Visual Art / Literary Production
African and diaspora aesthetics by
In Cameroon, a monumental "statue of liberty" is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness. Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans' Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising "morality" plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly "African" aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope. Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès
ISBN: 0822339072Publication Date: 2007-01-08
The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820 by
Essays by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Clara Bargellini, Dilys E. Blum, Elizabeth Hill Boone, Marcus Burke, Mitchell A. Codding, Thomas B. F. Cummins, Cristina Esteras Martín, M. Concepción García Sáiz, Ilona Katzew, Adrian Locke, Gridley McKim-Smith, Alfonso Ortiz Crespo, Jorge F. Rivas P., Nuno Senos, Edward J. Sullivan, and Marjorie Trusted. By the end of the 16th century, Europe, Africa, and Asia were connected to North and South America via a vast network of complex trade routes. This led, in turn, to dynamic cultural exchanges between these continents and a proliferation of diverse art forms in Latin America. This monumental book transcends geographic boundaries and explores the history of the confluence of styles, materials, and techniques among Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas through the end of the colonial era--a period marked by the independence movements, the formation of national states, and the rise of academic art. Written by distinguished international scholars, essays cover a full range of topics, including city planning, iconography in painting and sculpture, East-West connections, the power of images, and the role of the artist. Beautifully illustrated with over 450 works--many published for the first time--this book presents a spectacular selection of decorative arts, textiles, silver, sculpture, painting, and furniture. Scholarly entries on some three hundred works highlight the various cultural influences and differences throughout this vast region. This groundbreaking book also includes an illustrated chronology, informative maps, and an exhaustive bibliography and is sure to set a new standard in the field of Latin American studies.
ISBN: 9780300120035Publication Date: 2006-11-06
Critical perspectives on Afro-Latin American literatureISBN: 9780203807507
In black and white : prints from Africa and the diasporaISBN: 9781851777549
Literary expressions of African spiritualityISBN: 9780739181423
Nka : journal of contemporary African art by
Also online: http://search.library.northwestern.edu/NULV:library_resources:01NWU_ALMA51567148030002441
Publication Date: 1994-
Women warriors of the Afro-Latina diasporaISBN: 9781558857469
Music
Media, sound, and culture in Latin America and the CaribbeanISBN: 9780822961871
Junkanoo : festival of the Bahamas / E. Clement Bethel ; edited and expanded by Nicolette Bethel by ISBN: 0333554698Publication Date: 1991
Sacred Drums of Liberation by
Author Don Ohadike chronicles the struggle for peoples of African descent to overcome slavery, colonialism and neo-colonial hegemony. Tracing resistance movements from the colonial period into the 20th century through music and religion, the pursuit of freedom and the practice of resistance extend beyond the borders of Africa into popular culture in the US, the Caribbean and South Africa. Ohadike crosses a multitude of eras and locations but the theme of resistance to oppression through religion and music echoes drums of liberation into the present.
ISBN: 1592215173Publication Date: 2007-02-01
More Than Drumming by
“This delightful collection of essays is one of a pair of books that grew out of a 1978 symposium on African and Afro-American music sponsored by the Center for Ethnic Music at Howard University. This particular volume includes ten essays on African, Black South American (specifically Brazilian), and Afro-Latin music cultures. Following two introductory essays on ethnomusicological concepts in general, there are six essays on various music cultures of West and Central Africa. Some of the essays focus on specific groups, such as Ewe (Ghana) and Igede (Nigeria). Others survey such topics as aesthetics, social aspects, ecstatic singing, and women's roles with respect to music. Much of the emphasis is on music in ritual contexts. The final two essays are on Afro-American music cultures, one on Yoruba religious songs in Brazil and one on drums and other instruments in Panama.”– Choice
ISBN: 0313230935Publication Date: 1985-07-24
Theatre and Cinema
Afro-Cuban identity in postrevolutionary novel and filmISBN: 9781611484229
Recasting Transnationalism Through Performance by
A rigorous ethnography of three international theatre festivals spanning the Portuguese-speaking world, this book examines the potential for African theatre artists to generate meaningful cultural and postcolonial dialogues in festival venues despite the challenges posed by a global arts market.
ISBN: 1137006803Publication Date: 2013-11-19
Performing Afro-Cuba by
Visitors to Cuba will notice that Afro-Cuban figures and references are everywhere: in popular music and folklore shows, paintings and dolls of Santer??a saints in airport shops, and even restaurants with plantation themes. In Performing Afro-Cuba, Kristina Wirtz examines how the animation of Cuba's colonial past and African heritage through such figures and performances not only reflects but also shapes the Cuban experience of Blackness. She also investigates how this process operates at different spatial and temporal scales?from the immediate present to the imagined past, from the barrio to the socialist state. ??????????? Wirtz analyzes a variety of performances and the ways they construct Cuban racial and historical imaginations. She offers a sophisticated view of performance as enacting diverse revolutionary ideals, religious notions, and racial identity politics, and she outlines how these concepts play out in the ongoing institutionalization of folklore as an official, even state-sponsored, category. Employing Bakhtin's concept of ?chronotopes??the semiotic construction of space-time?she examines the roles of voice, temporality, embodiment, imagery, and memory in the racializing process. The result is a deftly balanced study that marries racial studies, performance studies, anthropology, and semiotics to explore the nature of race as a cultural sign, one that is always in process, always shifting. ?
ISBN: 9780226118864Publication Date: 2014-06-05
Myth performance in the African diasporas : ritual, theatre, and danceISBN: 9780810892804
Africana Women Writers by
Africana Women Writers: Performing Diaspora, Staging Healing focuses on contemporary literary works, plays in particular, written after 1976 by Africana women writers. From a cross-cultural, transnational perspective, the author examines how these women writers - emanating from Cameroon (Nicole Werewere Liking), Britain (Winsome Pinnock), Guadeloupe (Maryse Condé and Simone Schwartz-Bart), Nigeria (Tess Onwueme), and the United States (Ntozake Shange) - move beyond static, conventional notions regarding blackness and being female and reconfigure newer identities and spaces to thrive. DeLinda Marzette explores the numerous ways these women writers create black female agency and vital, energizing communities. Contextually, she uses the term diaspora to refer to the mass dispersal of peoples from their homelands - herein Africa - to other global locations; objects of diasporic dispersal, these individuals then become a kind of migrant, physically and psychologically. Each author shares a diasporic heritage; hence, much of their subjects, settings, and themes express diaspora consciousness. Marzette explores who these women are, how they define themselves, how they convey and experience their worlds, how they broach, loosen, and explode the multiple yokes of race, class, and gender-based oppression and exploitation in their works. What is fostered, encouraged, shunned, ignored - the spoken, the unspoken and, perhaps, the unspeakable - are all issues of critical exploration. Ultimately, all the women of this study depend on female bonds for survival, enrichment, healing, and hope. The plays by these women are especially important in that they add a diverse dimension to the standard dramatic canon.
ISBN: 1433113805Publication Date: 2013-10-29
