African Philosophy: Aesthetics

This book researches the ideas of Western and African scholars for a more inclusive development industry and studies. -/- .

This e-book is a collection of orally transmitted folktales about animals, currently circulating among the Ewe and Akan people of Ghana. Many of the stories in this bundle provide an explanation for the appearance of the most remarkable Ghanaian animals. For example, why does the parrot have such beautiful feathers? And why does the Pin-tailed Whydah have such a long tail? For sure, Ghanaian storytellers know the answer. They shared their animal wisdom stories, including those of the famous spider Anansi, (...) with Dr. Kofi Dorvlo. He wrote the stories down for us in English and translated them into Ewe and standard Akan/Twi with the help of his Ghanaian team members Dr. Kwaku Ofori and his students (Twi) and Mr. Kenneth Adevu (Ewe). The e-book contains twenty Ghanaian folktales and includes an introduction by Dr. Louise Müller, who also interpreted the stories. The 22 beautiful collages were made by the visual artist Josee Tesser. Editorial thanks are due to Greg Suffanti for proofreading the stories in English and Ir. Joke Koppius for her editorial help and graphic design. -/- Trilingual edition in Ewe, standard Akan/Twi and English. (shrink)

The chapter challenges the aesthetic imprints of Vlisco, a Dutch firm, whose representation of Africa’s image in its textile products and fabrics exported to Africa over many decades left much to be desired. The artistic contents of the products, mainly an amalgam of Javanese, Indian, Chinese, Arab and European cultural imageries, are branded as “African prints”. The chapter considered several arguments for and against Vlisco’s “African prints,” as well as the objection for a global understanding of textile and their aesthetic (...) dynamics that make them “Afropolitan” rather than indigenous. To be “Afropolitan” simply denotes a fabric or print as an all-comer art content which gives it the capacity for adaptability, and elevates it to global acceptability. The chapter rejects both Vlisco’s “African prints” and the argument for an Afropolitan prints because such designs sideline African traditional expressions. Consequently, the author suggests that some African industrialists should be encouraged to join the global textile trade and make designs with the purpose of projecting African aesthetics and imagery on fabrics. (shrink)

This book argues for a radical new approach to thinking about art and creativity in Africa, challenging outdated normative discourses about Africa's creative heritage. Africanism, which is driven by a traumatic response to colonialism in Africa, has an almost unshakable stranglehold on the content, stylistics, and meaning of art in Africa. Post-African aesthetics insists on the need to move beyond this counter-colonial self-consciousness and considerably change, re-work and enlarge the ground, principles and mission of artistic imagination and creativity in Africa. (...) This book critiques and dismantles the tropes of Africanism and Afrocentrism, providing the criteria and methodology for a Post-African art theory or Post-African aesthetics. Grounded initially in essays by Denis Ekpo, the father of Post-Africanism, the book then explores a range of applications and interpretations of Post-African theory to the art forms and creative practices in Africa. With particular reference to South Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers across the disciplines of Art, Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and African Studies. (shrink)

There is a contention on whether African architecture actually exists especially in relation to possessing a distinct identity. Also, African architecture is rarely discussed within mainstream contemporary theoretical debates in Architecture except with respect to influences on arts, artists and architecture in the developed world and generally speaking architecture of the past. This chapter reviews the different perspectives and conceptualisations on African architecture and its global influences. Furthermore the sources of and obstacles to identity formation in African architecture were reviewed (...) to surmise approaches to creating identity in African architecture. The chapter rekindles the debate on the formation of identity in African architecture and how African architecture can take its rightful place in global architecture discourse. (shrink)

This book investigates how African authors and artists have explored themes of the future and technology within their works. Afrofuturism was coined in the 1990s as a means of exploring the intersection of African diaspora culture with technology, science and science fiction. However, this book argues that literature and other arts within Africa has always reflected on themes of futurism, across diverse forms of speculative writing, images, spirituality, myth, magical realism, the supernatural, performance and other forms of oral resources. This (...) book reflects on themes of African futurism across a range of literary and artistic works, also investigating how problems such as racism, sexism, social injustice and postcolonialism are reflected in these narratives. Chapters cover authors, artists, movements, and performers such Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Elechi Amadi, Mazisi Kunene, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes, Leslie Nneka Arimah, and the New African Movement. The book also includes a range of original interviews with prominent authors and artists, including Tanure Ojaide, Lauren Beukes, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Benjamin Kwakye, Ntongela Masilela and Bruce Onobrakpeya. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will be an important resource for researchers across the fields of African literature, philosophy, culture and politics. (shrink)

A history of the French reception of African art, especially wooden masks and figures, in the first four decades of the twentieth century, and how that reception led to the creation of the broader aesthetic category Westerners now know as "primitive art.

I articulate an African view of personhood that combines beauty and goodness–aesthetic and moral features. I discuss the idea of communalism, which provides the social and moral values and belief system that give meaning to this view of personhood. I use ideas from some African ethnic traditions, or some people’s account of these traditions, as examples to illustrate this view. The similarities in these examples from different ethnic traditions indicate that it is reasonable to characterize this view as a common (...) theme that may plausibly represent many African cultures. This essay does not seek to provide an anthropological descriptive view, but a plausible philosophical stance on how we ought to understand the idea of personhood in African cultures. I do not suggest that all African cultures or traditions have exactly the same view or that they hold this view in the same way, extent or degree. Obviously, there may be minor differences that do not alter the essence of the view. Many of the authors quoted in this paper who have written on African philosophy use the phrase, ‘African culture’, ‘African tradition’, ‘African view’ or ‘African society’. Thus, it has become commonplace in African philosophical circles that when the prefix ‘African’ is used in the literature on African philosophy, it does not imply that Africa is a monolith or that its traditions are static. There is a recognition that some traditions have changed or are changing. The use of ‘African tradition’ usually indicates a generalizing theoretical abstraction about some enduring and dominant similar themes or ideas in many African traditions. It is also meant to contrast ‘African’ with ‘Western’ traditions, and to also respond to Western critiques of Africa as a group. It is used in a similar way in which the prefix ‘Western’ is used in the literature. This notion of ‘Western’, which is replete in the literature, does not suggest the West is a monolith, but rather, a reference to some similar dominant themes in Western thought. (shrink)

This book demonstrates how the indigenous wisdom contained in African proverbs and folktales can be used to enhance modern life. The timeless wisdom enriches the understanding of self-development and positive influence, contributing towards the much-needed, cross-cultural dialogue among individuals, organizations, and societies in this increasingly diversified world.

This essay offers a novel approach for understanding the poetry of negritude and its role in the struggle for black liberation by appealing to Giambattista Vico’s insights on the historical, cultural, and myth-making function of poetry and of the mythopoetic imagination. The essay begins with a discussion of Vico’s aesthetic historicism and of his ideas regarding the role of imagination, poetry, and myth-making and then brings these ideas to bear on the discussion of the function of negritude poetry, focusing primarily (...) on the writings of Aimé Césaire and on Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay, Black Orpheus. (shrink)

Le;opold Se;dar Senghor (1906–2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who in 1960 also became the first president of the Republic of Senegal. In African Art as Philosophy , Souleymane Bachir Diagne takes a unique approach to reading Senghor’s influential works, taking as the starting point for his analysis Henri Bergson’s idea that in order to understand philosophers one must find the initial intuition from which every aspect of their work develops. In the case of Senghor, Diagne argues that his (...) primordial intuition is that African art is a philosophy. _ To further this point, Diagne looks at what Senghor called the “1889 Revolution,” and the influential writers and publications of that time—specifically, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, as well as Bergson’s Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. The 1889 Revolution, Senghor claims, is what led him to the understanding of the “Vitalism” at the core of African religions and beliefs that found expression in the arts. _ This book offers a distinct, incisive look at an important figure in African literature and politics that will be welcomed by scholars in African Studies and philosophy. (shrink)

Following in the footsteps of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the tenor of the postcolonial African culture has been justifiably anti-imperialist. In the 21st century, however, there has been a gradual but certain shift away from the “write-back” discourse paradigm, towards more integrative, globally inflected cultural interpretive models in Africa. This book celebrates the emergence of new interpretive paradigms such as in African philosophy, gender studies and literature.

I am interested in looking at Krumpin’ through what I am calling the “politics of submergence.” If my world is chaotic, if my Blackness is my murderer, can I be expected to create beauty? Can my art be transformative? My paper argues that Krumpin’ is in fact transformative, not to the extent that it perpetuates hope, but maintains its social pessimism. In accepting both the conditions that have sustained the racial marginalization of African descended people, and the impotence of this (...) marginalized group to change the systemic social structures that continue racial subordination in the United States, Krumpin’ announces a reflective mode of racial identity and cultural existence that attends to the suffering of African-descended people in American ghettos. (shrink)

"Exhibition dates: The Phillips Collection, Oct. 10, 2009-Jan. 10, 2010; University of New Mexico Art Museum, Feb. 6-May 30, 2010; University of Virginia Museum of Art, Aug. 7-Oct. 10, 2010; University of British Columbia, Museum of Anthropology Oct. 29, 2010-Jan. 23, 2011." --T.p. verso.

Perhaps one of the more consistent elements of Wole Soyinka’s work has been a commitment to an individual will that refuses collective mobilization. Aisha Karim argues that Soyinka’s novel Season of Anomy marks a departure from any commitment as such that opens the text to new political possibilities. But while Season of Anomy presents us with an alternative to the politics and poetics that underlie Soyinka’s dramatic output, Karim maintains that it does so only insofar as it imagines itself as (...) a “failed text.” What emerges as a crisis of representation within the text consequently allows the reader to recognize herself as the agent of change on the level of the social. (shrink)

How can Africans escape the control of the complex power relationships established during Colonization and successfully achieve self-development? More importantly, and the primary concern of this book, can African female characters ever hope to arrive at such individuation given the dual challenges of the power structures defined and enforced by European colonizers and the patriarchal structures that contort issues related to gender? Tracing Personal Expansion reads late 20th Century works by African female novelists Buchi Emecheta, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Calixthe Beyala (...) as modern Bildungsromane, novels of self-development, to reveal the dynamics, complexities, and challenges the characters and authors experience. By exploring the possibility of self-development in African female protagonists, this engrossing work augments existing feminist critiques that have analyzed the possibilities and potentials for the individuation of mostly Western, mostly European female characters. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In the tradition of African musicologists who have pioneered serious scholarly study of African music, notably J.H. Kwabena Nketia, this extended essay considers the subject of aesthetic value in African music, in particular, in the Ewe and Akan (Ghanaian) traditions. It examines African - as compared with Western - ideas about musical experience and its appeal; and music in relation to values, morality and human emotion.

There are three facets to the colonial project: a practice, a body of knowledge, and mental engineering. The third is the result of colonialism as text, for such a text bolsters the minds behind colonizing practices and is simultaneously a prison house for the minds of the colonized. The battle between the colonial text and its dialectical opposite, the anti-colonial text, is central to decolonization. Hegel and Achebe are shown to exemplify this struggle.

"The essays and public addresses of scholar, teacher, philosopher, and activist Es'kia Mphahlele are presented in this collection spanning 40 years of recent African history. The intellectual and distinctly South African perspective exhibited in these writings is enriched by humor and autobiographical anecdotes. Subjects addressed include African literature and literary criticism, education in a democratic South Africa, relations between Africans and African Americans, negritude, African identity, and African humanism. A critical introduction, full biography, bibliography, and brief synopsis of each essay (...) are included.". (shrink)