AFRICAN ARTS最新文献

{"title":"Power and Play","authors":"Courtnay Micots","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00683","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts WINTER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 4 Fancy Dress Carnival is a multimedia spectacle wherein masked performers don costumes and dance down the street or compete in an arena with accompanying musicians, usually a brass band, delighting Ghanaian audiences (Fig. 1). Fancy Dress is a distinctive form of carnival1 belonging to Ghana with a deep history that stems from both international and local practices. What sets Fancy Dress apart from other African masquerades are the carnivalesque meanings that connect it to other Black Atlantic carnivals. The colorful costumes, characters, and other fancy aspects exhibiting “play” and fierce characters expressing “power” interact with their spectators as a means to negotiate community identity, demonstrating a complicated relationship with Europe and the United States. Fancy Dress is a form of kakaamotobe, an umbrella term for a fierce display through costume, music, and dance found throughout the country.2 The carnival started around the turn of the twentieth century as a combination of local religious and performance practices with foreign carnival forms. Local performances include those primarily from Fante asafo, paramilitary troops with religious and communal responsibilities, but also from Nzema and Ga practices along the coast.3 British sailors and officers, West Indian troops, Afro-Brazilians and others came to the coast in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bringing with them their comedic skits, carnival, and British Fancy Dress.4 The Fante, one of several Akan groups in southern Ghana, occupy part of the coastline in the Central Region (Fig. 2). Energized by these popular forms of expression, the local Fante created their own version of Fancy Dress to release tensions built during British colonization.5 As Doran H. Ross aptly stated, the Fante of coastal Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast Colony, were “fighting with art” (Ross 1979). Masquerade can manipulate the space for empowerment, and through “selective amnesia” participants and spectators can reinvent a more acceptable memory (than perhaps one of disempowerment) that suits the community (Njoku 2020: 190–92), which is often the case with Black Atlantic carnivals that use performance as a healing tonic from the cultural trauma suffered during the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. Theater in the streets as a performance conducted by the oppressed empowers participants and spectators as a therapeutic form of activism (Boal 1985: 122). Because characters allow performers to enact their desires and frustrations on the streets, Fancy Dress operates as theatrical activism to heal communities and thus has thrived for over a century. Multimedia events incorporating music, dance, costume, and skits provide a mechanism for letting off steam by revealing what is hidden from view. The hidden and unexpected are considered dangerous in many communities. Different rules exist during liminal periods such as those created by a masquerade; chaos","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"55 1","pages":"68-81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48662609","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":"Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture, 1970s-1990s","authors":"Leslie W. Rabine","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00686","url":null,"abstract":"Photo Cameroon plunged visitors into superimposed, disparate worlds: the studios of twentieth century Cameroonian photographers and a museum installation where COVID-19 dictated the design. Even the photographers on view—Jacques Toussele (1939–2017), Joseph Chila (b. 1948), and Samuel Finlak (b. 1958)—communicated three different atmospheres and styles. Toussele, the eldest and best-known in the West, expressed an urban, adventurous style. A buzz of activity surrounded his studio, Photo Jacques, which operated in the town of Mbouda from 1959 to 2006. The museum images often suggested this playful hustle-and-bustle. In one emblematic image, two young men wear bell-bottom trousers, sport-shirts, and athletic shoes. Each, prominently displaying a bottle of Sprite, turns away from the other. One looks up, the other down. Behind them, three layers of Toussele’s popular backgrounds are stacked helter-skelter, signaling a wacky lark of a photo session (Fig. 1). Toussele’s nephew and apprentice, Joseph Chila, established his more sober studio, Photo Joseph, in the small town of Mayo Darlé. Working indoors or out, he used a hand-painted cloth background and artificial light. Samuel Finlak worked outdoors with natural light. An itinerant photographer around his village of Atta, he transformed village walls, houses, doorways, and landscapes into picturesque settings (Fig. 2). The three men could thrive as popular studio photographers by seizing the","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"55 1","pages":"86-89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49182315","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":"PLAN B, a Gathering of Strangers (or) This Is Not Working by Goldendean","authors":"Fiona Siegenthaler","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00689","url":null,"abstract":"| 93 from its birthplace. Navigating through the demonization and politicization of Black hair in America, Tharps also highlights Black hair’s resilience as well as the continued strength and creativity of the Black community. Dr. Ingrid Banks, author of Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness, examines the painting “Internal Battle” by artist and illustrator Keturah Ariel. In this analysis, Dr. Banks references a number of notable figures including W. E. B. Du Bois, Anita Hill, Dr. Willie Morrow, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Madame C.J. Walker, and Angela Davis. Ariel’s painting presents a young woman whose hair, parted down the middle, is stylized straight with blue highlights on the left and in a natural, mid-size afro on the right. The woman wears a pink tank top, gold chain necklace, and a look of indecision on her face. Banks describes how Ariel’s portrait of a young woman captures the all-too-familiar fear around Black hair stylization. Since enslavement, Black hair has been historically subjected to and policed by Eurocentric standards of beauty. This perpetual discrimination, in turn, has challenged the Black community’s freedom to wear any coiffure as they so choose. While Banks goes into greater detail in her essay, “Internal Battle” presents a snapshot of the complex dynamics connected to hair texture and grooming. Dr. Afiya Mbilishaka, a hairstylist, therapist, and assistant professor of psychology at the University of the District of Columbia, begins by providing an explanation for hair texture variation. She then transitions to the traditional care, rituals, and varied significance hair embodied in African societies. During and after colonization and enslavement, Black hair was often manipulated to achieve unnatural textures in order to meet new societal standards. These efforts resulted not only in damaged hair, scalp, and skin but also psychological injury. Mbilishaka advocates that what is needed now are texture-positive counter-narratives and conjoined efforts by psychologists and hair care providers. While Mbilishaka celebrates the larger Black is Beautiful and #TeamNatural movements, it is also encouraging to see the existence of groups like “My Black is Beautiful,” their support of TEXTURES, and the presence of P&G and L’Oréal as sponsors. The “New World” societal standards discussed in Dr. Mbilishaka’s essay are developed further by Zoé Samudzi. She argues that one of the reasons Western standards of beauty took on global power was because Western society feigned ignorance and explicitly rejected the idea that Africa possessed any signs of development. This mentality both justified the damage of imperialism and chattel slavery and labeled textured hair as ugly and unruly. Hair that was stylized and prized in Africa was now forcibly removed and criminalized abroad. While hair strands are dead entities, they have always been alive in cultural connotations and meaning-making. Samudzi takes pride that today, as ","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":" ","pages":"93-94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48822765","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":"Lumumba in the Arts","authors":"Gabriel M. Nugent","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00690","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":" ","pages":"95-96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48564146","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":"Cloth is Money: Textiles from the Sahel","authors":"Morgan Snoap","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00684","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"55 1","pages":"82-83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43606564","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":"The Ritual Solidarity of Masked Processions in Calabar, Cameroon, and Cuba","authors":"Ivor L. Miller","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00681","url":null,"abstract":"My father danced in the first procession of the Componedores. The comparsa theme imitated the habits of the many Lukumí [ethnic Yorùbá] women who lived in this neighborhood. When the com-parsa passed by their homes, these Lukumí would speak in their language and pour water in the streets to “cool the road” as they passed. My father always took me to see the comparsas ; when we saw the Componedores,","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"55 1","pages":"42-53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49143883","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":"Carnival in Africa","authors":"Amanda B. Carlson, Courtnay Micots","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00678","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts WINTER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 4 Tourism-fueled economies in Africa and the travel industry produce photo-rich websites with seductive, color-saturated images that draw people to fabulous carnivals across the continent. These industries have vastly outpaced scholarly documentation of carnivals in Africa, which are often assumed to be an isolated and recent phenomenon, but in fact exist in all corners of the continent— Morocco, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Ethiopia, and Kenya to name a few. Some are very new—although usually built upon an existing performance tradition—while others, such as in Angola and Cape Verde, are thought to be centuries old. As carnival events are growing in popularity, we hope this collection of articles will encourage others (scholars, artists, communities) to join the party and experience the complexity of carnival in Africa. At this time, we know of only two full-length books about carnivals in Africa: Coon Carnival New Year in Cape Town: Past to Present (1999) by Denis-Constant Martin and Kakaamotobe: Fancy Dress Carnival in Ghana (2021) by Courtnay Micots. Many other carnivals are mentioned in disparate texts covering diverse regions and disciplines—a fair number published in African Arts. However, many references to carnivals in Africa fly under the radar because authors do not use the term “carnival” even when the event fits the definition of carnival or includes many characteristics of carnival. Until now, the literature on carnival has primarily focused on the Caribbean and Latin American epicenters. The weather vane of carnival history and theory indicates a strong wind blowing steadfast out of Trinidad & Tobago and Brazil (with carnivals that are well known among revelers and scholars alike), but this special issue hints at the vast scope of carnivals in Africa and the geographic decentering of carnival studies. The articles in this special issue demonstrate that Africa is not only a point of origin to explain diasporic performance traditions, Africa is also a place of return and reinvention—disrupting linear models of influence. Humans have found many reasons to form processions and dance in the street. Factors that contributed to carnivals in Africa include the Portuguese (early super-spreaders of Christian festivals and processions), emancipated returnees from the Americas, British maritime culture (suppliers of goods, ideas, and people among the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa), diplomatic programs and global festivals (e.g., the First World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966 in Senegal and FESTAC ’77 in Nigeria), and the intensification of globalization and shifts in the economy (moving from oil to tourism in Nigeria, for example). Another important piece of the puzzle is that festivals were almost always built upon the many preexisting performance traditions involving processions and masquerades. Carni","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"55 1","pages":"6-17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45041438","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":"Calabar Carnival","authors":"Nsima Stanislaus Udo","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00680","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts WINTER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 4 What is the place of the street in the production and consumption of contemporary and commodified African festival? How has the street become a curatorial platform and a contested space through which visuality, cultural aesthetic and commodification, play, vulgarity, and the secular coalesce and tangle in an attempt to create a composite festival that produces different layers of historical, cultural, and visual analysis? (Fig. 1). To answer these questions, we need to briefly look at how the street has been theorized by scholars in the social sciences. The street has been defined as being “both contradictory and complex... distinctive but contested social space” as well as a space for public engagement and community-making (Hubbard and Lyon 2018). Others see the street as venue of governmental surveillance, secular power demonstration, class categorization, and legal systematization (Coleman and Sim 2000). The plasticity of defining the street is multifaceted, yet it overlaps its cultural and visual functionality. In this essay, I read Calabar Festival and carnival and the street as cultural theater through the which performance, play, and visuality are exhibited. Using photographs as my tool of analysis and historical resource, I conceptualize the street as a space of convergence where culture, visuality, creativity, economy, the secular, and the vulgar meet and entangle, creating changes, rhythms, and movements in cultural, political, leisure, and visual aesthetics1 (Fig. 2). While the social life of the street is complex, fluid, and seemingly boundless, its cultural, performance, play, and visual agency seems to diminish and invert the uncanny and domineering “political, legal, and economic forces that reinforce existing social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion” (Barker 2009) (Fig. 3). The Calabar Festival and Carnival is a thirty-one to thirty-two day yearly event that started in 2004/2005. The event takes place on the streets of Calabar, while certain aspects of the events are hosted at city centers like Calabar Stadium, Eleven-Eleven arena, Calabar Cultural Centre, and the Calabar Municipal Local Government ground, where the popular Carnival Village Market is positioned. In 2004/2005, the carnival was originally dubbed “Calabar Carnival Extravaganza” by the organizers, where a few “paradelike walk-about” revelers displayed symbols of different tourism sites and other forms and symbols of government projects with very sparse costuming (Carlson 2010: 47). Performances are orchestrated by different groups from the Cross River Regions and different national and international groups, while other contemporary entertainment events and popular performances are prospective features of the event at different gravity each year (Fig. 4). The festival/carnival dominantly clones the Caribbean carnival genre, with close parallels in performance, costuming, props, colors, floats, and other forms of cultural te","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"55 1","pages":"32-41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46505674","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":"Dancing Altars","authors":"E. Hill","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00682","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts WINTER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 4 [B]lack diaspora traditions for masking and masquerade— from the carnival arts of Trinidad or New Orleans to the wigs and gold chains of the bling aesthetic—involve the construction of spectacular surfaces that charm, seduce, and beguile the eye but also ... the artifice of such masking hides and protects the inner world of diaspora subjectivity ... —Kobena Mercer (2011: 4, emphasis mine)","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"55 1","pages":"54-67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44878855","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":"New Masks, New Meanings: Covid Perspectives on African Art History: Part 1: Behind The Mask: African Art History in a Pandemic Era","authors":"Victoria L. Rovine","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00676","url":null,"abstract":"An introduction is presented in which author discusses articles on topics including focuses on N95 masks which have none of panache of a fine masquerade performance, but they have gained the cultural force of a powerful masquerade society, drawing authority from spiritual and political sanction.","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"55 1","pages":"1-4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42522098","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}