Race, Anthropology, and Politics in the Work of Wifredo Lam

Race, Anthropology, and Politics in the Work of Wifredo Lam
Author: Claude Cernuschi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2019-05-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351187856

This book reinterprets Wifredo Lam’s work with particular attention to its political implications, focusing on how these implications emerge from the artist’s critical engagement with 20th-century anthropology. Field work conducted in Cuba, including the witnessing of actual Afro-Cuban religious ritual ceremonies and information collected from informants, enhances the interpretive background against which we can construe the meanings of Lam's art. In the process, Claude Cernuschi argues that Lam hoped to fashion a new hybrid style to foster pride and dignity in the Afro-Cuban community, as well as counteract the acute racism of Cuban culture.

Digital Mapping and Indigenous America

Digital Mapping and Indigenous America
Author: Janet Berry Hess
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2021-03-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000367142

Employing anthropology, field research, and humanities methodologies as well as digital cartography, and foregrounding the voices of Indigenous scholars, this text examines digital projects currently underway, and includes alternative modes of "mapping" Native American, Alaskan Native, Indigenous Hawaiian and First Nations land. The work of both established and emerging scholars addressing a range of geographic regions and cultural issues is also represented. Issues addressed include the history of maps made by Native Americans; healing and reconciliation projects related to boarding schools; language and land reclamation; Western cartographic maps created in collaboration with Indigenous nations; and digital resources that combine maps with narrative, art, and film, along with chapters on archaeology, place naming, and the digital presence of elders. This text is of interest to scholars working in history, cultural studies, anthropology, Native American studies, and digital cartography.

El Monte

El Monte
Author: Lydia Cabrera
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 606
Release: 2023-04-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478023341

First published in Cuba in 1954 and appearing here in English for the first time, Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte is a foundational and iconic study of Afro-Cuban religious and cultural traditions. Drawing on conversations with elderly Afro-Cuban priests who were one or two generations away from the transatlantic slave trade, Cabrera combines ethnography, history, folklore, literature, and botany to provide a panoramic account of the multifaceted influence of Afro-Atlantic cultures in Cuba. Cabrera details the natural and spiritual landscape of the Cuban monte (forest, wilderness) and discusses hundreds of herbs and the constellations of deities, sacred rites, and knowledge that envelop them. The result is a complex spiritual and medicinal architecture of Afro-Cuban cultures. This new edition of what is often referred to as “the Santería bible” includes a new foreword, introduction, and translator notes. As a seminal work in the study of the African diaspora that has profoundly impacted numerous fields, Cabrera’s magnum opus is essential for scholars, activists, and religious devotees of Afro-Cuban traditions alike.

Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art

Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art
Author: Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2022-08-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000627101

This book examines Afrofuturism in African American art, focusing specifically on images of black women and how those images expand the discourse of representation in visual culture of the United States. This volume defines a visual language of Afrofuturism that includes materiality, temporality, and black liberation. Elizabeth Hamilton discusses the visual progenitors of Afrofuturism. In the artworks of Pierre Bennu, Sanford Biggers, Alison Saar, Mequitta Ahuja, Robert Pruitt, Renee Cox, Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Alma Thomas, and Harriet Powers, the fantastic narratives of Afrofuturism are uncovered through in-depth case studies. These case studies engage with Afrofuturism as a black feminist visual theory that helps to unburden the images of black women from the stereotypical visual scripts that are so common in contemporary visual culture of the United States. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, American literature, gender studies, popular culture, and African American studies.

Egon Schiele and the Art of Popular Illustration

Egon Schiele and the Art of Popular Illustration
Author: Claude Cernuschi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2022-09-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000648354

Presenting a radically different picture of Egon Schiele’s work, this study documents (in one-to-one comparisons) the extent of the artist’s visual borrowings from the Viennese humoristic journal, Die Muskete. Claude Cernuschi analyzes each comparison on a case-by-case basis, primarily because the interpretation of cartoons and caricatures is highly contingent on their specific historical and cultural context. Although this connection has gone unnoticed in the literature, in retrospect, this correlation makes perfect sense. Not only was Schiele’s artistic production frequently compared to caricature (and derided for being “grotesque”), but Expressionism and caricature are natural allies. One may belong to “high” art and the other to “popular” culture, yet both presuppose similar assumptions and deploy a similar rhetorical position: namely, that the exaggeration of human physiognomy allows deeper psychological “truths” to emerge. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, popular culture, and politics.

Animality and Humanity in French Late Modern Representations of Black Femininity

Animality and Humanity in French Late Modern Representations of Black Femininity
Author: Elodie Silberstein
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000628477

This volume examines the evolution of the depictions of black femininity in French visual culture as a prism through which to understand the Global North’s destructive relationship with the natural world. Drawing on a broad spectrum of archives extending back to the late 18th century – paintings, fashion plates, prints, photographs, and films – this study traces the intricate ways a patriarchal imperialism and a global capitalism have paired black women with the realm of nature to justify the exploitation both of people and of ecosystems. These dehumanizing and speciesist strategies of subjugation have perpetuated interlocking patterns of social injustice and environmental depletion that constitute the most salient challenges facing humankind today. Through a novel approach that merges visual studies, critical race theory, and animal studies, this interdisciplinary investigation historicizes the evolution of the boundaries between human and non-human animals during the modern period. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, critical race theory, colonial and post-colonial studies, animal studies, and French studies.

Imaging Migration in Post-War Britain

Imaging Migration in Post-War Britain
Author: Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2022-04-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000583856

This book examines the artistic practices of a range of British-based artists of East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese) heritage to consider the social, political and cultural effects of migration or diaspora on their creative production. Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk demonstrates three themes: the multiplicity and expansive contemporaneity of these artists’ visual oeuvres; the physical impact or interpretation of migratory circumstances on their artistic practices; and the necessity to continue to evolve ways of thinking about migration, race and border crossings in the current political climate of the 21st century. The book will be of interest to scholars studying art history, Asian studies, British studies, migration and diaspora studies, and cultural studies.

The Iconology of Abstraction

The Iconology of Abstraction
Author: Krešimir Purgar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2020-06-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429557574

This book uncovers how we make meaning of abstraction, both historically and in present times, and examines abstract images as a visual language. The contributors demonstrate that abstraction is not primarily an artistic phenomenon, but rather arises from human beings’ desire to imagine, understand and communicate complex, ineffable concepts in fields ranging from fine art and philosophy to technologies of data visualization, from cartography and medicine to astronomy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in image studies, visual studies, art history, philosophy and aesthetics.

Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia

Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia
Author: Natasha Eaton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2020-12-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000262553

Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia questions what are ideas of vertiginous collecting, art-making and museums as expanded fields, including wonder houses and missionary museums (or museobuses) in Britain and South Asia. If the historiography of British India has privileged photography and the 'Imperial Picturesque', the emphasis here is on the formation of a creole modernity, one that considers the relationship between art and labour, including pearlescence and pearl fishing in Sri Lanka, and the iconoclastic/fetish debates and forms of collecting amongst missionaries. Eaton explores these themes alongside the genealogies and modernities of white(ness) in contemporary curating and amateur female practice, and how the museobus or museum as a unique object has informed the work of contemporary artist group Raqs Media Collective. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, Asian history, and imperial and colonial history.

The Afro-Descendant Woman in Latin American Diasporic Visual Art

The Afro-Descendant Woman in Latin American Diasporic Visual Art
Author: Rosita Scerbo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2024-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1040089526

By studying multiple cultural expressions of Blackness throughout different regions of the Americas, the chapters of this book consider the relationship that social and historical processes such as sovereignty and colonialism have on cultural productions made by and about Black Latin American women. Rosita Scerbo analyzes a range of power dynamics as represented in different artistic media of the Afro-Latin/x American community, including photography, muralism, performance, paintings, and digital art. The book acknowledges that racial and gender equity cannot exist without Intersectionality and that is why the entirety of the chapters focus on cultural and visual productions exclusively created by Afro-descendant women. The Black Latin American women featured in the various chapters, spanning multiple artistic mediums and originating from various Latin American and Caribbean nations, including Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Cuba, collectively pursue the central aim of foregrounding the Afro-descendant woman’s experience. Simultaneously, they strive to enhance the visibility and acknowledgment of gendered Afro-diasporic culture within the Latin American context. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s studies, Latin American studies, African diaspora studies, and race and ethnic studies.