Bøker i African Expressive Cultures-serien

A Dance of Assassins presents the competing histories of how Congolese Chief Lusinga and Belgian Lieutenant Storms engaged in a deadly clash while striving to establish hegemony along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika in the 1880s. While Lusinga participated in the east African slave trade, Storms' secret mandate was to meet Henry Stanley's eastward march and trace "e;a white line across the Dark Continent"e; to legitimize King Leopold's audacious claim to the Congo. Confrontation was inevitable, and Lusinga lost his head. His skull became the subject of a sinister evolutionary treatise, while his ancestral figure is now considered a treasure of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Allen F. Roberts reveals the theatricality of early colonial encounter and how it continues to influence Congolese and Belgian understandings of history today.

Explores urban music and youth culture in Africa

Performance as public enactment of justice and human rights

In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.

Focusing on a single Malian textile identified variously as bogolanfini, bogolan, or mudcloth, Victoria L. Rovine traces the dramatic technical and stylistic innovations that have transformed the cloth from its village origins into a symbol of new internationalism.

Renowned for its mud-brick architecture, monumental mosque, and merchant-traders' houses, Djenne remains one of Africa's most distinctive cities. This title describes the raising of a mud-brick house and explores the technical, social, and magical processes involved in making buildings and renewing the urban environment of Djenne.

In 1978, Patrick McNaughton witnessed a bird dance masquerade in the small town of Dogoduman. He was so affected by this performance that its artistic power has never left him. Here, he considers the components of the performance, its pace, the performers, and what it means for understandings of Bamana and West African aesthetics and culture.

Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee bring together a compelling collection that shows how interviews can be used to generate new meaning and how connecting with artists and their work can transform artistic production into innovative critical insights and knowledge. The contributors to this volume include artists, museum curators, art historians, and anthropologists, who address artistic production in a variety of locations and media to question previous uses of interview and provoke alternative understandings of art.

Discusses the role of the workshop in the creation of African art

How does South Africa deal with public art from its years of colonialism and apartheid? How do new monuments address fraught histories and commemorate heroes of the struggle? Across South Africa, statues commemorating figures such as Cecil Rhodes have provoked heated protests, while new works commemorating icons of the liberation struggle have also sometimes proved contentious. In this lively volume, Kim Miller, Brenda Schmahmann and an international group of contributors explore how works in the public domain in South Africa serve as a forum in which important debates about race, gender, identity and nationhood play out. Examining statues and memorials as well as performance, billboards, and other temporal modes of communication, the authors of these essays consider the implications of not only the exposure, but also erasure of events and icons from the public domain. Revealing how public visual expressions articulate histories and memories, they explore how such works may serve as a forum in which tensions surrounding race, gender, identity, or nationhood play out.

Sango - the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning - is a powerful, fearful deity who controls the forces of nature. This title explores Sango religious traditions in West Africa and beyond. It considers the spread of polytheistic religious traditions from West Africa, the mythic Sango, the historical Sango, and syncretic traditions of Sango worship.

Expands our understanding of the world of women in West Africa and their complex and subtle roles as verbal artists.

An insight into the meaning and value of popular forms of expression during a time of political and social change in East Africa.

Tabloids hotly debated in South Africa

From clothing as an expression of freedom in early colonial Zanzibar to Somali women's headcovering in inner-city Minneapolis, this work explores the power of dress in African and pan-African settings. Nationalist and diasporic identities, as well as their histories and politics, are examined at the level of what is put on the body every day.

Staging a new politics of performance in the African diaspora

The dynamism and creativity of African fashion

The pulse of Africa's growing music scene

Politics and culture in everyday apparel

What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.

Looks at fashion, international networks of style, and the world of African aesthetic expression. This book introduces fashion designers whose work reflects African histories and cultures both conceptually and stylistically, and demonstrates that dress styles associated with indigenous cultures may have all the hallmarks of high fashion.

Gives sustained attention to Nollywood as a uniquely African cultural production

Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghana-when musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floor-in this penetrating look at musical leisure during a time of social, political, and cultural change. Framing dance band "e;highlife"e; music as a central medium through which Ghanaians negotiated gendered and generational social relations, Nate Plageman shows how popular music was central to the rhythm of daily life in a West African nation. He traces the history of highlife in urban Ghana during much of the 20th century and documents a range of figures that fueled the music's emergence, evolution, and explosive popularity. This book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.