Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Abimbola Adelakun, Toyin Falola

   Pages 1-13

3. Rewriting Algeria: Transcultural Kinship and Anticolonial Revolution in Kateb Yacine’s L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc

   • Amir Aziz

   Pages 15-45

4. Revolution and Revolt: Identitarian Space, Magic, and the Land in Decolonial Latin American and African Writing

   • Juan Manuel Ávila Conejo

   Pages 47-67

5. Family Politics: Negotiating the Family Unit as a Creative Force in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

   • Aaron Brown

   Pages 69-82

6. Auteuring Nollywood: Rethinking the Movie Director and the Idea of Creativity in the Nigerian Film Industry

   • Adeshina Afolayan

   Pages 83-102

7. Nollywood in Rio: An Exploration of Brazilian Audience Perception of Nigerian Cinema

   • Kamahra Ewing

   Pages 103-124

8. Re-producing Self, Community, and ‘Naija’ in Nigerian Diaspora Films: Soul Sisters in the United States and Man on the Ground in South Africa

   • Olaocha Nwadiuto Nwabara

   Pages 125-149

9. “A Single Story”: African Women as Staged in US Theater

   • Lisa B. Thompson

   Pages 151-165

10. Silêncio: Black Bodies, Black Characters, and the Black Political Persona in the Work of the Teatro Negro Group Cia dos Comuns

    • Gustavo Melo Cerqueira

    Pages 167-196

11. New Orleans: America’s Creative Crescent

    • Lucy Bartholomee

    Pages 197-215

12. The Hashtag as Archive: Internet Memes and Nigeria’s Social Media Election

    • James Yeku

    Pages 217-245

13. Black Creativity in Jamaica and Its Global Influences, 1930–1987

    • Bernard Steiner Ifekwe

    Pages 247-265

14. Ethics and Aesthetic Creativity: A Critical Reflection on the Moral Purpose of African Art

    • Modestus Nnamdi Onyeaghalaji

    Pages 267-280

15. From Saartjie to Queen Bey: Black Female Artists and the Global Cultural Industry

    • Olivier J. Tchouaffe

    Pages 281-298

16. Correction to: Rewriting Algeria: Transcultural Kinship and Anticolonial Revolution in Kateb Yacine’s L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc

    • Amir Aziz

    Pages C1-C1

17. Back Matter

    Pages 299-335

    PDF

This book explores the politics of artistic creativity, examining how black artists in Africa and the diaspora create art as a procedure of self-making. Essays cross continents to uncover the efflorescence of black culture in national and global contexts and in literature, film, performance, music, and visual art. Contributors place the concerns of black artists and their works within national and transnational conversations on anti-black racism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, migration, resettlement, resistance, and transnational feminisms. Does art by the subaltern fulfill the liberatory potential that critics have ascribed to it? What other possibilities does political art offer? Together, these essays sort through the aesthetics of daily life to build a thesis that reflects the desire of black artists and cultures to remake themselves and their world.

• political aesthetics
• black artists
• black culture
• African heritage
• Black Atlantic
• anti-black racism
• xenophobia
• ethnocentrism
• black cultures in Africa
• African Diaspora
• Nigerian Film Industry
• African writers
• African Art

“This is a book of exceptional importance for researchers, teachers, and the general reader with interests in the art as well as the creative and political studies of Africa and the Black world of the diaspora. It is, indeed, a well-researched publication, which will certainly stand the test of time due to its multi-purposefulness and intellectual distinction.” (A. B. Assensoh, Professor Emeritus, Indiana University, and Courtesy Professor Emeritus, University of Oregon, USA)

“At the heart of this book is the notion of art as goal-directed and emancipatory, belonging both to the individual creator and to the creator’s community. These essays are Afrocentric and powerfully grounded in engagement scholarship, particularly in theirdescription and analysis of the ways in which African art globalizes its humanistic value without losing its local essence as a material site of social and political expression.” (Malami Buba, Professor, Division of African Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Yongin, South Korea)

• African and Africana Studies Program, University of Texas, Austin, USA

  Abimbola Adelakun

• Department of History, University of Texas, Austin, USA

  Toyin Falola

Abimbola Adelakun teaches in the African and Africana Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.


Toyin Falola is University Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, as well as Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

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