""This is a stimulating book, which covers much new material
Scholarship on sub-Saharan Africa is very thinly theorized. Few
scholars seem to have the range to make connections with art
practice elsewhere and generally offer interpretations which
struggle to get beyond ethnographic documentation. Few monographs
engage with the wider debates. This book is an exception.""
--John Mack, Professor, University of East Anglia (UK)
"African Dream Machines" takes African headrests out of the
category of functional objects and into the more rarefied category
of "art" objects. Styles in African headrests are usually defined
in terms of Western art and archaeological discourses, but this
book interrogates these definitions and demonstrates the
shortcomings of defining a single formal style model as exclusive
to a single ethnic group.
This book has been in the making for fifteen years, starting
with research on the traditional woodcarving of the Shona-and
Venda-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe and South Africa. Among the
artifacts made by South African peoples, headrests were the best
known and during a year spent in Europe in 1975-1976, Anitra
Nettleton discovered museum stores full of unacknowledged
masterpieces made by speakers of numerous Southern African
languages. A Council Fellowship from the University of the
Witwatersrand in 1990 enabled the writer to develop an archive in
the form of notes, photographs, and sketches of each and every
headrest she encountered. Many examples from South African
collections were added from the early 1990s onwards, expanding the
field vastly. Nettelton executed drawings of each and every
headrest encountered, and they became a major part of the project
in their own right.
"African Dream Machines" questions the assumed one-to-one
relationship between formal styles and ethnic identities or
classifications. Historical factors are used to demonstrate that
"authenticity," in the form sought by collectors of antique African
art, is largely a construct.
"Anitra Nettleton" is a professor in the Wits School of Arts,
Johannesburg (South Africa). This manuscript was awarded the
University of the Witwatersrand Research Committee Publication
Award in 2006.
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