Book•
In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995
23 Nov 2004-
TL;DR: In Senghor's Shadow as discussed by the authors, Harney examines the art that flourished during the administration of Senegor, Senegal's first president, and in the decades since he stepped down in 1980.
Abstract: 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.
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01 Dec 2011
TL;DR: In this article, Goldwasser et al. discuss the role of science, religion, and history in contemporary British Ghost Tourism, and present a survey of the past, present, and future of Ghost Tourism.
Abstract: 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.
103 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take a rhetorical question posed by Ernest Gellner and reframes it to ask whether a sense of national identity can be forged through everyday acts of consumption, in particular, that of food and drink.
Abstract: This paper takes a rhetorical question posed by Ernest Gellner and reframes it to ask whether a sense of national identity can be forged through everyday acts of consumption – in particular, that of food and drink. The article finds value in Benedict Anderson’s conception of the nation as an imagined community, but argues that it makes little sense to privilege the printed word over other forms of consumption. The article goes on to suggest that there have been significant convergences at the level of consumption, but that not all of this has led to reflection about what it means to be a member of the nation. Some lessons are drawn from literatures about music and dress, following which the attention turns to alcoholic drinks and everyday foodstuffs. The history of the consumption of beer and wine in South Africa is used as a case study for convergence in a least likely scenario. The discussion on food observes that while cuisine is not a matter of debate in many African countries, in some countries, like Ethiopia and Senegal, it is taken very seriously indeed. In South Africa, there are ongoing efforts to posit food preferences as something distinctively South African. Although the braai is often discussed in a lighthearted manner, the promotion of a sense of awareness about what all South Africans share in terms of eating habits also has a more serious side to it.
24 citations
DOI•
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: In this article, an ethnographic and historical examination of Senegalese modern identity and cosmopolitanism through urban dance music was conducted in the city of Dakar, Senegal.
Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical
examination of Senegalese modern identity and cosmopolitanism
through urban dance music. My central argument is that local
popular culture thrives not in spite of transnational influences
and processes, but as a result of a Senegalese cosmopolitanism that
has long valued the borrowing and integration of foreign ideas,
cultural practices, and material culture into local lifeways. My
research focuses on the articulation of cosmopolitanism through
mbalax, an urban dance music distinct to Senegal and valued by
musicians and fans for its ability to shape, produce, re-produce,
and articulate overlapping ideas of their ethnic, racial,
generational, gendered, religious, and national identities.
Specifically, I concentrate on the practice of black, Muslim, and
Wolof identities that Senegalese urban dance music articulates most
consistently. The majority of my fieldwork was carried out in the
nightclubs and neighborhoods in Dakar, the capital city. I
performed with different mbalax groups and witnessed how the
practices of Wolofness, blackness, and Sufism layered and
intersected to articulate a modern Senegalese identity, or
Senegaleseness. This ethnographic work was complimented by research
in recording studios, television studios, radio stations, and
research institutions throughout Senegal.The dissertation begins
with an historical inquiry into the foundations of Senegalese
cosmopolitanism from precolonial Senegambia and the spread of Wolof
hegemony, to colonial Dakar and the rise of a distinctive urban
Senegalese identity that set the proximate conditions for the
postcolonial cultural policy of Negritude and mbalax. Subsequent
chapters focus on the practices of Wolofness, Sufism, and blackness
articulated through mbalax.
15 citations
Book•
10 Jul 2017TL;DR: The Haitian Revolution may have galvanized subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and 'Frenchness' for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle of women and men of color for rights under the French colonial regime as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The Haitian Revolution may have galvanized subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and 'Frenchness' for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle of women and men of color for rights under the French colonial regime. Through political activism ranging from armed struggle to literary expression, these colonial subjects challenged and exploited promises in French Republican rhetoric that should have contradicted the continued use of slavery in the Americas and the introduction of exploitative labor in the colonization of Africa. They defined an alternative French citizenship, which recognized difference, particularly race, as part of a 'universal' French identity. Spanning Atlantic port cities in Haiti, Senegal, Martinique, Benin, and France, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on citizenship, race, empire, and gender, and it sheds new light on debates around human rights and immigration in contemporary France.
14 citations
01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: In his inaugural speech titled “Mandate to Greatness, he spoke of a "national greatness" founded on the patriotism of forebears who had built the edifice of the "first modern republic in Asia and Africa" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: “This nation can be great again.” This was how Ferdinand Marcos enchanted the electorate in 1965 when he won his first presidential election at a time when the Philippines “prided itself on being the most ‘advanced’ in the region”.1 In his inaugural speech titled “Mandate to Greatness”, he spoke of a “national greatness” founded on the patriotism of forebears who had built the edifice of the “first modern republic in Asia and Africa”.2 Marcos conjured prospects of encompassing change: “This vision rejects and discards the inertia of centuries. It is a vision of the jungles opening up to the farmers’ tractor and plow, and the wilderness claimed for agriculture and the support of human life; the mountains yielding their boundless treasure, rows of factories turning the harvests of our fields into a thousand products.” 3 This line on greatness may prove salient in the discussion of the avantgarde in Philippine culture in the way it references “greatness” as a marker of the “progressive” as well as of the “massive”. “Greatness” refers to physical prowess and intellectual acumen, a transformative capacity to turn condition into potential. To conceive of something as great is to invest it with the transcendent and, in the same vein, to make it speak to the common, to the mass of people who must make it real with audacity. The other word “Total Community Response”:
14 citations