What Is African Art?: A Short History

Probst, Peter

ISBN 10: 022679315X / ISBN 13: 9780226793153

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2022

About this Item

Ex-library. Acceptable - This is a significantly damaged book. It should be considered a reading copy only. Please order this book only if you are interested in the content and not the condition. May be ex-library. PAPERBACK Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # M022679315XZ4

Bibliographic Details

• Title: What Is African Art?: A Short History
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022679315X
• ISBN 13: 9780226793153
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

A history of the evolving field of African art.

This book examines the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. It starts with a simple question: What do we mean when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Peter Probst identifies “African art” as a conceptual vessel that manifests wider societal transformations.

What Is African Art? covers three key stages in the field’s history. Starting with the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the book first discusses the colonial formation of the field by focusing on the role of museums, collectors, and photography in disseminating visual cultures as relations of power. It then explores the remaking of the field at the dawn of African independence with the shift toward contemporary art and the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it examines the post- and decolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of representation, repair, and restitution.

About the Author

Peter Probst is professor of art history and anthropology at Tufts University. He is the author or editor of several books, including National Museums of Africa, Osogbo and the Art of Heritage, Kalumbas Fest, and African Modernities.