Authors: Paul S. Landau (Editor), Deborah D. (Eds.) Kaspin, Deborah Kaspin
ISBN-13: 9780520229495, ISBN-10: 0520229495
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of California Press
Date Published: October 2002
Edition: 1st Edition
Paul S. Landau is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland at College Park, and author of The Realm of the World: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (1995). Deborah D. Kaspin is an independent scholar.
Figurative images have long played a critical, if largely unexamined, role in Africamediating relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the state and the individual, and the global and the local. This pivotal volume considers the meaning and power of images in African history and culture. Paul S. Landau and Deborah Kaspin have assembled a wide-ranging collection of essays dealing with specific visual forms, including monuments, cinema, cartoons, domestic and professional photography, body art, world fairs, and museum exhibits. The contributors, experts in a number of disciplines, discuss various modes of visuality in Africa and of Africa, investigating the interplay of visual images with personal identity, class, gender, politics, and wealth.
Integral to the argument of the book are over seventy contextualized illustrations. Africans saw foreigners in margarine wrappers, Tintin cartoons, circus posters, and Hollywood movies; westerners gleaned impressions of Africans from colonial exhibitions, Tarzan films, and naturalist magazines. The authors provide concrete examples of the construction of Africa's image in the modern world. They reveal how imperial iconographies sought to understand, deny, control, or transform authority, as well as the astonishing complexity and hybridity of visual communication within Africa itself.
List of Illustrations | ||
Preface | ||
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction: An Amazing Distance: Pictures and People in Africa | 1 | |
1 | "Our Mosquitoes Are Not So Big": Images and Modernity in Zimbabwe | 41 |
2 | The Sleep of the Brave: Graves as Sites and Signs in the Colonial Eastern Cape | 56 |
3 | Tintin and the Interruptions of Congolese Comics | 90 |
4 | Cartooning Nigerian Anticolonial Nationalism | 124 |
5 | Empires of the Visual: Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa | 141 |
6 | Portraits of Modernity: Fashioning Selves in Dakarois Popular Photography | 172 |
7 | Mami Wata and Santa Marta: Imag(in)ing Selves and Others in Africa and the Americas | 193 |
8 | "Captured on Film": Bushmen and the Claptrap of Performative Primitives | 212 |
9 | Decentering the Gaze at French Colonial Exhibitions | 233 |
10 | The Politics of Bushman Representations | 253 |
11 | Ornada Art at the Crossroads of Colonialisms | 275 |
12 | Bad Copies: The Colonial Aesthetic and the Manjaco-Portuguese Encounter | 294 |
Conclusion: Signifying Power in Africa | 320 | |
Bibliography | 337 | |
List of Contributors | 371 | |
Index | 375 |