Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

THE CONCEPT OF THE AVANT-GARDE Prologue Terminological ups-and-downs The two avant-gardes A novel concept, a novel fact THE CONCEPT OF A MOVEMENT Schools and movements The dialectic of movements Activism Antagonism ROMANTICISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE Popularity and unpopularity Romanticism as a precedent Down-with-the-past Anticipations AGONISM AND FUTURISM Nihilism Agonism Futurism Decadence FASHION, TASTE, AND THE PUBLIC Fashion, avant-garde, and stereotype Intelligentsia and elite The intellectual elite The avant-garde and politics THE STATE OF ALIENATION Art and society Psychological and social alienation Econoimic and cultural alienation Stylistic and aesthetic alienation TECHNOLOGY AND THE AVANT-GARDE Experimentalism Scientificism Humorism Nominalistic proof AVANT-GARDE CRITICISM Prerequisites The problem of obscurity Judgment and prejudgment Criticism, right and left AESTHETICS AND POETICS Dehumanization Cerebralism and voluntarism Metaphysics of the metaphor The mystique of purity HISTORY AND THEORY Historical parallels Modernity and modernism The overcoming of the avant-garde Epilogue Bibliography Index

The Theory of the Avant-Garde

1 Contested Cultural Heritage: A Selective Historiography, Helaine Silverman.- 2 The Stratigraphy of Forgetting: The Great Mosque of Cordoba and Its Contested Legacy, D. Fairchild Ruggles.- 3 Aestheticized Geographies of Conflict: The Politicization of Culture and the Culture of Politics in Belfast's Mural Tradition, Alexandra Hartnett.- 4 Blood of Our Ancestors: Cultural Heritage Management in the Balkans, Michael L. Galaty.- 5 Re-imagining the National Past: Negotiating the Roles of Science, Religion, and History in Contemporary British Ghost Tourism, Michele M. Hanks.- 6 Collecting and Repatriating Egypt's Past: Toward a New Nationalism, Salima Ikram.- 7 National Identity Interrupted: The Mutilation of the Parthenon Marbles and the Greek Claim for Repatriation, Vasiliki Kynourgioupoulou.- 8 Syrian National Museums: Regional Politics and the Imagined Community, Kari A. Zobler.- 9 Contestation from the Top: Fascism in the Realm of Culture and Italy's Conception of the Past, Alvaro Higueras.- 10 Touring the Slave Route: Inaccurate Authenticities in Benin, West Africa, Timothy R. Landry.- 11 Carving the Nation: Zimbabwean Sculptors and the Contested Heritage of Aesthetics, Lance L. Larkin.- Afterword, El Pilar and Maya Cultural Heritage: Reflections of a Cheerful Pessimist, Anabel Ford.

Contested cultural heritage: Religion, nationalism, erasure, and exclusion in a global world

Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption. Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing — the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects and spaces, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing materialities. The authors also aim to place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices.

Writing as Material Practice

This text explores the multidisciplinary context of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems from scholars and scholar activists committed to the interrogation, production, articulation, dissemination and general development of endogenous and indigenous modes of intellectual activity and praxis. The work reinforces the demand for the decolonization of the academy and makes the case for a paradigmatic shift in content, subject matter and curriculum in institutions in Africa and elsewhere – with a view to challenging and rejecting disinformation and intellectual servitude. Indigenous intellectual discourses related to diverse disciplines take center stage in this volume with a focus on education, mathematics, medicine, chemistry and engineering in their historical and contemporary context.

African Indigenous Knowledge and the Disciplines

In Senghor’s Shadow is a unique study of modern art in postindependence Senegal. Elizabeth Harney examines the art that flourished during the administration of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegal’s first president, and in the decades since he stepped down in 1980. As a major philosopher and poet of Negritude, Senghor envisioned an active and revolutionary role for modern artists, and he created a well-funded system for nurturing their work. In questioning the canon of art produced under his aegis—known as the Ecole de Dakar—Harney reconsiders Senghor’s Negritude philosophy, his desire to express Senegal’s postcolonial national identity through art, and the system of art schools and exhibits he developed. She expands scholarship on global modernisms by highlighting the distinctive cultural history that shaped Senegalese modernism and the complex and often contradictory choices made by its early artists.

Heavily illustrated with nearly one hundred images, including some in color, In Senghor’s Shadow surveys the work of a range of Senegalese artists, including painters, muralists, sculptors, and performance-based groups—from those who worked at the height of Senghor’s patronage system to those who graduated from art school in the early 1990s. Harney reveals how, in the 1970s, avant-gardists contested Negritude beliefs by breaking out of established artistic forms. During the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Moustapha Dime, Germaine Anta Gaye, and Kan-Si engaged with avant-garde methods and local artistic forms to challenge both Senghor’s legacy and the broader art world’s understandings of cultural syncretism. Ultimately, Harney’s work illuminates the production and reception of modern Senegalese art within the global arena.

In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995

Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art” explores the relationships between African art and the communicative powers of language, graphic systems, and the written word. For thousands of years, African artists have incorporated writing and graphic symbols into their art with great ingenuity and creativity. The exhibition and book seek to increase understanding and awareness of Africa’s legacies of writing and inscription and their prominent place in artistic and expressive culture past and present. Scripts communicate in many ways—through their appearance, their placement, and the very act of writing. Objects dating from ancient times to the contemporary moment illustrate how African artists have used both the diverse forms of letters, words, and symbols and their meanings to create beautiful, empowered works of art (Figs. 1–3). The scripts encountered in this exhibition reveal the complexity of African artistic practices through which the visual force and versatility of language, in its broadest sense, are realized. Scripts are used for the beauty, plasticity, and rhythm of their forms, and also as vehicles to assert identity, contest authority, or embody the divine. NatioNal MuseuM of africaN art May 9–august 26, 2007

Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art

Alors que les historiens de l'art africain s'interessent de plus en plus a l'art africain contemporain, il est fondamental de reexaminer les contributions pionieres d'artistes, de patrons et d'activistes culturels qui ont opere dans l'immediat de la periode post-independance. L'une de ces premieres matrices artistiques fut le milieu autour de l'Ecole de Dakar, qui a joue un role critique dans la definition de l'art moderne et de la figure de l'artiste moderne au Senegal. L'A. analyse les parametres structurels, ideologiques et discursifs de ce canon soutenu par l'Etat et reevalue egalement son iconographie, suggerant des interpretations alternatives de ses productions. Selon l'A., celles-ci representaient des deformations deliberees et creatives du primitivisme europeen.

The Ecole de Dakar: Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

artwork, but also to a specific feature of Senegalese cultural history.3 The nation of Senegal was unique amongst African states because it developed an explicit and well-funded cultural policy which sought to define the identity of the Senegalese, and by extension, African artist and to create an authentically modern African aesthetic which reflected the shared cultural heritage of the continent. One must examine and clarify the effects of this policy before one can understand the environment in which artists

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1360650.pdf

Elizabeth Harney

Papers

In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995

Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art

The Ecole de Dakar: Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

‘Les Chers Enfants’ sans Papa

Transforming the Crown. African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996