Sacred waters

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Chris Spring

"Angaza Afrika - the Swahili for 'shed light on Africa' - is a statement of this book's mission: to illuminate Africa's immensely fertile artistic landscape. Africa has emerged from its colonial past and is asserting its own identity. African art is not only confined to the continent itself, but has spread throughout the world. From the enforced migrations of the slave trade through the upheavals of the post-colonial period, African art and artists are also now established in Europe, North America, the Carribean and South America." "This book brings together more than 60 of Africa's most creative contemporary artists. Their work leaps off the page with more than 350 colour images. In addition to painters, sculptors and photographers, there are also a number of artists whose work embraces performance and installation. The materials they use range from the traditional to the highly unorthodox, as does their imagery." "This is the first book on contemporary African art to harness the creative energy pulsating from not only the continent but also from the rich global community that has developed outside it."--Jacket.

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Fritz Kramer

This remarkable and controversial book explores the ways in which colonial Europeans have been represented in African ritual art and drama. Through a profound re-examination of Western concepts of otherness and mimesis, the anthropologist and art historian Fritz Kramer shows that African images of Europeans - in sculpture, masquerades and, above all, spirit possession - are the reverse and also the counterpart of European images of the Other as savage, whether noble or. Ignoble. For Africans, Europeans belonged to the realm of nature, to a state of innocence. Rejecting the modernist view of African art as abstract, Kramer insists on its mimetic qualities. These rituals are representations of something experienced, although the experiences have been transformed into spirits. In ways which may echo nineteenth-century European realism, they reveal the power of the visible, of the telling, obsessive detail: a feather, a shirt, or the. Eponymous red fez which runs like a leitmotiv through spirit possession cults of the early colonial period. Just as one danced an ancestor or an animal, so one could dance a motor-car or an aeroplane, possessed by the spirit of the thing. The Red Fez is certainly a book of wonders but, more importantly, it is a study of wonderment. Fritz Kramer takes his readers through a hall of mirrors, in which can be found startling likenesses of ourselves and our culture. By. Different paths, Kramer leads us through another world back to our own, presenting a challenge to anthropology and indeed to social science as a whole.

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Jean Kennedy

"Although modern African literature and music have become well known in the West, through the contributions of such famous authors as Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head and such popular musicians as King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the continent's vast body of modern visual arts has been little explored." "In New Currents, Ancient Rivers Jean Kennedy surveys African art of the last fifty years, offering an expansive perspective on the visual arts of the continent. Just as ancient rivers flow through the modern African landscape, so too do the rituals and traditions of the past run deeply through modern African art. The past is able to coexist in vibrant synthesis with the present largely because of a critical constant in African culture, the acceptance of change." "The culmination of twenty years' research, New Currents, Ancient Rivers is the largest survey of contemporary African art, presenting nearly 150 artists of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and South Africa--painters, sculptors, fiber artists, printmakers, and filmmakers. As Kennedy examines their artistic development, she shows the many ways the artists meld elements from modern life, the legacy of colonialism, foreign technology, the natural world, and the past to create art that may be divorced from the original purposes of ritual but that still embraces traditional rhythms. The author also briefly discusses the influence of the oral and literary traditions on the visual arts." "New Currents, Ancient Rivers is a tribute to the vitality and diversity of a continent and its peoples. This progressive book recognizes individual artists, many of whom are virtually unknown in Europe and the United States."--Jacket.

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Matthew Glass

In late 1979 President Jimmy Carter approved the deployment of the MX weapons system, dubbed "man's largest project," across millions of acres of Great Basin land in Nevada and Utah. Officials sought to enlist citizen support with offers of jobs and calls for patriotic sacrifice. A coalition of ranchers, environmentalists, Western Shoshones, and Mormons battled with words and protest for two years to keep the weapons system out of their homelands. Drawing on interviews and records of involved organizations, Matthew Glass recounts the story of the citizens' struggle against the national security bureaucracy. He applies the critical social theory of Jurgen Habermas to show how the coalition's discourse differed from that of other antinuclear groups, undercutting in the process the role nuclear weapons have often played within the civil religion of American nationalism, a fact that may have contributed to the movement's success.