9/11 has been described as an "absolute event" that radically changed the course of history. It reinforced the opposition between Christian and Muslim worlds and led to the declaration of a unilateral war against a global network of terrorists that broke up the classical definition of war as a war between nation states. Yet, 9/11 also created responses in parts of the world that were not directly involved in the unfolding "war on terror." In Africa, local conflicts were re-mapped into an emerging new geography of anger that also reflects the effects of marginalization in a globalized world. The essays of this volume explore local remediations of 9/11 in African popular culture (posters, photographs, videos, cartoons, etc.) and visual arts. They give evidence of the fundamental ambivalence towards the event of 9/11 and provide insights into the various ways distant conflicts are translated into intense proximities. (Series: African Art and Visual Cultures - Vol. 3) [Subject: African Studies, Cultural Studies, Art]

Afrika gilt als die Wiege der Menschheit und begeistert immer wieder aufs Neue durch die archaischen, ausdrucksstarken Kunstobjekte seiner Volksstämme. Unter den vielen afrikanischen Volksgruppen gelten die Yoruba als die Kunstsinnigsten. Ein besonderer Bestandteil ihres religiösen Lebens und ihres daraus bedingten Kunstschaffens sind die Orakelbretter. Diese runden, ovalen oder auch rechteckigen Kultobjekte aus Holz zeigen am oberen Rand das Gesicht des Trickser-Gottes Eshu. Der Orakelpriester, der BABALAWO, übertrug mittels Strichzeichnungen die Ergebnisse der Würfe von 16 Palmnüssen auf das bemehlte Orakelbrett. Aus der Kombination dieser Striche ergaben sich über 3000 Orakelsprüche. Das Buch gewährt anhand von zahlreichen Abbildungen einen Einblick in den Formenreichtum der Ifa-Orakelbretter sowie in die Glaubensvorstellungen der Yoruba, speziell des Ifa-Orakelbundes. Bis vor kurzem wurde noch jeder Verrat des Geheimbundes mit der Todesstrafe geahndet. 2005 wurde das Ifa-Orakel als immaterielles Kulturerbe der UNESCO anerkannt und 2008 in die repräsentative Liste des immateriellen Kulturerbe der Menschheit aufgenommen.

Recent political conflicts signal an increased proliferation of image testimonies shared widely via social media. Although witnessing with and through images is not a phenomenon of the internet era, contemporary digital image practices and politics have significantly intensified the affective economies of image testimonies. This volume traces the contours of these conditions and develops a conception of image testimony along four areas of focus. The first and second section of this volume reflects the discussion of image testimonies as an interplay of evidential qualities and their potential to express affective relationalities and emotional involvement. The third section focuses on the question of how social media technologies shape and subsequently are shaped by image testimonies. To further complicate the ethical position of the witness, the final section looks at image testimony at the intersection of creation and destruction, taking into account the perspectives of different actors and their opposed moral positions. With an emphasis on the affectivity of these images, Image Testimonies provides new and so far overlooked insights in the field. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Sociology and Social Policy, Media and Communications, Visual Arts and Culture and Middle East Studies.

The multiauthored book accompanying the World on the Horizon exhibition organized by Krannert Art Museum is the first interdisciplinary study of Swahili visual arts and their historically deep and enduring connections to eastern and central Africa, the port towns of the western Indian Ocean, Europe, and the United States. At once exhibition catalogue and scholarly inquiry, the publication features eighteen essays in a mix of formats - personal reflections, object biographies, as well as more in-depth critical treatments - and includes never before published images of works from the National Museums of Kenya and Bait Al Zubair Museum in Oman. By approaching the east African coast as a vibrant arena of global cultural convergence, these essays offer compelling new perspectives on the situated yet mobile and deeply networked social lives of Swahili objects. Moving between the broader structural relations of political economic change to more intimate narratives through which such change is experienced, the essays throw light on the ways in which the material fabric of the arts structure Swahili people's sense of self and community in an ever-changing world of oceanic and terrestrial movement.

How does social media activism in Nigeria intersect with online popular forms—from GIFs to memes to videos—and become shaped by the repressive postcolonial state that propels resistance to dominant articulations of power? James Yékú proposes the concept of "cultural netizenship"—internet citizenship and its aesthetico-cultural dimensions—as a way of being on the social web and articulating counter-hegemonic self-presentations through viral popular images. Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies, and he examines how digital subjects in Nigeria, a nation with one of the most vibrant digital spheres in Africa, deconstruct state power through performed popular culture on social media. As a rubric for the new digital genres of popular and visual expressions on social media, cultural netizenship indexes the digital everyday through the affordances of the participatory web. A fascinating look at the intersection of social media and popular culture performance, Cultural Netizenship reveals the logic of remediation that is central to both the internet's remix culture and the generative materialism of African popular arts.

Wie lässt sich eine Kunstgeschichte denken, die prozessuale, performative und transkulturelle Wanderungsbewegungen ins Zentrum ihrer theoretischen und methodischen Analysen rückt? Mit Beiträgen international ausgewiesener Experten gibt das Handbuch erstmals Antworten darauf, welche Konsequenzen das Zusammenwirken von Migration und Globalisierung für die kunstwissenschaftliche Forschung, die kuratorische Praxis sowie die künstlerische Produktion und Theorie hat. Ziel der vielstimmigen Anthologie ist es, einen interdisziplinären Diskurs zum „migratory turn" in der Kunstgeschichte zu eröffnen.

Based on multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, this book describes how various governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental actors engage with colonial and post-colonial built heritage found in Eritrea, Tanzania, Niger and the Republic of the Congo, showing how this engagement produces problematizations of ‘the modern’, which ultimately indicate a need to rescue modernity from its dominant conception as an all-encompassing, epochal and spatial culture.