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Reclaiming Heritage
Struggles over the meaning of the past are common in postcolonial states. State cultural heritage programs build monuments to reinforce in nation building efforts—often supported by international organizations and tourist dollars. These efforts often ignore the other, often more troubling memories preserved by local communities—markers of colonial oppression, cultural genocide, and ethnic identity. Yet, as the contributors to this volume note, questions of memory, heritage, identity and conservation are interwoven at the local, ethnic, national and global level and cannot be easily disentangled. In a fascinating series of cases from West Africa, anthropologists, archaeologists and art historians show how memory and heritage play out in a variety of postcolonial contexts. Settings range from televised ritual performances in Mali to monument conservation in Djenne and slavery memorials in Ghana.
Decolonial Ecologies
In Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art, Joanna Page illuminates the ways in which contemporary artists in Latin America are reinventing historical methods of collecting, organizing, and displaying nature in order to develop new aesthetic and political perspectives on the past and the present. Page brings together an entirely new corpus of artistic projects from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru that engage critically and creatively with forms as diverse as the medieval bestiary, baroque cabinets of curiosities, atlases created by European travellers to the New World, the floras and herbaria composed by eighteenth- and nin...
Curating Human Rights
Curating Human Rights conceptualizes the human rights museum as a dynamic cultural-political genre that interacts with multiple social activist, state and corporate stakeholders. Drawing upon ethnographic and archival research on seven human rights museums in six countries, Ostow examines specifically what these museums do when they set out, or purport, to promote human rights. This includes the stories they visualize, display strategies, educational and other activities, internal structures, the way they position their visitors, the parameters of the human rights they address and the politics of pleasing their multiple stakeholders. The book also explores the contradictions and political an...
Portrait of an Island
The once famous trading center of Gorée, Sénégal today lies in the busy harbor of the modern city of Dakar. From its beginnings as a modest outpost, Gorée became one of the intersections which linked African trading routes to the European Atlantic trade. Then, as now, people of all nationalities poured into the island; Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese came to trade with the Mande, Moor, Tukor, and Wolf tribes. Trading parties brought gold, horses, firewood, mirrors, books, and more. They built houses of various forms, using American lumber, French roof tiles, freshly‑cut straw, and pulverized seashells, and furnished them in as cosmopolitan a fashion as the city itself. Mark Hinc...
Precious Metal
With its incorporation into architecture on a grand scale during the long nineteenth century, steel forever changed the way we perceive and inhabit buildings. In this book, Peter H. Christensen shows that even as architects and engineers were harnessing steel’s incredible properties, steel itself was busy transforming the natural world. Precious Metal explores this quintessentially modernist material—not for the heroic structural innovations it facilitated but for a deeper understanding of the role it played in the steady change of the earth. Focusing on the formative years of the architectural steel economy and on the corporate history of German steel titans Krupp and Thyssen, Christens...
Black People Invented Everything
Who invented the traffic light? What about transportation itself? Farming? Art? Modern chemistry? Who made…cats? What if I told you there was ONE answer to all of these questions? That one answer? BLACK PEOPLE! Seriously. And this book is like a mini-encyclopedia, full of more evidence than WikiLeaks and just as eye-opening! Do you know just how much Black inventors and creators have given to modern society? Within the past 200 years, Black Americans have drawn on a timeless well of inner genius to innovate and engineer the design of the world we live in today. But what of all the Black history before then? Before white people invented the Patent Office, Black folks were the original creat...
What Is African Art?
A history of the evolving field of African art. Peter Probst offers the first book to explore the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. He starts his exploration with a simple question: What do we actually talk about when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Probst identifies the notion of African art as a conceptual vessel whose changing content manifests wider societal transformations. The perspective is a pragmatic and relational one. Rather than providing an affirmative answer to what African art is and what local meanings it has, Probst shows how the works labeled as "African art" figure in the hi...
Under Discussion
Over the last two decades, the encyclopedic museum has been criticized and praised, constantly discussed, and often in the news. Encyclopedic museums are a phenomenon of Europe and the United States, and their locations and mostly Eurocentric collections have in more recent years drawn attention to what many see as bias. Debates on provenance in general, cultural origins, and restitutions of African heritage have exerted pressure on encyclopedic museums, and indeed on all matter of museums. Is there still a place for an institution dedicated to gathering, preserving, and showcasing all the world’s cultures? Donatien Grau’s conversations with international arts officials, museum leaders, ...
Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past
Authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in ancient Africa were made and unmade in their intersection with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power.
