IAHIS 5150 Africa: Tradition & Modernity
This course is as much about the cultural politics surrounding African art as it is about the art itself. With particular emphasis on colonialism as a vital agent of change, students first learn how the early modernist view of African objects as works of art paradoxically fostered a new myth of primitivism. The lingering hold of this fantasy about the "Other" on Western imagination today is also examined. A variety of cultural representations from postcolonial Africa are explored in the context of tradition and modernity.