Beautiful/ugly : African and diaspora aesthetics

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Title:

Author:

Nuttall, Sarah.

ISBN:

9780822339182

9780822339076

Publication Information:

Durham, N.C. ; London : Duke University Press, 2006.

Physical Description:

416 p. : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 23 cm.

General Note:

Formerly CIP.

Contents:

Introduction : rethinking beauty / Sarah Nuttall -- Picasso, Africa and the schemata of difference / Simon Gikandi -- Variations on the beautiful in Congolese worlds of sound / Achille Mbembe -- Two thoughts on drawing beauty / William Kentridge -- The place of beauty : reflections on Elaine Scarry and Zakes Mda / Rita Barnard -- Quelle Liberte : art, beauty and the grammars of resistance in Douala / Dominique Malaquais -- Fresh stories / Pippa Stein -- The love of the body : Ousmane Sow and beauty / Els van der Plas -- Inheritance / Mark Gevisser -- Let's eat : banquet aesthetics and social epicurism / Celestin Monga -- Let's cook! / Francoise Verges -- On the slipperiness of food / Cheryl-Ann Michael -- Afro-aesthetics in Brazil / Patricia Pinho -- Yoruba aesthetics and trans-Atlantic imaginaries / Kamari Maxine Clarke -- Urban imaging : the Friche waiting to happen / Rodney Place -- Things ugly : Ghanaian popular painting / Michelle Gilbert.

Two stories : old man with garden at the rear end of time and the fat Indian girl / Mia Couto -- Seeing the familiar : notes on Mia Couto / Isabel Hofmeyr.

Subject Term:

Aesthetics, American.

Added Author:

Nuttall, Sarah.

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168023685874	111.8508996 N981B 2006	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

In Cameroon, a monumental "statue of liberty" is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness.

Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans' Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising "morality" plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly "African" aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope.

Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès