AFRICAN ARTS最新文献

{"title":"After All Is Said and Done: On Fluid Solidarity and Survival","authors":"N. Makhubu","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00663","url":null,"abstract":"There is no doubt, given seemingly permanent social, environmental, and economic crises, that transnational solidarity is fundamental in the renewal and survival of art institutions. In the last couple of years, there have been several online discursive platforms—panels, symposia, colloquia—featuring artists, cultural critics, and academics to reflect on the consequences of global disasters such as the coronavirus pandemic on the livelihood of art practitioners and the sustainability of organizations and institutions based in the African continent, most of which are dependent on and competing for shrinking funding resources. In response to the precarity and desolation precipitated by crisis, there is revived urgency in solidarity through the ethics of care, healing, self-preservation, and other contingent strategies of survival. Alternatives such as online exhibitions, interventions, and forums seem to offer new prospects for how modes of practice and working relations across the African continent can be refashioned and large-scale transnational support networks can be formulated. Most significant is that a structurally altered art ecosystem modelled on generosity and collective empathy seems palpable. It is now possible, for example, to imagine the repositioning of institutions like museums as “spaces of care” and habituate therapeutic activities—sometimes ritualized and mysticized—in various initiatives, programs, events, and discursive platforms. The focus on recuperation and repair from psychosocial woundedness, ecocide, social injustice, and compounded trauma has enlivened the quest for slowing down to be in communion and to feel with others. Yet with the translocation of the hard work in affective labor from live to virtual spaces, there is also dilution of otherwise pivotal concepts and strategies demanded by solidarity. In very general terms, affective labor—already deeply entrenched in creative practice—is catalyzed and made visible. The disorienting simulation of social contact online, steamrolled by commercial traffic, trivializes the practice of “care,” leaving class polarization intact and impeding meaningful solidarity. One is reminded of the questions that the artist Naadira Patel so pointedly asks in the text included in her art work the future of work (2020): “how do we imagine a sustainable, more generous, more caring, more kind, unbiased, and more calm world of work?” and then “how radical is your self-care if you don’t post about it? [...] try the self-care app of the year? [...] how high is your social justice barometer?” Solidarity—civic, social, cultural, or political—among institutions, organizations, and art practitioners in the African continent is vital but it is predicated on volatile, uneven, constrained, and neocolonially bound societies. Take, for example, one of the rich historical intellectual legacies of cultural solidarity on the African continent: Pan-Africanism. Although bold in its ideals, Pan-Africanism is a","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48726295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Africa's First Woman Press Photographer”: Mabel Cetu's Photographs in Zonk!","authors":"Marie Meyerding","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00669","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts AUTUMN 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 3 For years, researchers have been searching for photographs made by Mabel Cetu, who “was said to be the first Black South African woman photojournalist” (Siopis 2006: 10). Cetu was a Black woman who worked as a nurse for more than twenty-five years before she was trained as a photographer in 1956, eight years after the National Party took over South Africa’s government and introduced apartheid—a system of institutionalized racial discrimination against people of color. She received her training at the monthly publication Zonk! African People’s Pictorial, which was launched in 1949 as the country’s first widely circulated magazine directed at a Black readership (Maingard 2020: 153). Perhaps because many magazines published their images uncredited at the time, it seems as if none of her images have been found, meaning that they have never been discussed in scholarly research.1 Critically examining Cetu’s photographs printed in Zonk! in 1956 and 1957 and analyzing in how far she might have been able to subvert common representations of gender, I want to reveal gendered power structures determining the field of photography in 1950s South Africa. The search for Cetu’s photographs can be understood as part of recent scholarly interest in female South African photographers working prior to 1994 (Newbury, Rizzo, and Thomas 2021; du Toit 2005; Corrigall 2018; Danilowitz 2005; Thomas 2018). It is interesting that, although most of these photographers, including Cetu, would probably not have considered their photographs as art, nearly all researchers concentrating on their works are art historians. While photographs had been displayed in a fine art context in South Africa from 1858 (Bull and Denfield 1970: 63), the 1950s photographs of Cetu and her contemporaries were only rediscovered in the late 1980s, when they started to circulate “as aestheticised images ... [ascending from the] grainy pictures in magazines” (du Toit and Gordon 2016: 158). The recent interest in these women’s photography can also be related to the efforts made in the field of humanities to broaden the canon and include more works by those groups that have historically been marginalized. For instance, the former director of the South African National Gallery, Marilyn Martin, claims that in South Africa’s history of photography, Black women form “the most telling absences” (2001: 51). During the 1950s, when Cetu began working as a photographer, the field of photography in South Africa was largely dominated by men and White people. The artist Penny Siopis takes the example of the photographs of the notorious 1956 Women’s March to point to the absence of women photographers covering the event (2006: 10). She claims that “Black women did not see photography as a viable profession. Those few chances to build a photographic career seemed limited to men, as witnessed in the photojournalism of Drum magazine of the fifties” (2006: 10). The lack of represe","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49641781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“If a Woman Knows Cult Secret, She Must Never Tell”: Ritual Consecration, Secrecy, and Female Power in Egungun Pageantry Among the Yoruba","authors":"Bolaji Campbell","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00667","url":null,"abstract":"King Sunny Ade, the Juju musician who popularized the Yorúbà folk song quoted here, created the lyrics to serve as a caustic warning to his rivals, critics, and detractors that any attempt to undermine his creative abilities will be met with strong opposition likened to an outright annihilation—the stock in trade of the Oro institution.2 When I began my research into the intriguing tradition of Egungun, I quickly learnt a counterhegemonic negation of the song lyrics: “If a woman knows cult secret, she must never tell.”3 That statement is deliberately adopted here, as it recognizes the limitations placed on women in a cultural tradition that was partly invented by them, in spite of their knowledge and leadership position within the cult of Egungun. While reinforcing this societal norm on the restriction and access to esoteric knowledge, Barber (1981: 739) noted that “The important thing is not women’s actual ignorance, but the maintenance of a respectful silence about their knowledge. It is a matter of keeping up appearances for the sake of ancestral dignity.” In spite of the overwhelming presence and visibility of women in every aspect of the public procession and organization of Egungun, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the role and position that women occupy in the annual celebrations of Egungun. In a bid to address this anomaly, this essay focuses on the unique position of women in the installation and consecration rituals of Egungun, specifically addressing their roles as guides, singers, and dancers in the public performances of Egungun. I will also examine the position of women as custodians of the ethical codes and histories of Egungun and highlight the multifaceted roles women perform in the staging and reenactment of this ancient tradition. Our goal here is to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between male and female counterparts in their roles to establish the cultural phenomenon that is now known as Egungun. It follows, therefore, that the position of women cannot be ignored or marginalized. On the contrary, we seek to remind the readers of the preeminent position of women as active members within most of the major religious organizations and especially the Yoruba Egungun. Indeed, Ifa cautions that, to ignore the position of women is to invite disaster, disorderliness and strife in every aspect of human endeavors. Mediated more by the principle of inclusiveness and collaboration, the Yorúbà religious sphere is neither hierarchically structured nor entirely fragmented along gender divides; rather, it is organized on the basis of equality, parity, and mutual respect. That ethos of inclusiveness, best articulated in the aphorism omode gbon, agba gbon la fi da’le Ife (“the wisdom and perception of both the youth and the elders were the organizing principle in the establishment of Ife”), fosters the spirit of mutual respect and recognition in Yorúbà philosophical thought and value system. Using oral literature as the basi","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41905489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's Gardiennes d'images","authors":"Katarzyna Falęcka","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00668","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts AUTUMN 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 3 In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art of Algiers (Musée Public National d’Art Moderne et Contemporain d’Alger; MAMA) staged a group exhibition that featured photography from the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62).1 Les Photographes de Guerre, Les Djounoud du noir et blanc (May 14–August 30, 2013) featured blown-up black-and-white photographs on three floors of the museum, a repurposed department store from the early twentieth century in the former European quarter of Algiers. Images taken by professional and amateur Algerian photographers were placed alongside those by international and French image makers, revealing the broader networks of visual production during the war (see Djehiche and Djilali 2013). Fought between the National Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale; FLN) and the French colonial state, the Algerian War of Independence holds a prolific place within histories of decolonization due to its excessive violence and impact on other liberation movements on the continent. For a long time, however, it was thought to have been pictured exclusively through French visual production, which often served to support or produce colonial propaganda (see Stora 2005: 199–220).2 However, by unearthing the work of Algerian photographers and mapping the extensive infrastructure of photographic studios that supported FLN politics across the region, the exhibition countered assumptions of an alleged absence of visual representation produced from “within” the revolution. Almost a decade before, Photographier la guerre d’Algérie, an exhibition organized by Laurent Gervereau and Benjamin Stora at the Hôtel de Sully in Paris (January 23–April 18, 2004) had offered a far more Francocentric view of the war’s photographic legacy. Gervereau and Stora’s show featured the work of official French military photographers, including René Bail and Marc Flament, photojournalists Marc Riboud and Raymond Depardon, as well as international reporters including Dickey Chapelle and Kryn Taconis. The exhibition featured only a handful of images taken by Algerian photographers, all of whom were relegated to anonymity. An “Algerian point of view” in photography, the exhibition’s organizers lamented, was rare during the war (Gervereau and Stora 2004: 7–9). Even in instances when the revolution succeeded in producing visual representation for its own political purposes, they added, it was quickly buried under the flood of pictures produced by French propaganda and published, for instance, in the military magazine Le Bled. Yet given the wealth of images shown at MAMA in 2013, these claims need to be reassessed. While Stora and Gervereau rightly noted that unequal financial resources on the French and Algerian sides informed the war’s visual production, they obscured the revolution’s varied photographic cultures by relegating the Algerian bodies of work to the margins of the show. The exhibition organized a decade later in Algier","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46460558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between African Sculpture and Black Diasporic Experiences: Hugh Hayden and Simone Leigh","authors":"G. Nugent","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00670","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts AUTUMN 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 3 Historical works of African sculpture have become increasingly entangled with the global Black Lives Matter movement. A popular sign that was carried by protestors in the United Kingdom after the police killing of the unarmed African American man George Floyd in May 2020 read: “Don’t like looting? You will hate the British Museum.” Meanwhile, a statement from the British Museum deploring Floyd’s death and expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement sparked thousands of tweets accusing the institution of hypocrisy and insensitivity. In June 2020, Paris Black Lives Matter demonstrators tried to seize artifacts at the Musée du Quai Branly. The material lives of African sculptural objects are today intimately linked with Black diasporic experiences, and these connections are made explicit in the work of contemporary American artists Hugh Hayden (b. 1983) and Simone Leigh (b. 1967). Both Hayden and Leigh draw on African sculptural traditions, largely from West and Central Africa, and sometimes even incorporate the objects themselves in their own sculptures. Their work creates a parallel between the colonial pillaging and displacement of African sculpture to Europe and North America and the forced diaspora of slavery and its afterlives in the United States. In his practice, Hayden utilizes wood as his primary medium, playing with its multilayered histories—African sculpture offers one iteration of this material. His sculptures and installations reflect on the history of social politics in the United States and the contribution of enslaved Africans to American culture and cuisine. Alternatively, Leigh’s practice, which spans sculpture, performance, film, and activist-based work, is concerned with the marginalization of Black women and their exclusion from the archive or history. She uses her work to reframe the experiences of Black women as central to society. Hayden and Leigh bring these respective concerns to bear on the histories of African sculpture. The adoption of African sculpture by Hayden and Leigh occurs against a background of twentieth-century engagements with these traditions by European and African American artists and theorists. The Paris avant-garde’s “discovery” of African sculpture, known then as art nègre, or “Black art,” effected the constitution of AfroAmerican modernism. The African American philosopher and art critic Alain LeRoy Locke (1895–1954), an influential figure of the Harlem Renaissance who travelled frequently to Paris, encouraged African American artists to adopt African sculptural traditions as a way to “reconnect” with an ancestral Africa in the creation of a Black art. However, African sculpture signifies differently today than it did at this earlier moment in time. There has been a turn toward the material lives of these objects and the contexts of violence through which they were acquired by Western institutions. The global Black Lives Matter movement has rene","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45094304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(In)visibility and African Fashion in UK Museums","authors":"N. Stylianou","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00664","url":null,"abstract":"| 7 it to account for contradictions and internal conflicts. Care, as an act of solidarity, can be redemptive, but it is not an end in itself. Care exists in the messy, convoluted, and volatile relationships forged within political communities. As such, one can talk of spiritual repatriation, but it is weakened and ineffectual in the absence of material repatriation. This reopens many questions about the ways in which care is fashioned in cultural institutions marred by a history of violence.","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41402485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Michael Armitage","authors":"Leonie Chima Emeka, Stefan Eisenhofer","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00658","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43496244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art","authors":"Matthew Francis Rarey","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00659","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45562127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nkwọ Onunu Cultural Heritage in Nsukka Igbo, Nigeria: A Festival in Honor of a Mother Goddess","authors":"Martins N. Okoro","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00656","url":null,"abstract":"the weird voice of the nocturnal agent and the fearful sound that ac-company it lend to the darkness of the night a sure feeling of spirit presence. It parades the close peripheries of people’s homes, singing lampoons, calling derogatory names and exposing the deeds of crim- inals within the community, warning them to repent before nemesis overtakes them from the ancestral realm (2013: 20).","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48700475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ceremonial Bill-Hooks from Sierra Leone","authors":"W. Hart","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00653","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts SUMMER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 2 In an article in African Arts in summer 1975 the Italian scholar V.I. Grottanelli announced the discovery in Rome of a hitherto unrecorded late fifteenth/early sixteenth century ivory salt-cellar from Sierra Leone. It was no ordinary run-of-the-mill work, but what he justifiably described as a masterpiece of carving, of exceptional size and decorative detail, not least in the carving of the lid, which showed a large squatting male figure, naked except for a pair of shorts, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a round shield on its left arm, and its right arm raised gripping the handle of a hatchet as if to strike (Fig. 1). In front of the figure was a smaller figure, its head bowed as if to receive the blow, and half-a-dozen decapitated heads. The ensemble understandably was interpreted by Grottanelli, and by others subsequently, as a scene of actual or symbolic execution. The identity of the large figure has been a matter of speculation. Most have supposed it to represent an African warrior leader or chief triumphing over his enemies. The wearing of the shorts with their codpiece and the appearance of hair drawn back in a pigtail at the nape of the neck have inclined others to think that the figure may be meant to be European (Curnow 1983: 133), although it is hard to imagine the circumstances in which a European would be shown in the pose of an executioner or warrior-chief. However what concerns us in the present instance is the weapon which the main figure holds aloft. Grottanelli explained that the right arm and hand gripping the hatchet were restorations modelled on the caryatid figures around the base of the salt-cellar, but that the restorers had no model for the weapon itself. It was clearly a chopping instrument of some kind, and there were published illustrations of generic African axes that might have provided a more plausible original of the kind of weapon the restorers were looking for, but the solution they settled on, a European-style hatchet, looks inauthentic even to the eye of a casual and nonspecialist observer. It is the aim of the present research note to suggest what kind of weapon the executioner-figure might originally have held and to draw attention to a group of similar weapons which have not hitherto been described in the literature about Sierra Leone. In 1985, while researching brass masks of chiefship among the Temne people of central Sierra Leone, I photographed an unusual weapon with a brass-bound handle and broad iron blade (Fig. 2). It was part of the paraphernalia of the chief ’s brass-masked ritual messenger in Kolifa chiefdom, Tonkolili district. The blade was pierced through in a number of places: two parallel rows of six and seven small rectangular vents through the broadest span of the blade and above them four larger vents around a central hole or hub forming a rough cross or wheel motif. In addition there were a number of pinholes around the edges of the blade and a curiou","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45181454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}