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This book approaches the reframing of African art through dialogues with collectors, curators, and artists on three continents. It explores museum exhibitions, storerooms, artists’ studios, and venues for community outreach. Part One (Chapters 1-3) addresses the history of ethnographic and art museums, ranging from curiosity cabinets to modernist edifices and virtual websites. Museums are considered in terms of five transformational nodes, which contrast ways in which museums are organized and reach out to their audiences. Diverse groups of artists interact with museums at each node. Part Two (Chapters 4-5) addresses museum practices and art worlds through dialogues with curators and artists examining museums as ecosystems and communities within communities. Processes of display and memory work used by curators and artists are analyzed with semiotic methods to investigate images, signs, and symbols drawn from curating the curators and exploring artists’ experiences. Part Three (Chapters 6-8) introduces new strategies for displaying, disseminating, and reclaiming African art. Approaches include the innovative technology of unmixing and the reframing of art for museums of the future. The book addresses building exchanges through studies of curatorial networks, south-north connections, genre classifications, archives, collections, databases, and learning strategies. These discussions open up new avenues of connectivity that range from local museums to global art markets and environments. In conclusion, the book proposes new methods for interpreting African art inside and outside of museums and remixing the results.

This book expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation diaspora framework that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. This book is arranged around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, the chapters offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America.

This book explores the roles of contemporary urban shrines and their visual traditions in Benin City. It focuses on the charismatic priests and priestesses who are possessed by a pantheon of deities, the communities of devotees, and the artists who make artifacts for their shrines. The visual arts are part of a wider configuration of practices that include song, dance, possession, and healing. These practices provide the means for exploring the relationships of the visual to both the verbal and performance arts that feature at these shrines. The analysis in this book raises fundamental questions about how the art of Benin, and non-Western art histories more generally, are understood. The book throws critical light on the taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin current interpretations and presents an original and revisionist account of Benin art history.

This book argues that scholars too often assume that the state is the most important force behind change in local political communities in Africa. Studies look to the state, and to the impact of government reforms, as ways of understanding processes of development and change. Using the example of Uganda, regarded as one of Africa's few ‘success stories’, the book chronicles the insignificance of the state and the marginal impact of Western development agencies. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a Ugandan village reveals that it is churches, the village court and organizations based on family and kinship obligations which represent the most significant sites of innovation and social transformation. The book offers a new anthropological perspective on how to think about processes of social and political change in poorer parts of the world, and should appeal to anyone interested in African development.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this book examines the emergence of mobility as an enduring and elusive collective value in contemporary Dakar, Senegal. It takes the concept of embouteillage (bottleneck)—a term used primarily to describe the city’s proliferating traffic jams, but also frustrated migration itineraries, tedious bureaucratic lags, overcrowded residential neighborhoods, overburdened infrastructures, the trickle of investment funds, and the scarcity of foreign visas—as both a concrete point of departure and as a theoretical lens for making sense of everyday life and policy in urban Africa and beyond. This book argues that it was in navigating through and engaging with bottlenecks of all sorts that residents grappled most urgently and intimately with the changing nature of citizenship and governance in the capital city. Moreover, the book asserts that the bottleneck, broadly construed, is not peculiar to Dakar but is instead the defining feature of citizen-state relations throughout the Global South. In this way, the book contributes to scholarly literatures on economic policy and practice after structural adjustment; citizenship and governance in a transnational era; urban space and infrastructure in the Global South; and migration and mobility.

This book explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. It focuses on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post-World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. At the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban–suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. As the book demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, the book argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.

This book explores the mass-media landscape of the early twentieth cspecific authorsentury to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. The book examines the literature against global realities through a modernist lens, studying an alternative modernism that challenges the Western European model. Through broad surveys of discussions surrounding Japanese life in the 1920s, the book locates and examines flourishing divergent ideologies of the early twentieth century, such as gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. It unravels how the narrative and linguistic strategies of modernist texts interrogated the innocence of this language, disrupting their hold on people's imagined relationship to daily life. These modernist works often discursively displaced the authority of their own claims by inadvertently exposing the global epistemology of East versus West. The book expands modernism studies into a more translational dialogue by locating subversions within the local historical culture and allowing readers to make connections to the time and place in which the texts were written. In highlighting the unbreakable link between literature and society, it reaffirms the value of modernist fiction and its ability to make us aware of how realities are constructed — and how those realities can be changed.

This book is an examination of the South Atlantic island of St Helena’s involvement in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. In the decades after 1807, British anti-slavery revolved around Sierra Leone, but following the establishment of a British Vice-Admiralty court at St Helena in 1840, this dynamic radically changed. The island became a new hub of naval activity in the region, acting as a base for the West Africa Squadron and a principal receiving depot for captured slave ships and their human cargo. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century over 25,000 ‘recaptive’ or liberated Africans were landed at St Helena. This book provides an account and evaluation of this episode. It begins by considering the geo-political events that brought St Helena into the fray of abolition, and the manner in which colonial policy set in London meshed with practical reality in the distant South Atlantic. The greater part of the book focuses closely on St Helena. It examines the relationship between the Royal Navy and the island during this period of slave-tradesuppression, the operation of the ‘depots’ that were set up to receive the liberated Africans, and the medical treatment that was afforded to them. The lives of the survivors, both in the immediate and longer-term, is also considered, from the limited settlement that occurred on St Helena, to their wider diaspora across the Atlantic world.

This book draws on two decades of research and provides a social and political history of North-Western Ghana. It traces the creation of new ethnic and territorial boundaries, categories and forms of self-understanding, and represents a major contribution to debates on ethnicity, colonialism, and the ‘production of history’. It explores the creation and redefinition of ethnic distinctions and commonalities by African and European actors, showing that ethnicity's power derives from a contradiction: while ethnic identities purport to be non-negotiable, creating permanent bonds, stability and security, the boundaries of the communities created and the associated traits and practices are malleable and adaptable to specific interests and contexts.

“Frottage” elaborates a conceptual framework for the book. It describes how black diasporic geohistories reframe queer studies and how queer studies, in turn, reframe black diaspora studies. I identify three key terms in black diaspora studies: kinship, hybridity, and thinghood. Dominant approaches in black diaspora studies have framed the black diaspora as a search for kinship, whether biological or fictive, creating what I describe as a genealogical imperative for black diasporic intellectual and cultural production. Attempting to redress this genealogical imperative, and the racial and ethnic policing it produces, scholars including Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy advanced the concept of hybridity, arguing that the cultural promiscuities produced through immigration and urbanization offered a way to imagine blackness as strategic and coalitional, rather than biological and ethnic. As the concept of hybridity moved from its black British context to the United States, it was appropriated by a genealogical imperative that privileged biological mixing as a “solution” to the problem of ethno-racial antagonisms. Thus, “hybridity” became a hetero-reproductive structure. I break from this genealogical imperative by arguing that “thinghood,” as theorized by Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten, provides an alternative paradigm for theorizing black being. I argue that “thinghood” is the central challenge that black diaspora studies poses for queer studies. The chapter introduces the four key figures in the book: Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay.

In a work that challenges the notion that fundamentalism is an appropriate analytical frame for understanding Muslim societies, Benjamin Soares explores different, and often seemingly contradictory, ways of being Muslim in Mali. In an innovative combination of anthropology, history, and social theory, he traces the transformations in ideas about Islam and authority and conventions of religious practice in a major Islamic religious centre from the late nineteenth century, through French colonial rule, and in the postcolonial period. Drawing on extensive ethnography, archival research, and written sources, he provides a richly detailed discussion of Muslim religious practice—Sufism, Islamic reform, and other ways of being Muslim—in Nioro du Sahel in western Mali and more broadly in the country. Using an original analytical perspective, he shows the historical importance of more standardized ways of being Muslim and the centrality of exceptional charismatic leaders, Muslim saints, in the development of 'the prayer economy' in the postcolonial period. He analyzes some of the contradictions and tensions in this economy of religious practice in which certain Muslim saints offer blessings and prayers in exchange for substantial gifts. In addition, he considers the implications of the recent expansion of the public sphere and increased global interconnections for the practice of Islam. This study is a major contribution to the study of Islam in Africa and will be welcomed by scholars and students in history, religion, and the social sciences, particularly those interested in anthropology, Islam, colonialism and the public sphere.

This book is an account of murder and politics in Africa, and a historical ethnography of southern Annang communities during the colonial period. Its narrative leads to events between 1945 and 1948, when the imperial gaze of police, press and politicians was focused on a series of mysterious deaths in south-eastern Nigeria attributed to the ‘man-leopard society’. These murder mysteries, reported as the ‘biggest, strangest murder hunt in the world’, were not just forensic but also related to the broad historical impact of commercial, Christian and colonial aid relations on Annang society.

How do those on the margins of modernity face the challenges of globalization? This book demonstrates that secrecy is one of the means by which a society on the fringe of modernity produces itself as locality. Focusing on initiation rituals, masked performances, and modern art, this study shows that rituals and performances long deemed obsolete serve the insertion of their performers in the world at their own terms. The Jola and Mandinko people of the Casamance region in Senegal have always used their rituals and performances to incorporate the impact of Islam, colonialism, capitalism and contemporary politics. Their performances of secrecy have accommodated these modern powers and continue to do so today. The performers incorporate the modern and redefine modernity through secretive practices. Their traditions are not modern inventions, but traditional ways of dealing with modernity. This book shows that secrecy, performed as a weapon of the weak, empowers their performers. Secrecy serves to mark boundaries and define the local in the global.

Studies of the media in Africa, incorporating both African and international perspectives, are few. The thirty chapters collected here were presented as papers at a seminar organised and hosted by the Kenya-based Twaweza Communications and the International African Institute in Nairobi in 2004. They demonstrate how media outlets are used to perpetuate, question or modify the unequal power relations between the North and the South. Focusing on east Africa, the chapters include discussions of the construction of old and new social entities, as defined by class, gender, ethnicity, political and economic differences, wealth, poverty, cultural behaviour, language and religion. The chapters illustrate how there is increasing control by local people of traditional and modern forms of media. Globalisation is being countered by local responses, within the context of social and cultural identities. Essentially, the book describes the tensions between the global and the local, tensions not often discussed in media studies, thus pioneering new debates.

Medicine murder involved the cutting of body parts from victims, usually while they were still alive, to be used for the preparation of medicines intended to enhance the power of the perpetrators. A startling increase in cases of medicine murder apparently took place in Basutoland (now Lesotho), in southern Africa, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It gave rise to a dramatic crisis of late colonial rule. Was this increase a real one? If so, why did it happen? How far does it explain the crisis? What other factors contributed? This book offers some comprehensive answers to these difficult, complex and controversial questions and a highly readable analysis of how the crisis arose and of how it fell away. The chapters draw sensitively and critically on many different and often conflicting sources of evidence.

Nigeria’s Nollywood is among the world’s largest film industries and is the most powerful expression of contemporary African culture. This book provides an overview of the industry and its history while focusing on Nollywood’s major themes and genres. Nollywood arose at the intersection of African popular culture and the decay of formal state institutions, including television broadcasting. Born at a moment of economic, political, social, spiritual, and moral crisis, its most characteristic themes address this situation from a popular perspective. Nollywood’s technological basis (piracy-prone video) and its economic basis in informal market trading have led to a staggeringly high rate of production. Films are produced quickly and on very low budgets and are therefore inevitably generic. Much of the meaning and cultural power of Nollywood lies in these collective generic forms. Nollywood’s genres are sometimes related to transnational film and television culture, but they are essentially original forms arising from specific values and tensions in Nigerian society and history. Nollywood is strongly linked to the Igbo and Yoruba cultures, but the horizon of its imagination is national; the processes of hybridity and homogenization that constitute this national imagination in turn have facilitated Nollywood’s remarkable diffusion throughout Africa and the African diaspora. The book is based on more than twenty years of interviewing and research. Its method holds the description of genres and the forces that shape them in creative tension with detailed readings of particular films and profiles of leading film auteurs.

This book examines the evolution of a distinctive Yoruba community, Remo, and the central role played in this process by the Remo-born nationalist and Yoruba leader Obafemi Awolowo (1909–87). Since the nineteenth century, popular participation has played an important role in challenging or confirming local hierarchies in Remo. This historical dynamic had a significant impact on Awolowo's vision both for Yoruba and Nigerian politics. When Awolowo moved into national politics in the 1950s, his career at the national level also gave him the opportunity to shape Remo's political identity. He was both a product and a producer of Remo politics. Based on a subtle analysis of local-level politics, the book argues that traditional and modern participatory structures play an important role both in Yoruba politics and in the African postcolonial state. At the same time, its focus on Awolowo makes an important contribution to the scholarly debate on one of Nigeria's most important politicians.

This book provides an approach to the anthropological study of philosophical discourses in the Swahili context of Mombasa, Kenya. In this historically established Muslim environment, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, philosophy is investigated as social discourse and intellectual practice, situated in everyday life. This is done from the perspective of an ‘anthropology of philosophy’, a project that is spelt out in the opening chapter. Entry points and guidelines for the ethnography are provided by discussions of Swahili literary genres, life histories, and social debates. From here, local discourses of knowledge are described and analysed. The social environment and discursive dynamics of the Old Town are portrayed, firstly, by means of following and contextualising informal discussions among neighbours and friends at daily meeting points in the streets; and secondly, by presenting and discussing in-depth case studies of local intellectuals and their contributions to moral and intellectual debates within the community. Taking recurrent internal discussions on social affairs, politics, and appropriate Islamic conduct as a focus, this study sheds light on local practices of critique and reflection. In particular, three local intellectuals (two poets, one Islamic scholar) are portrayed against the background of regional intellectual history, Islamic scholarship, and common public debates and private discussions. The three contextual portrayals discuss exemplary issues for the wider field of research on philosophical discourse in Mombasa and the Swahili context on the whole, with reference to the lives and projects of distinct individual thinkers.

This book unearths the little-known story of Johannesburg’s MuseumAfrica, a South African history museum that embodies one of the most dynamic and fraught stories of colonialism and postcolonialism, its life spanning the eras before, during, and after apartheid. In examining this story, it sheds new light not only on racism and its institutionalization in South Africa but also on the problems facing any museum that is charged with navigating colonial history from a postcolonial perspective. Drawing on thirty years of personal letters and public writings by museum founder John Gubbins, the book paints a picture of a uniquely progressive colonist, focusing on the philosophical notion of “three-dimensional thinking,” which aimed to transcend binaries and thus racism. Unfortunately, Gubbins died within weeks of the museum’s opening, and his hopes would go unrealized as the museum fell in line with emergent apartheid politics. Following the museum through this transformation and on to its 1994 reconfiguration as a post-apartheid institution, the book showcases it as a rich and problematic archive of both material culture and the ideas that surround that culture, arguing for its continued importance in the establishment of a unified South Africa.

How are we to explain the so-called "resurgence" of chiefs – or, more accurately, of indigenous sovereigns – in contemporary Africa, figures who were supposed to disappear with modernity, but are a rising, vocal force in many places across the continent today? What are we to make of the increasingly assertive politics of custom, also long said to be losing its aura under the impact of Universal History? What might both of these things have to do with transformations in the state, the workings of global political economy, and the changing social geography of the planet? These questions have pressed themselves forcibly, alike in Africa and way beyond, on scholars and social activists, on organic intellectuals and media commentators, in policy communities and digital publics. This volume addresses those questions by taking a wide view – it explores chiefship and the customary across Southern, Central, and West Africa – in order to account for this counter-intuitive chapter in the contemporary history of Africa, one that few mainstream social scientists would have anticipated.