German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies Architecture, Art, Urbanism, and Visual Culture
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Itohan Osayimwese is Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at Brown University, USA
<i>German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies</i> provides welcome histories of German colonial art, architecture and visual culture while offering ground-breaking analyses of how contemporary and historic African and German stakeholders used such materials to forward their own agendas.
Steven Nelson, Dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, USA
This book produces a unique and highly informative understanding of the relationship between colonial architecture and urbanism. It persuasively demonstrates how architecture and the visual arts in Germany relied on the innate relationship between architecture, space, and race at the intersection of politics and economics.
- Volker Langbehn, Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature, San Francisco State University, USA
The editor and authors successfully introduce new topics, actors, and voices to the ongoing scholarly debate of German colonialism, thus moving away from singular interpretations and creating more openings for future analysis. The book offers a first step in unravelling the “complex set of entangled historical relations, and multiple lines of affinity” … demanding an urgent reconsideration of colonialism’s legacies in our violent present.
Fabrications
Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense debates about Africa’s cultural heritage in European museums have brought this period of African and German history back into the spotlight.
German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and Germany.
The first in-depth exploration of the designed and visual aspects of German colonialism, the book presents a series of essays combining formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings, and space with the discourse analysis approach associated with postcolonial theory. Covering the entire period from the build-up to colonialism in the early-19th century to the present, subjects covered range from late-19th-century German colonial paintings of African landscapes and people to German land appropriation through planning and architectural mechanisms, and from indigenous African responses to colonial architecture, to explorations of the legacies of German colonialism by contemporary artists today.
This powerful and revealing collection of essays will encourage new research on this under-explored topic, and demonstrate the importance of historical research to the present, especially with regards to ongoing debates about the presence of material legacies of colonialism in Western culture, museum collections, and immigration policies.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Seeing and Building German Colonialism - Itohan Osayimwese
1. From Travel to Colonialism: Art and the German Colonies - Itohan Osayimwese
2. Water, its Presence and Absence in Settlements and Placemaking in Colonial Namibia - Walter Peters
3. A Spatial Writing of the Earth: The Design of Colonial Territory in South-West Africa - Hollyamber Kennedy
4. The Palace of King Njoya: Responding to Colonial Architecture - Mark Dike DeLancey
5. Namibia’s Anti-Colonial Hero Hendrik Witbooi: Reflections from the Visual Arts - Fabian Lehmann
6. On Mwangi Hutter’s Postcolonialism(s): From “Static Drift” to “One Ground” - Brett M. Van Hoesen
Bibliography
Index
Visual Cultures and German Contexts publishes innovative research into visual culture in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well as in diasporic linguistic and cultural communities outside of these geographic, historical, and political borders.
The series invites scholarship by academics, curators, architects, artists, and designers across all media forms and time periods. It engages with traditional methods in visual culture analysis as well as inventive interdisciplinary approaches. It seeks to encourage a dialogue amongst scholars in traditional disciplines with those pursuing innovative interdisciplinary and intermedial research. Of particular interest are provocative perspectives on archival materials, original scholarship on emerging and established creative visual fields, investigations into time-based forms of aesthetic expression, and new readings of history through the lens of visual culture. The series offers a much-needed venue for expanding how we engage with the field of Visual Culture in general.
Proposals for monographs, edited volumes, and outstanding research studies by established as well as emerging writers from a wide range of comparative, theoretical and methodological perspectives are welcome.
Series Editors
Deborah Ascher Barnstone is Professor and Head of the school of Architecture, Design, and Planning at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is on the editorial board of The Art Journal of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand and has published widely in scholarly journals such as Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Architecture, and New German Critique. Recent monographs are: Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918-1933 (2016) and The Break with the Past: Avant-garde Architecture in Germany, 1910–1925 (2018).
Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor in Critical Studies and Visual Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, USA. He serves as Vice President of the U.S. Fulbright Association's Chapter Advisory Board, as well as on the Advisory Board and on the Summer Workshop Program Committee for the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. He has been published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review, and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism, Spectacle, Representations of German Identity as well as Memorialization in Germany Since 1945.
Advisory Board Members
Donna West Brett, University of Sydney, Australia
Nina Lübbren, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
Patrizia C. McBride, Cornell University, USA
Elizabeth Otto, University at Buffalo SUNY, USA
Annette F. Timm, University of Calgary, Canada
James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri, USA
Randall Halle, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Christophe Kone, Williams College, USA
Paul Jaskot, Duke University, USA
Qinna Shen, Bryn Mawr College, USA
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Itohan Osayimwese is Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at Brown University, USA