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Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.
This book explores the tribal politics of the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin in the borderland of Egypt and Libya. These tribal politics are part of heterarchy in which sovereignty is shared between tribes, states and other groups and, within this dynamic setting, the local politicians of the Awlad ‘Ali are essential producers of order beyond the framework of the nation state. Based on long-term fieldwork, this monograph is ideal for audiences interested in North African Politics, Libya, Egypt, and borderland studies.
Highlights the role of photography and other forms of aesthetic practice in processes of state formation and bureaucratic transition
This study highlights the agency of African economic actors in the green tea trade between China and West Africa, their unique tea brand designs, their challenges and successes, and the social and cultural context in which they conduct their work.
In tourism, strangers meet face to face. What do Tanzanian Maasai and Western tourists think when they meet? Using a combination of methods that has never been tried in anthropology, or in the field of tourism studies, this work provides novel theoretical insights into the images hosts and guests have of each other, and how their views relate to the interactions they experience. This compelling reflexive study uses video and Q method to contribute to the epistemology of anthropological research in tourism settings, and the construction of a new, more symmetrical anthropology. Dissertation. ***An important contribution to the growing field of the anthropology of tourism, an example of intense and methodical fieldwork, combined with theoretical acumen and deep reflexivity.--Prof. Dr Walter E. A. van Beek (Tilburg U.) (Series: Contributions to African Research / Beitr�¤ge zur Afrikaforschung, Vol. 76) [Subject: African Studies, Tourism Studies, Anthropology, Sociology]
Across Africa, digital media are providing scholars with a reason and opportunity for revisiting the question, and the analytical lens, of publics with new vigour and less normative baggage. This book brings together a rich set of empirically grounded analyses of the diverse digital spaces and networks of communication springing up across the Eastern African region. The contributions offer a plural set of reflections on whether and how we can usefully think about these spaces and networks as convening publics, where citizens come together to discuss matters of common interest. The authors make clear the need to unshackle such studies from slavish acceptance of outsiders’ prescriptions on w...
Focusing on everyday experiences of sexuality in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, this book considers personal narratives and other queer artefacts to shed light on linguistic and performative strategies of resistance, referred to as queer word- and world-making. Questions of non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality in South Africa refer to the politics of words, and to their contested meanings and valuations reflected in the way that they roll off tongues. If sexualities are not merely acts, feelings, or identities, but embodiments of desires which invoke and influence social contexts, assumptions about sexuality as a realm of situated knowledge cannot be trusted at face-value. Taylor Riley considers the meanings coded in words used to depict same-sexualities and the productive silences which surround them, and how those meanings are embraced, altered, and resisted through labors of everyday existence. The volume sheds new light on and personalizes the highly contested meanings which surround queer life and LGBTI rights in South Africa. It will be of interest to scholars and upper-level students of anthropology, queer studies and African studies.
This volume serves to illustrate the promising insights to be gained when cross-fertilizing Cognitive Linguistics and contact linguistics, which each hold crucial ingredients to an encompassing study of contact-induced variation and change. Combining the study of the individual mind with the study of shared context, bridging research on experience and perspective with research on variation and change, and tackling the methodological complexities that this empirical approach to mental categorization entails, help us determine how the meaningful units that make up language are categorized and structured in the bi- and multilingual mind and, by extension, in any human mind. Together, the ten papers in this volume reveal the complexities of the interaction between usage, meaning and mind in contact-induced variation and change, which we hope will inspire future research exploring the possibilities of the cross-fertilization we have labeled Cognitive Contact Linguistics.
The study of code-switching has been carried out from linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives, largely in isolation from each other. This volume attempts to unite these three research strands by placing at the centre of the enquiry the role played by social factors in the occurrence, forms, and outcomes of code-switching. The contributions in this volume are divided into three parts: “code-switching between cognition and socio-pragmatics”, “multilingual interaction and identity”, and “code-switching and social structure”. The case studies represent contact settings on five continents and feature languages with diverse linguistic affiliations. They are predi...
According to Taoist philosophy, every body—not to mention everything in the cosmos—possesses quantities of the five elements: Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, and Wood. Each element has an emotional component (water, for example, is associated with fear), a meridian in the body that can be worked on through somatic exercises like massage, and a moral imperative. Camellia Lee, an energy worker with a family lineage of healing going back generations to Taiwan, explains elements of Taoist philosophy, traditional Chinese medicine, and other related studies through the lens of the Five Elements in an easy-to-understand and enjoyable way. This is a Five-Element plan—with plenty of exercises for introspection, healing, and enlightenment—that anyone can commit to in order to restore order to their bodies, minds, and spirits.