Duke University Press Log

Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art Virtual Roundtable Discussion

Cross-posted from Nka's new blog, where you can follow the entire virtual roundtable discussion over the course of the next few weeks:

Nka Roundtable III: “Contemporary African Art and the Museum”

Over the next several weeks curators and directors of major museums in the United States, Germany, Japan, South Africa and the UK will engage in spirited but substantial discussion on the relationship between contemporary African art and the museum. I expect excursions into the history of this relationship, its crucial moments, state of affairs, and challenges that remain. In the process, we shall debate issues of presenting this material in art and ethnology museums; the politics of acquisitions and display; museums and scholarship; and the place of contemporary African art–relative to the “traditional” and western contemporary. I suspect that there will be surprising turns in the course of our discussion, but I am certain that the deliberations of this diverse, unprecedented and distinguished panel of curators will surely be of immense value to students and scholars working or interested in this exciting, dynamic field. Please join us!

Convener: Chika Okeke-Agulu (Princeton University)

 

Participants: Marla Berns (Director, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles), Christa Clarke (Senior Curator, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ), Laurie Ann Farrell (Director of Exhibitions, Savannah College of Art & Design Gallery, Savannah, GA), Khwezi Gule (Chief Curator, Hector Pieterson Memorial, Johannesburg), Kinsey Katchka, Yukiya Kawaguchi (National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka), Clive Kellner, Karen Milbourne (Curator, Smithsonian National Museum for African Art, Washington DC), Raison Naidoo (Director Arts Collections, Iziko: South African National Gallery, Cape Town), Enid Schildkrout (Chief Curator/Director of Exhibitions, Museum for African Art, New York) Chris Spring (Curator, British Museum, London), Ulf Vierke (Director, Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth), Okwui Enwezor, Salah M. Hassan.

World AIDS Day

Today is World AIDS Day, founded by the United Nations in 2004 as a way to raise awareness about the global disease, commemorate those who have died from it, and celebrate new medial advances. Although we still have a long way to go before curing the deadly disease, many sufferers around the world, even in poor nations, now take medication allowing them to live relatively normal lives. But when antiretroviral drugs were first discovered in the 1990s, treatment was mostly reserved for wealthy Westerners. Vinh-Kim Nguyen's new book The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS argues that during the years when antiretroviral medicines were scarce in Africa, triage decisions were made determining who would receive lifesaving treatment. Nguyen explains how those decisions altered social relations in West Africa. In 1994, anxious to "break the silence" and "put a face to the epidemic," international agencies unwittingly created a market in which stories about being HIV positive could be bartered for access to limited medical resources. Being able to talk about oneself became a matter of life or death. Nguyen's book is an important cautionary tale for those continuing to work on HIV in Africa. If you're in the New York area, you can hear him talk about his book and pick up a copy for yourself. He'll be speaking at the New York Academy of Medicine tomorrow, December 2, at 5:30 p.m.

Duke Authors at the ASALH Annual Meeting

This last weekend, we attended the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) 95th Annual Convention in Raleigh, NC. A few of our authors had booksignings during the conference, and we were able to get photos of a few of them.

Karla FC Holloway, author of Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial, stopped by to sign copies of her book.

 

 

 

 

Sonia Sanchez, author of "I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't" and Other Plays, took a quick break from her booksigning to pose for a picture with Jacqueline Wood. Wood edited the book and provided an introduction.

Thanks to our Exhibits Manager, Helena Knox, for taking these photos!

The View from Sudan

The Sudan is in the news today, as the president of South Sudan has warned of a widespread return to violence if the region’s independence is not upheld in the nation-wide referendum, which is now 100 days away. The Obama Administration supports the election and has said that it is “inevitable” that the South will declare independence.

A recent issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly, “What’s Left of the Left?: The View from Sudan,” looks closely at the region in question, and particularly focuses on the historical struggle of the Sudanese Communist Party.  Editor Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf urges commemoration of progressive politics in Sudanese society as we look ahead to the region’s future, she says: “This task is even more critical when we take into account the current state of affairs: charges of ethnic cleansing and genocide, the specter of secession, and the everyday suffering that engulfs the country.”

Read the introduction to this issue, "Writing the Dialectic," by Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf for free.

Bob White wins Joel Gregory Prize

Congratulations to Bob W. White, author of Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu's Zaire, for winning the 2010 Joel Gregory Prize. The Joel Gregory Prize is awarded by the Canadian Association of African Studies to the best book published in African Studies in the social sciences and humanities, written by a Canadian, a landed immigrant, or an African who has completed a Ph.D. program in Canada or has worked in a Canadian organization devoted to the promotion of knowledge of Africa. The award was announced at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of African Studies on May 5th.

In Rumba Rules, the first ethnography of popular music in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bob W. White examines not only the economic and political conditions that brought this powerful music industry to its knees, but also the ways that popular musicians sought to remain socially relevant in a time of increasing insecurity.

Full text of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art is now available online

Duke University Press is pleased to announce that the full text of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art is now available online.

Nka focuses on publishing critical work that examines the newly developing field of contemporary African and African Diaspora art within the modernist and postmodernist experience. The journal contributes significantly to the intellectual dialogue on world art and the discourse on internationalism and multiculturalism in the arts. Nka mainly includes scholarly articles, reviews (exhibits and books), interviews, and roundtable discussions.

Newest issue online: Number 24, Spring 2009

Oldest issue online: Number 1, Fall/Winter 1994

Access content for free until June 15, 2010 at nka.dukejournals.org.

Public Space and the Legacy of Racism in Johannesburg

Today's New York Times has an interesting article about the difficulties getting a bus system set up in Johannesburg. Much of the city's poorer black population lives in the outer suburbs of the sprawling metropolis and for decades has had to rely on private minibus taxis to get them to jobs in the city center and wealthy close-in neighborhoods. The 2010 World Cup was supposed to finally bring reliable bus service from Soweto to Sandton, but lingering racism and "not in my backyard" activism by wealthy suburbanites has complicated things. The article mentions a number of geographical curiosities about Johannesburg, such as how a wasteland of mine dumps, factories, and vacant land still separates black from white neighborhoods. Duke Press recently published Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, a collection of essays about the teeming megacity and this coming fall we'll publish a new book that specifically addresses how the lingering effects of Apartheid continue to shape the city's geography. Look for City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg by Martin J. Murray next December. And for more general background on the spread of megacities in the Global South, check out the collection edited by Andreas Huyssen, Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age and AbdouMaliq Simone's For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities.

Village Voice Praises White's Rumba Rules

The Village Voice looks to expert Bob White and his book Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire in an article about music in the Democratic Republic of Congo. White argues that "many linguistic complexities are rooted in the repression endured under Joseph Désiré Mobutu, a/k/a Mobutu Sese Seko, the CIA-installed despot who changed the country's name to Zaire for much of his 32-year reign (which finally ended in 1997)." Reporter K. Leander Williams especially likes White's chapter that analyzes "soukous lyrics by such stars as J.B. M'Piana, Koffi Olomide, and General Defao to show that love paeans and praise songs are often veiled cries for help, community, even power in a society gone awry."

Samuel Charters Shares a Playlist with New York Times

Samuel Charters, author of A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora, and countless other books about music, writes a playlist for the New York Times Papercuts blog today. It's called "Living with Music: Some Songs I Wrote About, and Some Others I Haven't Gotten Around to Writing About Yet." Charters shares some of his favorite blues, rock, and gospel songs on the list.

Finnström and Macías Win Awards

Anthony Macías has won a 2009 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research for his book Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968. The winners will be recognized at a banquet in New Orleans in May 2010. And Sverker Finnström has won the Margaret Mead Award, jointly sponsored by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for his book Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda. The award will be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Yucatan, Mexico, in March 2010. Congratulations to both these authors!