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The Event of Art presents, in fifty-two modular chapters and over eight hundred pages and images, the works of artist Marc Lafia. The book interweaves essays, notes, photographic archives, and a host of exhibitions wherein Lafia traverses his wide body of work and examines how his early strategies of cultural reading of photography and film, of interface, network culture, and social media, transform into an investigation of materiality itself. If his interest was once the way media becomes the message, his interest later becomes the realm of the sensible and the sensate in themselves. Here he presents art as the medium itself, giving us wide permission to explore and examine our deepest feelings and senses, our world and its becoming. The book is introduced by two essays. The first is by curator and art dealer Mathieu Borysevicz, where he recounts meeting Lafia at his first artist residency, and the many projects they would go on to do together. He introduces Lafia's interest in recording as it becomes digital and computational where "recording is not only memory, and a data structure, but a permutational instrument and ever-changing horizon of iterations." The other introductory essay is by critic Daniel Coffeen, who writes, "while Lafia may not have a traditional medium - there is no such thing anymore - he does in fact have one consistent medium: imaging making itself, its apparati of creation, consumption, and circulation. In fact Lafia's medium is the discourse of art - what it is, how it comes to be, how we experience it." The Event of Art presents the work of art as a complex material and societal event. The event is multiple, a continual becoming of perception, being, materiality, participation, a coming to the senses and the making, shaping and opening to them, not only of one's self, but the world becoming.
Igbo art is famous for its diversity, inventiveness, and aesthetic quality. This wide-ranging survey of art made by the 15 to 20 million Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria focuses on the 20th century but also takes a look at the extraordinary 9th- and 10th-century bce cast copper alloy and ceramic finds that influenced Igbo artworks created 20 centuries later. Ceremonial contexts and meanings are explained, covering art associated with individuals as well as communal works and ranging from personal decoration to architectural forms, from household objects to cult sculpture, title regalia, and public shrines. Many little-known objects are included alongside a generous sampling of the thousands of masks that are perhaps the quintessential forms of Igbo art.
This book traces the visual cultures and histories of Mami Wata and other African water divinities. Mami Wata, often portrayed with the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish, is at once beautiful, jealous, generous, seductive, and potentially deadly. A water spirit widely known across Africa and the African diaspora, her origins are said to lie "overseas," although she has been thoroughly incorporated into local beliefs and practics. She can bring good fortune in the form of money, and her power increased between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, the era of growing international trade between Africa and the rest of the world. Her name, which may be translated as "Mother Water" or "Mistress Water," is pidgin English, a language developed to lubricate trade. Africans forcibly carried across the Atlantic as part of that "trade" brought with them their beliefs and practices honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities. Henry John Drewal is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Other contributors include Marilyn Houlberg, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Amy L. Noell, John W. Nunley, and Jill Salmons.
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
In African Women and the Shame and Pain of Infertility: An Ethico-Cultural Study of Christian Response to Childlessness among the Igbo People of West Africa, Okoro discusses the shipwreck that is associated with infertility in marriage in Africa. Within this space, childlessness places a big question mark on a woman’s femininity and the self-esteem of the man. The stigma of infertility most often leads to social isolation and humiliation, particularly of married women, even when the source of infertility may not have come from them. Unfortunately, this situation goes against the highly valued Igbo ethical principle of onye aghala nwanne ya, meaning “no kith or kin should be left behind.” Therefore, the purpose of the book is to help married people in Igbo land and Africa at large to appropriate this indigenous principle in their response to the problem of infertility. To attain this, the author critically evaluates discrimination and oppression of infertile couples, particularly women, and shedding light on the paradoxes found in Igbo cultural expressions. He employs a constructive, ethical, cultural, religious, contextual, and theological approach that explores important Igbo religious paradigms like Chi (an Igbo religio-cultural understanding of personal destiny) and Ani (the feminine deity in-charge of the land and fertility) to argue the case for the liberation and integration of infertile couples.
Secret societies in tribal societies turn out to be key to understanding the origins of social inequalities and state religions.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and the world's eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption and an ailing economy. Toyin Falola, a leading historian intimately acquainted with the region, and Matthew Heaton, who has worked extensively on African science and culture, combine their expertise to explain the context to Nigeria's recent troubles through an exploration of its pre-colonial and colonial past, and its journey from independence to statehood. By examining key themes such as colonialism, religion, slavery, nationalism and the economy, the authors show how Nigeria's history has been swayed by the vicissitudes of the world around it, and how Nigerians have adapted to meet these challenges. This book offers a unique portrayal of a resilient people living in a country with immense, but unrealized, potential.