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
General
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