Research in African Literatures articles from December 2000

Research in African Literatures archives from December 2000

Introduction.
December 22, 2000... In humanity's artistic legacy innumerable mixtures of words and images exist. However, the various disciplines (largely based on Western models, traditions, and background thinking) doing research on those artistic achievements in general...

African Verbal Arts and the Study of African Visual Aesthetics.
December 22, 2000... In this paper I would like to briefly explore the possibilities that analyses of African verbal arts present for an understanding of aesthetics in African cultures. When used in African studies, by both nonindigenous and indigenous scholars,...

From Bandiagara to Paris: Reflections on the Travels of a Dogon Sign.
December 22, 2000... "What is a sign?" writes Roland Barthes. It is a piece of an image, a fragment of something murmured which I can recognize: without recognition there is no sign ("I Hear" 54). In Dakar, New York, and Paris, the tributes manifested in 1997 for...

The "Discovery" of the African Mask(1).
December 22, 2000... The principal theme in this essay is the part played in Western art by masks from the Niger and Congo basins in Africa (to be referred to after this as Niger-Congo Africa), and the significance of their discovery" in the years preceding and...

African Literature and the Traditional Arts: Speaking Art, Molding Theory.
December 22, 2000... In the effort--to write the African story in European languages, Africans seem to have written themselves out of a lived African history into an alien and transitional narrative world. Though enabling in its capacity to open up Africa to the...

Wild Animals and Heroic Men: Visual and Verbal Arts in the Sogo bo Masquerades of Mali.
December 22, 2000... Throughout the Segou region in Mali, local youth associations perform Sogo bo masquerades. The masquerades are owned and performed by the young men's associations, the kamalen ton. Their annual festivals are defined by the community as...

"Paintings Like Prayers": The Hidden Side of Senegalese Reverse-Glass "Image/Texts".
December 22, 2000... There are no arrested things, only myriad relations "in the making." --Houston Baker, "Beyond Artifacts" 186 Establishing links between African literatures and African arts is both a straightforward and a complex process. In an...

Oral Traditions and Material Culture: An East Africa Experience(1).
December 22, 2000... In this paper I explore the relationship between oral traditions and material culture. Specifically, the paper draws attention to methodological points in researching and writing an ethnography that combines the two disciplines of material...

Aesthetics of Communication: Texts on Textiles (Leso) from the East African Coast (Swahili).
December 22, 2000... The leso,(1) a wrap cloth, is an object of everyday use on which proverbial art is visually represented in writing. It serves as a means of equivocal interpersonal communication (see Bavelas et al.), which is achieved by playing on processes...

Portraying a Story: The Narrative Function of the Human Form in Contemporary Art of South Africa.
December 22, 2000... The image is a desperate recourse against the silence that invades us, every time we try to express the terrible experience of what surrounds us and of ourselves. --Octavio Paz, El Arco y la Lira Contemporary art of South Africa is...

The Verbal and the Visual in a Globalizing Context: African and European Connections as an Ongoing Process.
December 22, 2000... In the twentieth century painters, sculptors, poets, storytellers, novelists, singers, and their works went global. Artists and arts from all over the world and widely different origins started to meet and influence each other. In the fields...

The Thread of the Story: Two South African Women Artists Talk about Their Work.
December 22, 2000... On a sunny afternoon, in the Stadshof Museum in Zwolle, the Netherlands, the South African Allina Ndebele, born in 1939, tells about her work, with her soft voice and singing South African accent. She has just received the Thami Mnyele Award...

Museums and Archaeology in West Africa.
December 22, 2000... Museums and Archaeology in West Africa, ed. Claude Daniel Ardouin. Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution P, in association with The African International Institute, 1997. xiv + 178 pp. ISBN 1-56098-785-5; 0-85255-237-8 (Oxford: James...

Museums and the Community in West Africa.
December 22, 2000... Museums and the Community in West Africa, ed. Claude Daniel Ardouin and Emmanuel Arinze. Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution P; Oxford: James Currey; for the West African Museums Programme in association with The African International...

Beauty in Context: Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics.
December 22, 2000... Beauty in Context: Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics, by Wilfried van Damme. Leiden: E.J. Brill. xv + 400 pp. hardcover. "A thousand African languages and no word for art" was a Dutch newspaper's headline commenting on...

Caribbean Art.
December 22, 2000... Caribbean Art, by Veerle Poupeye. World of Art Series. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. 224 pp. 177 illustrations, 76 in color. ISBN 0-500-20306-7. This is the first, and a much needed, survey of Caribbean art. Veerle Poupeye's...

Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French.
December 22, 2000... Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French, by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Durham: Duke UP, 1900. 100 pp. ISBN 0-8223-2340-0 paper. Black Venus represents a significant addition to the growing...

Imagining Insiders: Africa and the Question of Belonging.
December 22, 2000... Imagining Insiders: Africa and the Question of Belonging, by Mineke Schipper. London: Cassell, 1999. 256 pp. ISBN 0-304-70492-2 paper; 0-304-70168-8 cloth. Imagining Insiders: Africa and the Question of Belonging reads at three levels:...

Les cinemas d'Afrique noire: le regard en question.
December 22, 2000... Les cinemas d'Afrique noire: le regard en question, by Olivier Barlet. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996. This is an excellent book: fresh, graceful, perspicacious, intelligent, current, and always alive with passionate sympathy for its subject....