This book argues for a radical new approach to thinking about art and creativity in Africa, challenging outdated normative discourses about Africa’s creative heritage. Africanism, which is driven by a traumatic response to colonialism in Africa, has an almost unshakable stranglehold on the content, stylistics, and meaning of art in Africa. Post-African aesthetics insists on the need to move beyond this counter-colonial self-consciousness and considerably change, re-work and enlarge the ground, principles and mission of artistic imagination and creativity in Africa. This book critiques and dismantles the tropes of Africanism and Afrocentrism, providing the criteria and methodology for a Post-African art theory or Post-African aesthetics. Grounded initially in essays by Denis Ekpo, the father of Post-Africanism, the book then explores a range of applications and interpretations of Post-African theory to the art forms and creative practices in Africa. With particular reference to South Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers across the disciplines of Art, Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and African Studies.

Colonial architecture and urbanism carved its way through space: ordering and classifying the built environment, while projecting the authority of European powers across Africa in the name of science and progress. The built urban fabric left by colonial powers attests to its lingering impacts in shaping the present and the future trajectory of postcolonial cities in Africa. Colonial Architecture and Urbanism explores the intersection between architecture and urbanism as discursive cultural projects in Africa. Like other colonial institutions such as the courts, police, prisons, and schools, that were crucial in establishing and maintaining political domination, colonial architecture and urbanism played s pivotal role in shaping the spatial and social structures of African cities during the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, it is the cultural destination of colonial architecture and urbanism and the connection between them and colonialism that the volume seeks to critically address. The contributions drawn from different interdisciplinary fields map the historical processes of colonial architecture and urbanism and bring into sharp focus the dynamic conditions in which colonial states, officials, architects, planners, medical doctors and missionaries mutually constructed a hierarchical and exclusionary built environment that served the wider colonial project in Africa.

John Castagno's Artists' Signatures and Monograms have become the standard reference source for galleries, museums, libraries, and collectors around the world. In African, Asian and Middle Eastern Artists Signatures and Monograms From 1800: A Directory, Castagno has collected the signatures and monograms of artists from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—including signature examples of artists from China, India, Japan, South Africa, Israel, and many other countries. In addition to the standard signature entries, the book contains sections for monograms and initials, common surname signatures, alternative surname signatures, and symbols. It provides the researcher a reference tool not duplicated elsewhere—one that will save many hours of research.

Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

Private wildlife conservation is booming business in South Africa! Nick Steele stood at the cradle of this development in the politically turbulent 1970s and 1980s, by stimulating farmers in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) to pool resources in order to restore wilderness landscapes, but at the same time improve their security situation in cooperative conservancy structures. His involvement in Operation Rhino in the 1960s and subsequent networks to save the rhino from extinction, brought him into controversial military (oriented) networks around the Western world. The author’s unique access to his private diaries paints a personal picture of this controversial conservationist.

Like Monet. who was his first inspiration, Moses Tladi was a gardener and an artist. Born in remote Sekhukuneland, east of Pretoria, South Africa, the son of a medicine-man who made a living by working in iron and a mother who was a gifted potter, Tladi in his early childhood herded cattle in the dramatic hill-country around his home. His parents had become "believers" under the influence of the Berlin Missionary Society and he was educated at the Lobethal mission, at ga Phaahla. Tladi, like many young men of the time, went to the cities in search of work. It is not known how he encountered Herbert Read, but in the mid 1920's he found employment in Johannesburg as gardener to Read at his property in the fashionable suburb of Parktown. Tladi's talent was discovered by Herbert Read's daughters who were schoolgirls in the mid-1920's. Read took Tladi under his wing, and introduced him to the collector and philanthropist Howard Pim. Read and Pim promoted Tladi at public exhibitions from 1929 onwards. Pim died in 1934, but Tladi continued to flourish, with Read as his patron until the outbreak of World War II.

Classified list with author and title index.