Africa's Struggle for its Art: Debating Critical Topics in Museology, Art History, and Culture

As the original home of humanity, the African continent has, over the millennia, produced an incredible diversity of tangible and intangible arts and aesthetic practices - in sculpture, architecture, masquerade, royal and religious regalia, rock painting, pottery, and much more. However, this richcultural heritage has, historically, largely been approached, studied, and curated according to Western academic, museological, and cultural heritage management approaches. These have often been disconnected from the lived realities of Africans across the continent. Critics of these interconnected hegemonic paradigms and practices have argued that the needs, interests, aspirations, aesthetic philosophies, and concepts of preservation and patrimony of local communities have long been neglected, overlooked, and even undermined by colonially derived and often ethnocentric approaches and understandings of material culture, as well as the expropriation of much of Africa's historic art, much of it now held in Western museum and private collections. These criticisms highlight Africa's ongoing struggle for its art and heritage: to repatriate it, curate it, and represent it in ways more in accordance with various African philosophies and practices.
Course Attributes: AS HUM; AS LCD; EN H; FA HUM; AR HUM; AH NW; BU Hum; BU IS

Africa's Struggle for its Art: Debating Critical Topics in Museology, Art History, and Culture

ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY 2510

Section 01