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On the Origins of the Récades of the Kings of Dahomey 论达荷美国王雷卡德的起源
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-05-11 DOI: 10.1162/afar_a_00706
Sandro Capo Chichi
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引用次数: 0
African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016) Sinethemba Ngubane装置作品中黑人双性儿童的非洲方言符号(2007-2016)
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-05-11 DOI: 10.1162/afar_a_00707
S. James
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引用次数: 0
Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach 《为了人民的艺术:芝加哥黑人的艺术家和社区,1965年至1975年》,丽贝卡·佐拉赫著
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1162/afar_r_00704
E. Gellman
{"title":"Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach","authors":"E. Gellman","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00704","url":null,"abstract":"How did African Americans in 1960s and 1970s Chicago create art rooted in working-class West Side and South Side communities? Art for the People’s Sake takes up this question by showing how these Black artists drew inspiration from neighborhood participation and protest politics. These were both controversial stances for artists to take, then as they would be now. These Black artists sought to engage and deepen antiracist activism against pernicious forms of urban renewal, deindustrialization, machine politics, and police repression. Like the artists she examines, Zorach analyzes art within its spatial historical contexts. This book thus brilliantly illuminates the complex dialectic among artists, activists, and other neighborhood residents as well as the cultural work and protest politics these interactions produced. Zorach details the emergence of the Black Arts movement in Chicago by referencing the previous generation’s artists while also explaining that this new generation reflected its own urban political and cultural moment. The artists of the Black Chicago Renaissance— especially Margaret Burroughs, who played a prominent role as an artist, educator, and museum movement leader—helped inspire and mentor this new generation, and spaces such as the South Side Community Arts Center and Abraham Lincoln Center became key incubators of intergenerational artistic collaboration. But this 1960s Black Arts scene was distinct. Zorach explains that its 1967 “founding moment” was also a “founding trauma” (p. 7). With the City of Chicago demolishing neighborhoods to make way for “renewal,” artists in Black Chicago neighborhoods claimed within Muridiyya’s collective memory, the author shows how the Sufis viewed it as the very embodiment of Islamic knowledge and a medium of mystically channeling/receiving Bamba’s blessing (baraka). Chapter 5 explores the screen adaptation of Senegalese stagecraft in relation to the local and global economic forces that led to such a development. The author argues that the same factors behind economic liberalization in the country also engendered the demise of Senghor’s traditional model of state-funded national cultural policy and created an overwhelming demand for a conjunctural social and moral critique that television was uniquely suited to provide. While Senghor’s presidency had provided large state funding to promote elitist cultural nationalism through national institutions such as Dakar’s polyvalent Daniel Sorano National Theater, the chapter shows that his successor, Abdou Diouf, made huge cuts to state spending on culture, due to global financial constraints. Such structural developments, coupled with the advent of television in Senegal in 1973 and video film technology later, precipitated the first screen adaptions of Senegalese popular theater. The author’s discussion of theater-to-screen adaptation, or “televised theater,” zooms in on the works of a pioneer troupe Daaray Kocc (The School of Kocc), whose actors","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":" ","pages":"95-96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46066371","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}
引用次数: 0
[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times curated by Paul Basu [回复]保罗·巴苏策展的《纠缠:非殖民时代的殖民收藏
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1162/afar_r_00699
Jean M. Borgatti
{"title":"[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times curated by Paul Basu","authors":"Jean M. Borgatti","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00699","url":null,"abstract":"[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times is an exhibition drawn from the Museum Affordances/[Re:]Entanglements project led by Paul Basu, formerly at SOAS University of London. The exhibition revisits the ethnographic archive assembled by the colonial anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. The title itself plays on the ideas of the entangling of Africa and the West during the colonial period, and with a continued, renewed, and expanded process of reengagement that includes community involvement and works by artists inspired by (and critical of) the collection and its original frame of reference. A central question raised by the exhibition is whether we can see beyond the violence of the colonial period, especially now, when the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to continued inequities in Western cultures as well as between world populations. The archive itself includes some 3,000 objects; at least 700 sound recordings (now digitized); a large body of photographic material consisting of 5,200 surviving glass negatives, 6,200 loose prints, and three eight-volume album sets; published work and fieldnotes; and botanical specimens. 1 [Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times, installation view of “The Making of a Colonial Anthropological Archive” display, including objects collected by Northcote Thomas in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. Photo: Paul Basu","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"82-85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41660430","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}
引用次数: 0
Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa by Brian Valente-Quinn 塞内加尔的舞台艺术:法语非洲的非殖民化戏剧制作布赖恩·瓦伦特-奎因著
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1162/afar_r_00703
S. Camará
{"title":"Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa by Brian Valente-Quinn","authors":"S. Camará","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00703","url":null,"abstract":"The book under review explores modern Senegalese theater from its colonial inception at the scholastic stage of the William Ponty elite training school, to the screen adaptation of the theatre populaire (popular theater) of grassroots theater troupes, to the emergence of Senegalese digital television series. Brian Valente-Quinn’s study of Senegalese theater across time foregrounds an analysis of the practices of “theater-making” and “stagecraft.” He describes the former as “the work of crafting the stage space through the use of text, place, and embodied performance,” and the latter as “the nuts-and-bolts work that goes into the craft of theater-making from conception to reception” (pp. 1, 13). The book employs both terms to conceptualize theatrical practice and meaning while drawing on both textual analysis and fieldwork. Senegalese Stagecraft explores the development of modern Senegalese theater in six chapters. The initial chapter traces the origins of Senegalese theater to 1930s colonial French West Africa, when the pontins, or African students of the elite École Normale William Ponty school, began almost incidentally to experiment with Western-style theater performance to stage their respective ethnic cultures as part of the school’s extracurricular program launched by Charles Béart (p. 3). The outcome was the birth of a colonial théâtre indigene (indigenous theater) that combined French-style dramaturgy and African music, ritual, and dance to bring African stories on stage. While the pontins were political subalterns under an assimilationist French colonial public policy, the author argues that the pontin actors—who arrived in Senegal’s historic Gorée Island from different French colonies of Africa — could use “the stage to project themselves beyond the limited roles assigned to them as colonial intermediaries,” thereby engaging in a form of “decolonizing stage space” (p. 3, 6). By writing and/or enacting local stories, such as Bernard Dadié’s Assémien Dahyle, King of the Sanwi, The Conference of Samory and Captain Peroz – 1887, or Lat Joor, the pontins staged moral values of valor and honor—typical of Jean Racine’s and Pierre Corneil’s tragedies—in order to revise or question Western colonial metanarratives about Africa. The author reads the pontins’ performances as a subtle subversion of Ponty’s scholastic stage aimed not just at repositioning African historical figures as agents of history, but also at speaking to an important audience of colonial administrators during annual events. The next chapter investigates how the colonial centres culturels français (CCF), or French cultural centers, shaped theater-making in colonial and postcolonial Senegal and broader French West Africa. It contextualizes the emergence of the cultural centers in the transformative aftermath of World War II, when West Africa’s French-educated elite embraced a transnational French identity that reconciled “Africanness” with “Frenchness” (p. 41). In the absence of ","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"94-95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48883149","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}
引用次数: 0
Exterminate All the Brutes directed by Raoul Peck 拉乌尔·佩克执导的《消灭所有野兽》
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1162/afar_r_00702
Manar Ellethy
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引用次数: 0
We Write to You About Africa curated by Laura De Becker and Ozi Uduma; Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution curated by Laura De Becker, Bridget Grier, Timnet Gedar, and Ozi Uduma Laura De Becker和Ozi Uduma策划的《我们给你写关于非洲的信》;希望你在这里:非洲艺术和恢复由劳拉·德·贝克尔,布里奇特·格里尔,蒂姆特·格达尔和奥齐·乌杜玛策展
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1162/afar_r_00700
Carlee S. Forbes
{"title":"We Write to You About Africa curated by Laura De Becker and Ozi Uduma; Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution curated by Laura De Becker, Bridget Grier, Timnet Gedar, and Ozi Uduma","authors":"Carlee S. Forbes","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00700","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"86-88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41320176","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}
引用次数: 0
The African Origin of Civilization curated by Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch; Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room curated by Hannah Beachler, Michelle Commander, Ian Alteveer, and Sarah E. Lawrence 由Alisa LaGamma和Diana Craig Patch策划的《文明的非洲起源》;在昨天之前,我们可以飞:一个非洲未来主义时期的房间,由汉娜·比奇勒、米歇尔·康托姆、伊恩·阿尔特维尔和莎拉·e·劳伦斯策划
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1162/afar_r_00701
Yann K. Petit
{"title":"The African Origin of Civilization curated by Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch; Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room curated by Hannah Beachler, Michelle Commander, Ian Alteveer, and Sarah E. Lawrence","authors":"Yann K. Petit","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00701","url":null,"abstract":"In times of confusion and change, the human mind tends to escape the present moment, wandering in past and future tenses. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibitions on African and African American art rendered visible what I suggest is a transitional period being undergone by both fields. The exhibition The African Origin of Civilization, which included insightful “guest appearances” spread throughout the Met’s galleries, demonstrated the strong ancient Egyptian artistic influences enacted by and on other African arts in the past three millennia. On the other side of the museum, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room offered a counternarrative, opening avenues for new perspectives on both history and the future. Together, the two exhibits fostered potential recontextualizations of African and African American histories highlighting the roles of archaeology within our contemporary lives and fabulating about human futures. Nestled in the middle of the Egyptian collection, The African Origin of Civilization offered twenty-one pairings of forty-two individual ancient Egyptian and other African artworks from the Met’s collection. Gathered under a chronological banner highlighting historical events on the African continent, and punctuated by descriptive paragraphs of the exhibit’s project as shaped by Cheikh Anta Diop’s philosophy, these pairings aimed at catalyzing temporal, geographical, and topical discussions. A redefinition and reconsideration of Egyptian art within the African art historical canon became possible through some of these pairings—not only through aesthetic similarities, but also through meaningful connections made in the wall texts. Gathered under telling subtitles such as “Exceptional Women” (Figs. 1–2), “Masks as Doubles,” “Active Enlightenment” (Fig. 3), or “Lineage of Knowledge” (Fig. 4), Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch’s curatorial choices showed the range of inspirations drawn from each civilization, and the influence of Egypt on African aesthetic productions, (above, l–r) 1 Edo artist, Igbesanmwen guild, Court of Benin; Nigeria Iyoba (Queen Mother) Pendant Mask 16th century Ivory, iron, copper","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"89-91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44755758","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}
引用次数: 0
Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts 城市出租车口号:人民的艺术
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-02-17 DOI: 10.1162/afar_a_00697
Daniel E. Agbiboa
{"title":"Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts","authors":"Daniel E. Agbiboa","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00697","url":null,"abstract":"The contemporary African city runs on informal modes of public transportation. Typically, minibuses provide the core, but motorbikes, tricycles, and shared taxis all contribute to informal transport ecosystems. These privately operated services are ground-level responses to growing demand for mobility in the face of absent or inadequate formal public transportation services. For many African urbanites, it is impossible to imagine city life without its ubiquitous minibuses, which constitute a distinctive feature of many African urban environments and are the stuff of news, gossip, rumors, and urban myths. Far from being mere containers that form part of the mise en scène in African cities, the dilapidated yet decorated bodies of these minibus taxis mirror for urbanites the duplicity of the African city: both as a place filled with hope and joie de vivre and as a redoubt of stuckedness and immiseration. Minibus taxis account for an estimated 80% of Africa’s total motorized trips (Medium 2018), contributing 50% of all motorized traffic in some corridors (Kumar and Barrett 2008: 5). They go by various appellations: danfo1 in Lagos (Fig. 1), trotro in Accra, daladala in Dar es Salaam, poda-poda in Freetown, matatu in Nairobi, otobis in Cairo, car rapides in Dakar, condongueiros in Luanda, gbaka in Abidjan, kamuny in Kampala, magbana in Conakry, sotrama in Bamako, songa kidogo in Kigali, and kombi in Cape Town. Minibuses are supplemented by motorcycle taxis, popularly known as okada in Nigeria, oleiya in Togo, zémidjan in Benin, pikipiki in Kenya, and boda-boda in Uganda. This urban transportation complex expresses, shapes, produces, and refracts political, social, and economic relations. Informal transport indicates an alternate mode of flexible passenger transport services that cater to the urban poor in the Global South. Unlike modern mass transit systems with fixed stops, fares, routes, and timetables, informal transport services have no predictable schedule: “they depart when they have reached maximum capacity and they arrive when they have successfully passed through all the checkpoints, paid all necessary fees and bribes, and fixed all parts that have broken down during the journey” (GreenSimms 2009: 31). The failure of state-owned mass transportation services occasioned the growth and popularity of these local and ostensibly unregulated services. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and Africa’s most populous city, okadas emerged in the 1980s as a popular means of mobility for hard-pressed subalterns during a time of massive economic crisis and urban population growth, when increased demand for mobility widened the gap between supply and demand (Agbiboa 2022a). In Nigeria, the Lagos state government aims to phase out the use of the iconic danfos. Former governor Akinwunmi Ambode (2015–2019) lamented that, “When I wake up in the morning and see all these yellow buses ... and then we claim we are a megacity, that is not true and we must acknowl","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"42-61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43663897","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}
引用次数: 1
Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities 呼吸空间:非洲城市中独立艺术空间的工作原理
IF 0.3 3区 艺术学
AFRICAN ARTS Pub Date : 2023-02-17 DOI: 10.1162/afar_a_00696
Kim Gurney
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