Arts & Africa through the Ages: an Introduction

HAA 19 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course is an introduction to the arts and expressive cultures of Africa, through the ages. African arts, from the 70,000-years-old South African Blombos cave drawings to this year’s Venice Biennale, cannot be approached as a single unit. Rather, this lecture class considers key moments in the long history of the African continent and their worldwide impact.

It pairs deep consideration of specific historical or contemporary African traditions, techniques, and forms with a sustained attention to methods, historiography, and sources.

In this class, you will engage with monuments of the expressive cultures of Africa and its worldwide diasporas from multiple perspectives by considering local politics, oral traditions, architectural and urban forms, religious dynamics, material exchange, etc… Through weekly lectures, looking labs examining artworks in person, and discussion sections, you will also learn how to examine visual and material culture and critically interrogate the sources and interpretation scholars have brought to bear on their analysis such as the historical and contemporary politics of oral histories, the biases of colonial documentation, the cross-cultural epistemologies shaping material analysis, and the economic entanglements between scholarship, preservation, the tourism industry and museums..