Performance, Art, and Politics in the African Diaspora

Performance, Art, and Politics in the African Diaspora PDF

Author: Myron Beasley

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-29

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 0429639821

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This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora. In this book, Myron M. Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others’ specific locales. The focus is an interrogation of the political systems that dictate and determine the value of lives (and decide which lives matter) through a lens of performance and art. Beasley highlights how the performances of rupture, which are of artistic, and historical significance, reveal both strategies of survival and promises of possibility. Artists and curators examined include Jelili Atiku, Giscard Bouchotte, Nona Faustine, Vanessa German, Simone Leigh, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Ebony G. Patterson, and Dianne Smith. The volume is an ideal research and reference book for students and scholars of Contemporary Art, African Studies, and Performance Theory.

Black Movements

Black Movements PDF

Author: Soyica Diggs Colbert

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2017-04-28

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0813588545

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Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. The post–Jim Crow, post–apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly color blind society and along with it an assault on race-based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. Soyica Diggs Colbert argues that in the late twentieth century race went “underground,” and by the twenty-first century race no longer functioned as an explicit marker of second-class citizenship. The subterranean nature of race manifests itself in discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie, an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear, rather than focusing on structural racism; in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness; in evaluations of black independence struggles in the Caribbean and Africa that allege these movements have accomplished little more than creating a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its former white counterpart. Black Movements intervenes in these discussions by highlighting the ways in which artists draw from the past to create coherence about blackness in present and future worlds. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.

Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora

Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora PDF

Author: Abimbola Adelakun

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-07-26

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 3319913107

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This book explores the politics of artistic creativity, examining how black artists in Africa and the diaspora create art as a procedure of self-making. Essays cross continents to uncover the efflorescence of black culture in national and global contexts and in literature, film, performance, music, and visual art. Contributors place the concerns of black artists and their works within national and transnational conversations on anti-black racism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, migration, resettlement, resistance, and transnational feminisms. Does art by the subaltern fulfill the liberatory potential that critics have ascribed to it? What other possibilities does political art offer? Together, these essays sort through the aesthetics of daily life to build a thesis that reflects the desire of black artists and cultures to remake themselves and their world.

Let's Get it on

Let's Get it on PDF

Author: Catherine Ugwu

Publisher: Institute of Contemporary Art

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13:

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"Produced by ICA Live Arts, a contemporary arts institute in Boston, 'Let's Get It On' features the art of Reza Abdoh, Elia Arce, Chila Kumari Burman, Ronald Fraser-Monro and more as well as essays by Cosco Fusco and bell hooks and others. The collection evaluates various forms of African-American performance art from the circle of the dance under slavery to Carnival and its masquerade of identities, and the validity of the art form in a contemporary society"--Amazon.com.

Arts Management, Cultural Policy, & the African Diaspora

Arts Management, Cultural Policy, & the African Diaspora PDF

Author: Antonio C. Cuyler

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-06-15

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 3030858103

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This book centers people of African descent as cultural leaders to challenge the myth that they do not know how or care about managing and preserving their culture. Arts Management, Cultural Policy, & the African Diaspora also presents comparative case studies of the challenges, differences, similarities, and successes in approaches to cultural leadership across multiple cultural contexts throughout the diaspora. This volume disrupts the enduring and systemic global marginalization, oppression, and subjugation that threatens and undermines people of African descent’s cultural contributions to humanity. The most important distinguishing feature of the volume is its geographical use of the African diaspora to explore the subjects of arts management and cultural policy which, to date, no volume has done before. Furthermore, the volume’s comparative examination of ten critical, historical, practical, and theoretical questions makes it a significant contribution to the literatures in Arts Management, Cultural Policy, Cultural, Africana, African American, and Ethnic studies.

African American Arts

African American Arts PDF

Author: Sharrell D. Luckett

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 9781684481569

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"Signaling recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?"--

Performing Africa

Performing Africa PDF

Author: Paulla A. Ebron

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-04-11

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1400825210

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The jali--a member of a hereditary group of Mandinka professional performers--is a charismatic but contradictory figure. He is at once the repository of his people's history, the voice of contemporary political authority, the inspiration for African American dreams of an African homeland, and the chief entertainment for the burgeoning transnational tourist industry. Numerous journalists, scholars, politicians, and culture aficionados have tried to pin him down. This book shows how the jali's talents at performance make him a genius at representation--the ideal figure to tell us about the "Africa" that the world imagines, which is always a thing of illusion, magic, and contradiction. Africa often enters the global imagination through news accounts of ethnic war, famine, and despotic political regimes. Those interested in countering such dystopic images--be they cultural nationalists in the African diaspora or connoisseurs of "global culture"--often found their representations of an emancipatory Africa on an enthusiasm for West African popular culture and performance arts. Based on extensive field research in The Gambia and focusing on the figure of the jali, Performing Africa interrogates these representations together with their cultural and political implications. It explores how Africa is produced, circulated, and consumed through performance and how encounters through performance create the place of Africa in the world. Innovative and discerning, Performing Africa is a provocative contribution to debates over cultural nationalism and the construction of identity and history in Africa and elsewhere.

Black Movements

Black Movements PDF

Author: Soyica Diggs Colbert

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2017-04-28

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0813588537

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Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. The post–Jim Crow, post–apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly color blind society and along with it an assault on race-based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. Soyica Diggs Colbert argues that in the late twentieth century race went “underground,” and by the twenty-first century race no longer functioned as an explicit marker of second-class citizenship. The subterranean nature of race manifests itself in discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie, an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear, rather than focusing on structural racism; in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness; in evaluations of black independence struggles in the Caribbean and Africa that allege these movements have accomplished little more than creating a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its former white counterpart. Black Movements intervenes in these discussions by highlighting the ways in which artists draw from the past to create coherence about blackness in present and future worlds. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.

African Performance Arts and Political Acts

African Performance Arts and Political Acts PDF

Author: Naomi Andre

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2021-10-28

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0472128752

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African Performance Arts and Political Actspresents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing and gesture, theater and social justice, opera, radio announcements, protest songs, and migrant workers’ dances. The spaces include village communities, city landscapes, prisons, urban hostels, Township theaters, opera houses, and broadcasts through the airwaves on television and radio as well as in cyberspace. Essays focus on case studies from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.

Black Theatre

Black Theatre PDF

Author: Paul Carter Harrison

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2002-11-08

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1566399440

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Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."

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