The Scramble For Art In Central Africa
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| Author | : Enid Schildkrout |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 274 |
| Release | : 1998-03-28 |
| Genre | : Antiques & Collectibles |
| ISBN | : 9780521586788 |
Western attitudes to Africa have been influenced to an extraordinary degree by the arts and artefacts that were brought back by the early collectors, exhibited in museums, and celebrated by scholars and artists in the metropolitan centres. The contributors to this volume trace the life history of artefacts that were brought to Europe and America from Congo towards the end of the nineteenth century, and became the subjects of museum displays. They also present fascinating case studies of the pioneering collectors, including such major figures as Frobenius and Torday. They discuss the complex and sensitive issues involved in the business of 'collecting', and show how the collections and exhibitions influenced academic debates about the categories of art and artefact, and the notion of authenticity, and challenged conventional aesthetic values, as modern Western artists began to draw on African models.
| Author | : Michael A. Rutz |
| Publisher | : Hackett Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 134 |
| Release | : 2018-03-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1624666582 |
"King Leopold of Belgium's exploits up the Congo River in the 1880s were central to the European partitioning of the African continent. The Congo Free State, Leopold's private colony, was a unique political construct that opened the door to the savage exploitation of the Congo's natural and human resources by international corporations. The resulting 'red rubber' scandal—which laid bare a fundamental contradiction between the European propagation of free labor and 'civilization' and colonial governments' acceptance of violence and coercion for productivity's sake—haunted all imperial powers in Africa. Featuring a clever introduction and judicious collection of documents, Michael Rutz's book neatly captures the drama of one king's quest to build an empire in Central Africa—a quest that began in the name of anti-slavery and free trade and ended in the brutal exploitation of human lives. This volume is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the history of colonial rule in Africa." —Jelmer Vos, University of Glasgow
| Author | : Thomas Fillitz |
| Publisher | : Berghahn Books |
| Total Pages | : 258 |
| Release | : 2012-12-01 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 0857454978 |
The longing for authenticity, on an individual or collective level, connects the search for external expressions to internal orientations. What is largely referred to as production of authenticity is a reformulation of cultural values and norms within the ongoing process of modernity, impacted by globalization and contemporary transnational cultural flows. This collection interrogates the notion of authenticity from an anthropological point of view and considers authenticity in terms of how meaning is produced in and through discourses about authenticity. Incorporating case studies from four continents, the topics reach from art and colonialism to exoticism-primitivism, film, ritual and wilderness. Some contributors emphasise the dichotomy between the academic use of the term and the one deployed in public spaces and political projects. All, however, consider authenticity as something that can only be understood ethnographically, and not as a simple characteristic or category used to distinguish some behaviors, experiences or material things from other less authentic versions.
| Author | : Raoul J. Granqvist |
| Publisher | : MSU Press |
| Total Pages | : 270 |
| Release | : 2017-04-01 |
| Genre | : Photography |
| ISBN | : 1628952881 |
This book is the first to question both why and how the colonialist mythologies represented by the work of photographer Eliot Elisofon persist. It documents and discusses a heterogeneous practice of American coloniality of power as it explores Elisofon’s career as war photographer-correspondent and staff photographer for LIFE, filmmaker, author, artist, and collector of “primitive art” and sculpture. It focuses on three areas: Elisofon’s narcissism, voyeurism, and sexism; his involvement in the homogenizing of Western social orders and colonial legacies; and his enthused mission of “sending home” a mass of still-life photographs, annexed African artifacts, and assumed vintage knowledge. The book does not challenge his artistic merit or his fascinating personality; what it does question is his production and imagining of “difference.” As the text travels from World War II to colonialism, postcolonialism, and the Cold War, from Casablanca to Leopoldville (Kinshasa), it proves to be a necessarily strenuous and provocative trip.
| Author | : |
| Publisher | : LIT Verlag Münster |
| Total Pages | : 263 |
| Release | : |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : 3643999313 |
| Author | : Ruth Sacks |
| Publisher | : University of Michigan Press |
| Total Pages | : 249 |
| Release | : 2023-07-25 |
| Genre | : Art |
| ISBN | : 0472903888 |
Congo Style presents a postcolonial approach to discussing the visual culture of two now-notorious regimes: King Leopold II’s Congo Colony and the state sites of Mobutu Sese Seko’s totalitarian Zaïre. Readers are brought into the living remains of sites once made up of ambitious modernist architecture and art in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the total artworks of Art Nouveau to the aggrandizing sites of post-independence Kinshasa, Congo Style investigates the experiential qualities of man-made environments intended to entertain, delight, seduce, and impress. In her study of visual culture, Ruth Sacks sets out to reinstate the compelling wonder of nationalist architecture from Kinshasa’s post-independence era, such as the Tower of the Exchange (1974), Gécamines Tower (1977), and the artworks and exhibitions that accompanied them. While exploring post-independence nation-building, this book examines how the underlying ideology of Belgian Art Nouveau, a celebrated movement in Belgium, led to the dominating early colonial settler buildings of the ABC Hotels (circa 1908–13). Congo Style combines Sacks’s practice as a visual artist and her academic scholarship to provide an original study of early colonial and independence-era modernist sites in their African context.
| Author | : Sarah Van Beurden |
| Publisher | : Ohio University Press |
| Total Pages | : 505 |
| Release | : 2015-11-25 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0821445456 |
Together, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaire (IMNZ) in the Congo have defined and marketed Congolese art and culture. In Authentically African, Sarah Van Beurden traces the relationship between the possession, definition, and display of art and the construction of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy from the late colonial until the postcolonial era. Her study of the interconnected histories of these two institutions is the first history of an art museum in Africa, and the only work of its kind in English. Drawing on Flemish-language sources other scholars have been unable to access, Van Beurden illuminates the politics of museum collections, showing how the IMNZ became a showpiece in Mobutu’s effort to revive “authentic” African culture. She reconstructs debates between Belgian and Congolese museum professionals, revealing how the dynamics of decolonization played out in the fields of the museum and international heritage conservation. Finally, she casts light on the art market, showing how the traveling displays put on by the IMNZ helped intensify collectors’ interest and generate an international market for Congolese art. The book contributes to the fields of history, art history, museum studies, and anthropology and challenges existing narratives of Congo’s decolonization. It tells a new history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities.
| Author | : Ariella Aïsha Azoulay |
| Publisher | : Verso Books |
| Total Pages | : 657 |
| Release | : 2019-11-19 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1788735714 |
A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share, from one of our most compelling political theorists In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions—an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums—to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as “past” and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.
| Author | : Leila Koivunen |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 437 |
| Release | : 2008-11-19 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 1135856117 |
This study examines and explains how British explorers visualized the African interior in the latter part of the nineteenth century, providing the first sustained analysis of the process by which this visual material was transformed into the illustrations in popular travel books. At that time, central Africa was, effectively, a blank canvas for Europeans, unknown and devoid of visual representations. While previous works have concentrated on exploring the stereotyped nature of printed imagery of Africa, this study examines the actual production process of images and the books in which they were published in order to demonstrate how, why, and by whom the images were manipulated. Thus, the main focus of the work is not on the aesthetic value of pictures, but in the activities, interaction, and situations that gave birth to them in both Africa and Europe.
| Author | : Mary Clare Kidenda |
| Publisher | : Waxmann Verlag |
| Total Pages | : 256 |
| Release | : 2022-04-06 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 383094523X |
The voices in this book offer a multi-perspectival approach to Africa, focusing on the skills and the knowledge underpinning visual cultural expressions ranging from Akan symbolism to embodied performances by dancers and storytellers, even re-designed models of Western cars. Educators, designers, artists, critics, curators, and custodians based both in Africa and in Europe are configuring spaces for public, private, institutional as well as digital conversation – whether through pottery or portraiture, furniture or film, shoes or selfies, buildings or books. Readers are encouraged to question how African visual cultures are both ‘in’ and ‘of’; identifying and confrontational; post- and decolonial; preserved and practised; old and new; borrowed and authentic; composite and complete; rooted and soaring. Disciplines being engaged include visual culture studies, media studies, performance studies, orature, literature, art and design – as well as their histories. The editors Mary Clare Kidenda, Lize Kriel and Ernst Wagner represent three nodes in the Exploring Visual Cultures north-south collaborative network: The Technical University of Kenya, the University of Pretoria in South Africa and Munich Academy of Fine Arts in Germany.
