African and diaspora aesthetics
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Bibliographic Information
African and diaspora aesthetics
Duke University Press , Prince Claus Fund Library, 2006
- : cloth
- : pbk
- Other Title
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Beautiful ugly
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 392-408) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 Santeria 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 Reunion; 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, Francoise Verges
Table of Contents
Introduction: Rethinking Beauty / Sarah Nuttall 6
Picasso, Africa and the Schemata of Difference / Simon Gikanki 30
Variations on the Beautiful in Congolese Worlds of Sound / Achille Mbembe 94
Two Thoughts of Drawing Beauty / William Kentridge 94
The Place of Beauty: Reflections on Elaine Scarry and Zakes Mda / Rita Barnard 102
Quille Liberte: Art, Beauty and the Grammars of Resistance in Doula / Dominique Malaquais 122
Fresh Stories / Pippa Stein 164
The Love of the Body: Ousmane Sow and Beauty / Els van der Plas 188
Inheritance / Mark Gevisser 204
Let's Eat: Banquet Aesthetics and Social Epicurism / Celestin Monga 224
Let's Cook / Francois Verges 240
On the Slipperiness of Food / Cheryl-Ann Michael 256
Afro-Aesthetics in Brazil / Patricia Pinho 266
Yoruba Aesthetics and Trans-Atlantic Imaginaries / Kamari Maxine Clarke 290
Urban Imaging: The Friche Waiting to Happen / Rodney Place 316
Things Ugly: Ghanaian Popular Painting / Michelle Gilbert 340
Two Stories: Old Man with Garden at the Rear End of Time and The Fat Indian Girl / Mia Couto 372
Seeing the Familiar: Notes on Mia Couto / Isabel Hofmeyr 384
Notes 392
Index 409
by "Nielsen BookData"
