Aesthetic Practices in African Tourism explores "Rastahood", a community, youth culture, and new tourist art form created by young men on the margins of the Ghanaian economy as they came of age at the turn of the millennium. This book focuses on art, music, and affective experience created within tourism contexts, which enabled young men without educational or class capital to achieve mobility through work with foreigners, transforming the temporal horizon by expanding the geographic one. It traces the path that led young men down the path to Rastahood and investigates how they created an art form in, and of, a particular place and then used it to propel themselves far beyond its confines. The book ends with a leap forward into the present, out of Ghana, and beyond Rastahood, as men, now in middle age, look back upon the path that Rastahood created. It explores the social effects of neoliberal capitalism, specifically the rise of neoliberal subjectivities, collectivities, and socialities. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, tourism, art, African and Africana Studies, popular culture; gender studies; migration; youth studies and those interested in African cities.

"Aesthetic Practices in African Tourism explores 'Rastahood', a community, youth culture, and new tourist art form created by young men on the margins of the Ghanaian economy as they came of age at the turn of the millennium. This book focuses on art, music, and affective experience created within tourism contexts, which enabled young men without educational or class capital to achieve mobility through work with foreigners, transforming the temporal horizon by expanding the geographic one. It traces the path that led young men down the path to Rastahood and investigates how they created an art form in, and of, a particular place and then used it to propel themselves far beyond its confines. The book ends with a leap forward into the present, out of Ghana, and beyond Rastahood, as men, now in middle age, look back upon the path that Rastahood created. It explores the social effects of neoliberal capitalism, specifically the rise of neoliberal subjectivities, collectivities, and socialities. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, tourism, art, African and Africana Studies, popular culture; gender studies; migration; youth studies and those interested in African cities"--

In Jamaican dancehalls competition for the video camera's light is stiff, so much so that dancers sometimes bleach their skin to enhance their visibility. In the Bahamas, tuxedoed students roll into prom in tricked-out sedans, staging grand red-carpet entrances that are designed to ensure they are seen being photographed. Throughout the United States and Jamaica friends pose in front of hand-painted backgrounds of Tupac, flashy cars, or brand-name products popularized in hip-hop culture in countless makeshift roadside photography studios. And visual artists such as Kehinde Wiley remix the aesthetic of Western artists with hip-hop culture in their portraiture. In Shine, Krista Thompson examines these and other photographic practices in the Caribbean and United States, arguing that performing for the camera is more important than the final image itself. For the members of these African diasporic communities, seeking out the camera's light—whether from a cell phone, Polaroid, or video camera—provides a means with which to represent themselves in the public sphere. The resulting images, Thompson argues, become their own forms of memory, modernity, value, and social status that allow for cultural formation within and between African diasporic communities.

Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film. Volume Two of this landmark series on African cinema is devoted to the decolonizing mediation of the Pan African Film & Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the most important, inclusive, and consequential cinematic convocation of its kind in the world. Since its creation in 1969, FESPACO's mission is, in principle, remarkably unchanged: to unapologetically recover, chronicle, affirm, and reconstitute the representation of the African continent and its global diasporas of people, thereby enunciating in the cinematic, all manner of Pan-African identity, experience, and the futurity of the Black World. This volume features historically significant and commissioned essays, commentaries, conversations, dossiers, and programmatic statements and manifestos that mark and elaborate the key moments in the evolution of FESPACO over the span of the past five decades.

The role of the workshop in the creation of African art is the subject of this revelatory book. In the group setting of the workshop, innovation and imitation collide, artists share ideas and techniques, and creative expression flourishes. African Art and Agency in the Workshop examines the variety of workshops, from those which are politically driven or tourist oriented, to those based on historical patronage or allied to current artistic trends. Fifteen lively essays explore the impact of the workshop on the production of artists such as Zimbabwean stone sculptors, master potters from Cameroon, wood carvers from Nigeria, and others from across the continent.

Focusing on the theme of warriorhood, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir weaves a complex history of how colonial influence forever changed artistic practice, objects, and their meaning. Looking at two widely diverse cultures, the Idoma in Nigeria and the Samburu in Kenya, Kasfir makes a bold statement about the links between colonialism, the Europeans' image of Africans, Africans' changing self representation, and the impact of global trade on cultural artifacts and the making of art. This intriguing history of the interaction between peoples, aesthetics, morals, artistic objects and practices, and the global trade in African art challenges current ideas about artistic production and representation.