Category: publications

A long-overdue shift is happening in how contemporary African art – from Dakar and Lagos to Cape Town, Harare and Rabat – is disseminated and discussed.

This piece was published in the May issue of frieze Magazine and can be found online at:
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/speak-now/

Speak Now

Much of what we know of art – how it is taught, exhibited and presented, whether in London or Lagos or Lahore – was first defined by Western critics. When Pablo Picasso drew inspiration from Bambara and Gabon masks after a visit to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris in 1906, it was the West that decided that his works were ‘Modernist’ and that the masks were ‘primitive’. In 1953, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais made their first film, Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die), which dealt with African art. In 2005, I was asked to do a new translation of the film from French into English as Marker was unhappy with the one that existed. In the film the directors talk of the ‘botany of death’ that happened when sculptures were taken from their natural settings in Africa to the museum cabinets of the West. The study of African art is not just a study of lines and forms, but also of the histories of silence.

Continue reading “PUB: Speak Now by Nana Oforiatta Ayim”

Martin A. Berger, “Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520268647

Seeing through Race is a boldly original reinterpretation of the iconic photographs of the black civil rights struggle. Martin A. Berger’s provocative and groundbreaking study shows how the very pictures credited with arousing white sympathy, and thereby paving the way for civil rights legislation, actually limited the scope of racial reform in the 1960s. Berger analyzes many of these famous images—dogs and fire hoses turned against peaceful black marchers in Birmingham, tear gas and clubs wielded against voting-rights marchers in Selma—and argues that because white sympathy was dependent on photographs of powerless blacks, these unforgettable pictures undermined efforts to enact—or even imagine—reforms that threatened to upend the racial balance of power

Continue reading “PUB: Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography by Martin Berger”

“Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America,” by Tanya Sheenan was released last week from Penn State University Press.

http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03792-9.html

http://www.amazon.com/Doctored-Medicine-Photography-Nineteenth-Century-America/dp/027103792X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301967393&sr=1-1

In Doctored, Tanya Sheehan takes a new look at the relationship between
photography and medicine in American culture, from the nineteenth century
to the present. Sheehan focuses on Civil War and postbellum Philadelphia,
exploring the ways in which medical models and metaphors helped strengthen
the professional legitimacy of the city’s commercial photographic
community at a time when it was not well established. By reading the trade
literature and material practices of portrait photography and medicine in
relation to one another, she shows how their interaction defined the space
of the urban portrait studio as well as the physical and social effects of
studio operations. Integrating the methods of social art history, science
studies, and media studies, Doctored reveals important connections between
the professionalization of American photographers and the construction of
photography’s cultural identity.

Continue reading “PUB: Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America by Tanya Sheenan”

In celebration of Black History Month, Southern Cultures permanently has
dedicated a new section of our website to all of our essays and features
from the last decade on AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE.  This material
includes interviews with many famous figures (and lesser known ones, too),
as well as material which explores many aspects of the experiences of
African Americans inside and outside the South.  In addition, we’ve also
been presenting featured content on our homepage to commemorate African
American history: an essay from  Timothy B. Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign
My Name, who reveals why Martin Luther King’s message  endures and what he
means to the South and the nation.

To date, over 65,000 readers have viewed our material online.  To read our
new section on AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, please visit:
http://www.southerncultures.org/content/read/read_by_subject/african_american_history_and_culture/

To read Tim Tyson’s “Martin Luther King and the Southern Dream of Freedom,”
please visit:
www.SouthernCultures.org<http://www.SouthernCultures.org>