Paul-Simon Handy

Regional Director, Institute for Security Studies

NGO

Ethiopia

iss@issafrica.org

Karen Tranberg Hansen

Professor Emerita, Anthropology, African Studies

Northwestern University

kth462@northwestern.edu      

anthropology.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/emeritus/hansen.html

Hansen, Karen Tranberg. Salaula: The World of Second hand Clothing and Zambia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

When we donate our unwanted clothes to charity, we rarely think about what will happen to them: who will sort and sell them, and finally, who will revive and wear them. In this fascinating look at the multibillion-dollar second-hand clothing business, Karen Tranberg Hansen takes us around the world from the West, where clothing is donated, through the salvage houses in North America and Europe, where it is sorted and compressed, to Africa, in this case, Zambia. There it enters the dynamic world of Salaula, a Bemba term that means “to rummage through a pile.” Essential for the African economy, the second-hand clothing business is wildly popular, to the point of threatening the indigenous textile industry. But, Hansen shows, wearing second-hand clothes is about much more than imitating Western styles. It is about taking a garment and altering it to something entirely local, something that adheres to current cultural norms of etiquette. By unraveling how these garments becomes entangled in the economic, political, and cultural processes of contemporary Zambia, Hansen also raises provocative questions about environmentalism, charity, recycling, and thrift.

[Source: The University of Chicago Press].

Harding, Oscar. “Martin Scorsese on the African Film Heritage Project.” The Film Foundation, July 22, 2018. https://www.film-foundation.org/cinema-escapist

“Launched last spring, the African Film Heritage Project (AFHP) is a joint initiative between Scorsese’s non-profit Film Foundation, UNESCO, Cineteca di Bologna, and the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI). It aims to locate and preserve 50 classic African films, some thought lost and others beyond repair, with hopes to make them available to audiences everywhere.”

[Source: Excerpt from the article].

Elizabeth Harney

Associate Professor, African Art History, University of Toronto Scarborough

1265 Military Trail,  Toronto, ON. Canada, M1C 1A4

e.harney@utoronto.ca

416-287-7109

Harney, Elizabeth, and Ruth B. Phillips, eds. Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2018.

Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history’s traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world.

[Source: Duke University Press].

Harney, Elizabeth. Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora. London: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2003.

Ethiopian Passages tells of the importance of the arts in the African diaspora and explores the important histories of migration and the myriad negotiations of artistic groups among African artists in the diaspora. The book discusses Ethiopia’s history: the word ‘Ethiopia’ means ‘land of the sun-burned, or black-skinned people’, representing a sense of place for Africans who became land-lost, renamed and denied the use of their native tongues. It tells of the reign of Menelik II-which marked the beginning of Ethiopia’s modern history-and of life under the Marxist military regime. The book describes the tumultuous political environment of the late 20th century and shows how these unstable times have shaped the Ethiopia of today. The book also questions stereotype misconceptions about African peoples and cultures and explains why the concept of ‘ethiopianism’ came to be associated with pride, independence, self-motivation and reliance… thoroughly competent to chart their own course of development and to manage their own affairs’. Above all it revolutionizes our understanding of the culture and identity of African peoples.

[Source: Google Books].

Harney, Elizabeth. In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw712.

In Senghor’s Shadow is a unique study of modern art in post-independence Senegal. Elizabeth Harney examines the art that flourished during the administration of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president, and in the decades since he stepped down in1980. As a major philosopher and poet of Negritude, Senghor envisioned an active and revolutionary role for modern artists, and he created a well-funded system for nurturing their work. In questioning the canon of art produced under his aegis—known as the Ecole de Dakar—Harney reconsiders Senghor’s Negritude philosophy, his desire to express Senegal’s postcolonial national identity through art, and the system of art schools and exhibits he developed. She expands scholarship on global modernisms by highlighting the distinctive cultural history that shaped Senegalese modernism and the complex and often contradictory choices made by its early artists.

[Source: Duke University Press].