Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8308198
Fatima El‐Tayeb
This article addresses the long-term impact of colonialism on Europe’s internal structures and on its self-positioning in a global context. Using the 2015 refugee crisis as a focal point and centering the German example, the author explores the complex relationship between memory discourses and visions of Germany’s and Europe’s postunification future. The author argues that the erasure of colonial violence from the continent’s collective memory has a direct, negative impact on its ability to let go of a racialized identity that is in increasing tension with Europe’s actual multiracial and multireligious composition. The article traces this dynamic around the example of the non-European collections in Berlin’s Museum Island and the future Humboldt Forum, conceptualized as the world’s largest “universal museum.” The narratives through which this art is integrated into Europe’s cultural heritage are in stark contrast to those that simultaneously defined the refugees, who arrived from the same region in which the art originated, as fundamentally different and threatening. The narratives intersect in the Multaqa initiative, which offers Arab language tours of Museum Island to refugees, and in the controversy around the site of the Humboldt Forum and the colonial art it is meant to house.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8308282
B. Shehab
ABSTRACT:The article highlights the dialogue that took place in 2011–13 between the street and cyberspace and the government and the revolutionaries during the first wave of the Egyptian revolution. In this personal account of the Egyptian uprising, the author describes the unfolding political and social events and climate during the revolution, highlighting key factions at play and taking into account the reactions of protestors online and on the street. Examples of how the revolution was driven online by archival research, music videos, comedians, memes, graffiti, and symbols of martyrdom are paralleled with an account of the protests on the street and events that were unfolding at the time. Describing the environment of censorship and strategies used by the government to block dissent, the author provides stories of how different groups who were part of the revolution retaliated. The article can be considered a screen shot of a revolution that inspired the world but met an expected end.
{"title":"Practicing Art in Revolutionary Times","authors":"B. Shehab","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8308282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8308282","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The article highlights the dialogue that took place in 2011–13 between the street and cyberspace and the government and the revolutionaries during the first wave of the Egyptian revolution. In this personal account of the Egyptian uprising, the author describes the unfolding political and social events and climate during the revolution, highlighting key factions at play and taking into account the reactions of protestors online and on the street. Examples of how the revolution was driven online by archival research, music videos, comedians, memes, graffiti, and symbols of martyrdom are paralleled with an account of the protests on the street and events that were unfolding at the time. Describing the environment of censorship and strategies used by the government to block dissent, the author provides stories of how different groups who were part of the revolution retaliated. The article can be considered a screen shot of a revolution that inspired the world but met an expected end.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"49 1","pages":"168 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73610225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8308210
Berni Searle
The author/artist provides twenty images from three of her performance and video series: Home and Away (2003), Seeking Refuge (2008), and Mute (2008), complementing them with descriptions of the creative process and the collective experiences the images depict. Themes of identity, migration, displacement, loss, and vulnerability provide a stark contrast to the hopeful possibility of cosmopolitanism.
{"title":"On Cosmopolitanism, Xenophobia, and Migration","authors":"Berni Searle","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8308210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8308210","url":null,"abstract":"The author/artist provides twenty images from three of her performance and video series: Home and Away (2003), Seeking Refuge (2008), and Mute (2008), complementing them with descriptions of the creative process and the collective experiences the images depict. Themes of identity, migration, displacement, loss, and vulnerability provide a stark contrast to the hopeful possibility of cosmopolitanism.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"2020 1","pages":"84-99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48023087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8308234
Prita Meier
This article explores how an oceanic perspective challenges still pervasive ideas about the constitutive link between place and culture in the study of the arts of Africa. Taking the rich and diverse photographs of nineteenth-century coastal eastern Africa as a springboard, the author considers how portrait photography was not an expression of a local modernity, in the way the concept is narrated in established studies of the cultural dimensions of globalization, but was an expression of the in-between. This can be described as a form of cosmopolitanism or creolization, depending on one’s interpretive predilections, but, most important, it emphasizes that historical actors on the Swahili coast of eastern Africa did not worry about what was authentically local or indigenous in the making of modernity. In coastal eastern African port cities, the photograph became instantly popular in the 1860s, because it was linked to the traveling cultures of the port, giving new form to a very old desire to create aesthetic experiences of oceanic connectedness. Additionally, the portrait photograph allowed residents of the port to merge Swahili ideals of the cultured body, colonial codes of the body, and newly forming ideas about individual subjectivity. Ultimately, the author suggests that in such nonterritorial spaces as the Swahili port city, engaging the artifacts of faraway places is a carefully crafted tactic of translation, where technologies of modernity, such as photography, enable people simultaneously to sustain a sense of distance and closeness to others.
{"title":"Beyond Multiple Modernities","authors":"Prita Meier","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8308234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8308234","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how an oceanic perspective challenges still pervasive ideas about the constitutive link between place and culture in the study of the arts of Africa. Taking the rich and diverse photographs of nineteenth-century coastal eastern Africa as a springboard, the author considers how portrait photography was not an expression of a local modernity, in the way the concept is narrated in established studies of the cultural dimensions of globalization, but was an expression of the in-between. This can be described as a form of cosmopolitanism or creolization, depending on one’s interpretive predilections, but, most important, it emphasizes that historical actors on the Swahili coast of eastern Africa did not worry about what was authentically local or indigenous in the making of modernity. In coastal eastern African port cities, the photograph became instantly popular in the 1860s, because it was linked to the traveling cultures of the port, giving new form to a very old desire to create aesthetic experiences of oceanic connectedness. Additionally, the portrait photograph allowed residents of the port to merge Swahili ideals of the cultured body, colonial codes of the body, and newly forming ideas about individual subjectivity. Ultimately, the author suggests that in such nonterritorial spaces as the Swahili port city, engaging the artifacts of faraway places is a carefully crafted tactic of translation, where technologies of modernity, such as photography, enable people simultaneously to sustain a sense of distance and closeness to others.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"2020 1","pages":"116-125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43910702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8308186
M. R. Sanches
ABSTRACT:Cosmopolitanism has been invoked to stress the potential advantages of thinking beyond the nation with regard to human rights, diasporic or intellectual affinities, as well as other forms of affiliation. However, nationalism does not have to amount to a mere manifestation of ethnic or xenophobic closure, and it may foreground an effective cosmopolitanism that ensures social rights on a local and a transnational level. The author considers not only the European nationalist tradition but also the ways in which it was appropriated and redefined in non-European places as a condition of the possibility for more effective transnational, cosmopolitan alliances.
{"title":"Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism","authors":"M. R. Sanches","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8308186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8308186","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Cosmopolitanism has been invoked to stress the potential advantages of thinking beyond the nation with regard to human rights, diasporic or intellectual affinities, as well as other forms of affiliation. However, nationalism does not have to amount to a mere manifestation of ethnic or xenophobic closure, and it may foreground an effective cosmopolitanism that ensures social rights on a local and a transnational level. The author considers not only the European nationalist tradition but also the ways in which it was appropriated and redefined in non-European places as a condition of the possibility for more effective transnational, cosmopolitan alliances.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"96 1","pages":"62 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75207850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8308162
Siegfried Zielinski
ABSTRACT:In this article, the author examines the contrasting worldviews of specific philosophers, architects, and physicists in an attempt to identify a position that would represent a viable alternative to the concept of universalization. In the history of civilization, he asserts, almost all wars have been of a territorial nature. Territories tend toward uniformity and universalization. He contrasts this worldview with reflections on oceanic thinking, which perceives bodies of water such as the Mediterranean as mediators between continents as well as between opposing worldviews, connecting and dividing at the same time. The sea, however, does not connect in order to homogenize but rather creates distance as an important prerequisite for true communication, thus linking multiplicity in all its variety as a viable alternative to universalism. The author moves on to scrutinize the cosmopolitan attitude as a paradox that on the one hand is oriented to the particular individual and on the other hand to an imaginary world community, that is, the universal. Taking this notion further to consider today’s world that is saturated with the imaginary and symbolic power of the Internet, the author proposes that cosmopolitanism could be understood as an adequate expression for the technologically advanced world community by its capability to strike a balance between the individual and the world as a whole, on one side, and synthetic identity generated by culture and technology, on the other. Nevertheless, deviating from all of these worldviews, the author concludes with a short reflection, inspired by two films, on an alternative to cosmopolitanism that he calls cosmoethics, which employs ethics as the guiding principle of thought and action and commits to a practice that stays in close contact not only with real but also with diverse realities.
{"title":"Means and Seas","authors":"Siegfried Zielinski","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8308162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8308162","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In this article, the author examines the contrasting worldviews of specific philosophers, architects, and physicists in an attempt to identify a position that would represent a viable alternative to the concept of universalization. In the history of civilization, he asserts, almost all wars have been of a territorial nature. Territories tend toward uniformity and universalization. He contrasts this worldview with reflections on oceanic thinking, which perceives bodies of water such as the Mediterranean as mediators between continents as well as between opposing worldviews, connecting and dividing at the same time. The sea, however, does not connect in order to homogenize but rather creates distance as an important prerequisite for true communication, thus linking multiplicity in all its variety as a viable alternative to universalism. The author moves on to scrutinize the cosmopolitan attitude as a paradox that on the one hand is oriented to the particular individual and on the other hand to an imaginary world community, that is, the universal. Taking this notion further to consider today’s world that is saturated with the imaginary and symbolic power of the Internet, the author proposes that cosmopolitanism could be understood as an adequate expression for the technologically advanced world community by its capability to strike a balance between the individual and the world as a whole, on one side, and synthetic identity generated by culture and technology, on the other. Nevertheless, deviating from all of these worldviews, the author concludes with a short reflection, inspired by two films, on an alternative to cosmopolitanism that he calls cosmoethics, which employs ethics as the guiding principle of thought and action and commits to a practice that stays in close contact not only with real but also with diverse realities.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"9 1","pages":"40 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90826257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479829682.003.0007
Achille Mbembe, L. Chauvet
ABSTRACT:African discourse has been dominated for almost a century by three politico-intellectual paradigms: anticolonial nationalism, various reinterpretations of Marxism, and a Pan-African sphere of influence that gave special place to two types of solidarity—a racial and transnational solidarity, and an international and anti-imperialist solidarity. In addressing the question, “Who is African and who is not?,” the author reminds readers that traces of Africa cover the face of the capitalist and Islamic worlds. The precolonial history of African societies is a history of colliding cultures and can hardly be understood outside the paradigm of itinerancy, mobility, and displacement. In addition to the forced migrations of the previous centuries, there have also been migrations driven by colonization. Today, millions of people of African origin are citizens of various countries of the world—a historical phenomenon he calls worlds in movement. Awareness of the interweaving of the here and there; embracing, with full knowledge of the facts, strangeness, foreignness, and remoteness; the ability to recognize one’s face in that of a foreigner and to make the most of the traces of remoteness in closeness; to domesticate the unfamiliar; to work with what seem to be opposites—it is this cultural, historical, and aesthetic sensitivity that underlies the term Afropolitanism—a political and cultural stance in relation to the nation, to race, and to the issue of difference in general. Today, many Africans live outside Africa or live on the continent but not necessarily in their countries of birth. They have had the opportunity to experience several worlds. They are developing a transnational culture the author calls “Afropolitan.”
{"title":"Afropolitanism","authors":"Achille Mbembe, L. Chauvet","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479829682.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479829682.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:African discourse has been dominated for almost a century by three politico-intellectual paradigms: anticolonial nationalism, various reinterpretations of Marxism, and a Pan-African sphere of influence that gave special place to two types of solidarity—a racial and transnational solidarity, and an international and anti-imperialist solidarity. In addressing the question, “Who is African and who is not?,” the author reminds readers that traces of Africa cover the face of the capitalist and Islamic worlds. The precolonial history of African societies is a history of colliding cultures and can hardly be understood outside the paradigm of itinerancy, mobility, and displacement. In addition to the forced migrations of the previous centuries, there have also been migrations driven by colonization. Today, millions of people of African origin are citizens of various countries of the world—a historical phenomenon he calls worlds in movement. Awareness of the interweaving of the here and there; embracing, with full knowledge of the facts, strangeness, foreignness, and remoteness; the ability to recognize one’s face in that of a foreigner and to make the most of the traces of remoteness in closeness; to domesticate the unfamiliar; to work with what seem to be opposites—it is this cultural, historical, and aesthetic sensitivity that underlies the term Afropolitanism—a political and cultural stance in relation to the nation, to race, and to the issue of difference in general. Today, many Africans live outside Africa or live on the continent but not necessarily in their countries of birth. They have had the opportunity to experience several worlds. They are developing a transnational culture the author calls “Afropolitan.”","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"16 1","pages":"56 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85447127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8308246
Tejúmólá Ọláníyan
ABSTRACT:Much scholarly effort over the last two to three decades has been spent debating cosmopolitanism and attacking or refurbishing its older understanding as something owned by the West and a marker of civilization that others should strive for. The criticisms, however, have tended to emphasize the Eurocentric origins and constitutive cultural exclusionism of cosmopolitanism more than anything else. A second and newer origin of cosmopolitanism that is more commonly referenced today as cosmopolitanism’s modern foundation is one in which we find an inextricable imbrication of three Cs: conquest, commerce, and cosmopolitanism. Global commerce was the condition of possibility of cosmopolitanism, but what had long structured global commerce was a composite of rapacity, enslavement, violence, domination, and some good. The author proposes that the contemporary study of cosmopolitanism reacquaint itself with what continues to make it possible as aspiration, if not reality for all: global commerce and its conditions. To make commerce legible in cosmopolitanism, he asserts, is to accommodate the talk of profit, loss, assets, accumulation, interests, interest rates, and the likes in our theorizations. Using this analogy, the author speculates on what sort of “cosmopolitan interest rates” might be assigned to the social and economic debts owed to the descendants of slaves who suffered great loss at the hands of cosmopolitan global commerce. He concludes that it is a rate of interest that says to live as a social being is to be obligated in any number of ways to one another and the overall optimal health of that sociality.
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