Books in the African Expressive Cultures series

Performance as public enactment of justice and human rights

In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.

Focusing on a single Malian textile identified variously as bogolanfini, bogolan, or mudcloth, Victoria L. Rovine traces the dramatic technical and stylistic innovations that have transformed the cloth from its village origins into a symbol of new internationalism.

In 1978, Patrick McNaughton witnessed a bird dance masquerade in the small town of Dogoduman. He was so affected by this performance that its artistic power has never left him. Here, he considers the components of the performance, its pace, the performers, and what it means for understandings of Bamana and West African aesthetics and culture.

Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee bring together a compelling collection that shows how interviews can be used to generate new meaning and how connecting with artists and their work can transform artistic production into innovative critical insights and knowledge. The contributors to this volume include artists, museum curators, art historians, and anthropologists, who address artistic production in a variety of locations and media to question previous uses of interview and provoke alternative understandings of art.

Sango - the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning - is a powerful, fearful deity who controls the forces of nature. This title explores Sango religious traditions in West Africa and beyond. It considers the spread of polytheistic religious traditions from West Africa, the mythic Sango, the historical Sango, and syncretic traditions of Sango worship.

How does South Africa deal with public art from its years of colonialism and apartheid? How do new monuments address fraught histories and commemorate heroes of the struggle? Across South Africa, statues commemorating figures such as Cecil Rhodes have provoked heated protests, while new works commemorating icons of the liberation struggle have also sometimes proved contentious. In this lively volume, Kim Miller, Brenda Schmahmann and an international group of contributors explore how works in the public domain in South Africa serve as a forum in which important debates about race, gender, identity and nationhood play out. Examining statues and memorials as well as performance, billboards, and other temporal modes of communication, the authors of these essays consider the implications of not only the exposure, but also erasure of events and icons from the public domain. Revealing how public visual expressions articulate histories and memories, they explore how such works may serve as a forum in which tensions surrounding race, gender, identity, or nationhood play out.

Colonial Africa saw an explosion of writing and printing. This book considers the profusion of literary culture, the propensity to collect and archive text, and the significance attached to reading as a form of self-improvement. It also explores the innovative, intense, and sociable interest in reading and writing.

Expands our understanding of the world of women in West Africa and their complex and subtle roles as verbal artists.

An insight into the meaning and value of popular forms of expression during a time of political and social change in East Africa.

Tabloids hotly debated in South Africa

From clothing as an expression of freedom in early colonial Zanzibar to Somali women's headcovering in inner-city Minneapolis, this work explores the power of dress in African and pan-African settings. Nationalist and diasporic identities, as well as their histories and politics, are examined at the level of what is put on the body every day.

Staging a new politics of performance in the African diaspora

The dynamism and creativity of African fashion

The pulse of Africa's growing music scene

Politics and culture in everyday apparel