sculptures and extravagant coffins to elaborate headstones, memorials, monuments, and cenotaphs. This book is a unique survey of the artful nature of funerals in Africa. Drawing on a wide range of historical, anthropological, archaeological, art historical, and literary sources, John Mack charts the full range of African funereal art, highlighting examples from across the continent and from ancient times to today. Featuring abundant illustrations--some of which have never been published before--The Artfulness of Death in Africa is essential reading for those interested in African art, culture, society, and history.
Download or read book Death Ritual and Art in Africa written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Art and Death in a Senufo Village written by Anita J. Glaze and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In My Time of Dying written by John Parker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at how mortuary cultures and issues of death and the dead in Africa have developed over four centuries In My Time of Dying is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now present-day Ghana, John Parker explores mortuary cultures and the relationship between the living and the dead over a four-hundred-year period spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Parker considers many questions from the African historical perspective, including why people die and where they go after death, how the dead are buried and mourned to ensure they continue to work for the benefit of the living, and how perceptions and experiences of death and the ends of life have changed over time. From exuberant funeral celebrations encountered by seventeenth-century observers to the brilliantly conceived designer coffins of the late twentieth century, Parker shows that the peoples of Ghana have developed one of the world’s most vibrant cultures of death. He explores the unfolding background of that culture through a diverse range of issues, such as the symbolic power of mortal remains and the dominion of hallowed ancestors, as well as the problem of bad deaths, vile bodies, and vengeful ghosts. Parker reconstructs a vast timeline of death and the dead, from the era of the slave trade to the coming of Christianity and colonial rule to the rise of the modern postcolonial nation. With an array of written and oral sources, In My Time of Dying richly adds to an understanding of how the dead continue to weigh on the shoulders of the living.
Download or read book Funerals in Africa written by Michael Jindra and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Africa, funerals and events remembering the dead have become larger and even more numerous over the years. Whereas in the West death is normally a private and family affair, in Africa funerals are often the central life cycle event, unparalleled in cost and importance, for which families harness vast amounts of resources to host lavish events for multitudes of people with ramifications well beyond the event. Though officials may try to regulate them, the popularity of these events often makes such efforts fruitless, and the elites themselves spend tremendously on funerals. This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health. "Funerals in Africa is an excellent volume. Based on outstanding original research the collection shows how social and economic changes in Africa are illuminated through the analysis of burials, mortuary rites, mourning and remembrance. In this collection encounters with world religions emerge as the key theme. Death and burial are therefore employed to illuminate classic debates on conversion, reformism and localglobal religious tensions. Highly recommended for anthropologists and historians and a major contribution to African studies." - David Pratten, Director, African Studies Centre, Oxford University
Download or read book The Face of Sunset written by Nicholas Prior and published by . This book was released on 2012-02-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Death and the Creative Instinct written by Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at mortuary activities and some creative acts associated with them in selected communities in Africa and the diaspora. Besides death narratives and mortuary rites which are vital in maintaining the centralizing myths of communities and groups, parts of the anthology problematize the tensions and conflicts that arise in the mill of postcolonialism and how they are reflected in the politics of dying, death and after-death in some African and diasporan communities. Beyond these concerns, death is seen here as a renegotiation of reality and, therefore, an agency of art and theatre, since art is essentially a re-representation of reality, the same concern that is at the heart of mortuary acts. Perhaps, the strength of the book is in the authors' ability to ask new questions about death and its social symbolism and to provide new insights through critical and groundbreaking perspectives.
Download or read book Matters of Life and Death written by Utah Museum of Fine Arts and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 8 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Art of Small Things written by John Mack and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly illustrated book celebrates the art of the miniature, but also looks beyond it at the many aspects of "small worlds"--in particular, their capacity to evoke responses that far exceed their physical dimensions. Mack explores the talismanic, religious, or magical properties with which miniatures are often imbued. Considering a wide range of objects, he examines the use of the miniature form in various cultural contexts.
Download or read book The Art Instinct written by Denis Dutton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dinka have a connoisseur's appreciation of the patterns and colours of the markings on their cattle. The Japanese tea ceremony is regarded as a performance art. Some cultures produce carving but no drawing; others specialize in poetry. Yet despite the rich variety of artistic expression to be found across many cultures, we all share a deep sense of aesthetic pleasure. The need to create art of some form is found in every human society.In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton explores the idea that this need has an evolutionary basis: how the feelings that we all share when we see a wonderful landscape or a beautiful sunset evolved as a useful adaptation in our hunter-gather ancestors, and have been passed on to us today, manifest in our artistic natures. Why do people indulge in displaying their artistic skills? How can we understand artistic genius? Why do we value art, and what is it for? These questions have long been asked by scholars in the humanities and in literature, but this is the first book to consider the biological basis of this deep human need.This sparking and intelligent book looks at these deep and fundamental questions, and combines the science of evolutionary psychology with aesthetics, to shed new light on longstanding questions about the nature of art.
Download or read book Africa Wo Man Palava written by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-04-15 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ogunyemi uses the novels to trace a Nigerian women's literary tradition that reflects an ideology centered on children and community. Of prime importance is the paradoxical Mammywata figure, the independent, childless mother, who serves as a basis for the postcolonial woman in the novels and in society at large. Ogunyemi tracks this figure through many permutations, from matriarch to writer, her multiple personalities reflecting competing loyalties. This sustained critical study counters prevailing "masculinist" theories of black literature in a powerful narrative of the Nigerian world.
Download or read book Sexuality and death written by Klaus Schneider and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Art and Death in a Senufo Village written by Anita J. Glaze and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel written by Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel, Chigbo Anyaduba examines fictional responses to mass atrocities occurring in postcolonial Africa. Through a comparative reading of novels responding to the genocides of the Igbo in Nigeria (1966-1970) and the Tutsi in Rwanda (1990-1994), the book underscores the ways that literary encounters with genocides in Africa's postcolonies have attempted to reimagine the conditions giving rise to exterminatory forms of mass violence. The book concretizes and troubles one of the apparent truisms of genocide studies, especially in the context of imaginative literature: that the reality of genocide more often than not resists meaningfulness. Particularly given the centrality of this truism to artistic responses to the Holocaust and to genocides more generally, Anyaduba tracks the astonishing range of meanings drawn by writers at a series of (temporal, spatial, historical, cultural and other) removes from the realities of genocide in Africa's postcolonies, a set of meanings that are often highly-specific and irreducible to maxims or foundational cases. The book shows that in the artistic projects to construct meanings against genocide's nihilism writers of African genocides deploy tropes that while significantly oriented to African concerns are equally shaped by the representational conventions and practices associated with the legacies of the Holocaust.
Download or read book Dying Death and the Politics of After Death in Africa written by Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-23 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the outcome of a major conference initiated and organized at University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 2013 by Society for Research and Promotion of Igbo Culture, The Art Republic, and Death Studies Association of Nigeria, in association with the School of General Studies, University of Nigeria Nsukka and with the support of Institute Française de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA), Ibadan. The selected essays from the conference published in this anthology dwell on how death and culture shape each other in some Nigerian communities. The essays cover issues in thanatology, dying, death, and the politics of the otherworld. Combining interests in mortuary acts and arts, the book images death as an agent for symbolic actions, extra-ordinary creative acts and the access road to ancestrality.
Download or read book Art of Death written by Nigel Llewellyn and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did our ancestors die? Whereas in our own day the subject of death is usually avoided, in pre-Industrial England the rituals and processes of death were present and immediate. People not only surrounded themselves with memento mori, they also sought to keep alive memories of those who had gone before. This continual confrontation with death was enhanced by a rich culture of visual artifacts. In The Art of Death, Nigel Llewellyn explores the meanings behind an astonishing range of these artifacts, and describes the attitudes and practices which lay behind their production and use. Illustrated and explained in this book are an array of little-known objects and images such as death's head spoons, jewels and swords, mourning-rings and fans, wax effigies, church monuments, Dance of Death prints, funeral invitations and ephemera, as well as works by well-known artists, including Holbein, Hogarth and Blake.
Download or read book ABCDuane written by Duane Michals and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legendary photographer relates intimate themes of his life and art in a scrapbook memoir illustrated by his works—from portraits of Magritte to Warhol, to painted tintypes, and the revolutionary multiple-image sequences and handwritten texts for which he is best known—and by pieces from his personal art collection, now donated to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. Whether a portrait of Eugène Atget by Berenice Abbott, collages by Joseph Cornell, or drawings by David Hockney, the works of Michals’s artistic lodestars sit alongside his own haunting images—some never-before-published—and his mordantly funny, playful, humble, and heartbreaking observations on art, photography, and life—revealing the creative obsessions of a uniquely beloved artist. The images and texts by Duane Michals assembled here are, like the artist himself—impossible to categorize; perhaps there is no better way to organize them than alphabetically. Whether recalling encounters with many of the past century’s most illustrious artists (Balthus, Duchamp), celebrating literary heroes (Whitman, Joyce), addressing essential human concerns (Grief, Children’s Stories, Homosexuality, God), or revealing deeply personal snippets of life with a partner suffering from dementia (Fred Said)—ABCDuane is a creative autobiography and the perfect primer for Michals’s vastly influential body of work—both for those who have loved it for the past half-century, and those being delighted by it for the first time.
