HNRS 122-01: Artistic Life in African Cities

Cities in Africa, like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, are intensely -- perhaps even unrelentingly -- expressive environments. In Dakar as in Nairobi, in Johannesburg as in Lagos, the urban terrain’s unparalleled resources enable myriad creative phenomena including paintings and sculptures, modernist architecture and public monuments, sartorial expression, as well as printed and electronic media such as cartoons, advertisements, video, television, and the internet. In this seminar style course, students will investigate the creative propositions and resources constituting the urban environment in Africa by way of a series of case studies. Students will increase their critical understanding of urban creative forms and the myriad ways in which expressive culture is produced, interpreted, and consumed in contemporary urban Africa.

To this end, this course will explore the following questions: How does the city offer unique opportunities for the production and consumption of expressive propositions? What is the nature of visuality in the city? How do individuals create and engage these forms to construct, evaluate, contest or subvert contemporary social realities? How do these forms operate as both individual expressions and collective resources? How does the influx of expressive phenomena from one city shape expression in another? And, if we understand expressive forms as operating in a world of intertextuality, we must ask, how urban visual projects entangle and interface with other creative expressions (such as music in Kinshasa or Accra)? How do vision and visuality mediate relationships between colonizer/colonized, local/global, and individual/collective?

Term: Spring 2009

Credits: 4

Fulfills: GE Requirement in Arts (A)

Meeting times: 11:30-1:20 MW

Instructor: Joanna Grabski

Open to: First-years/Sophomores/Juniors/Seniors, limited by quota of 4-4-4-4