Description
Book SynopsisThis book contributes to a growing corpus of writing on the body, bringing new perspectives to this fascinating and topical subject. Feminist, psychoanalytic and queer readings, among others, have demonstrated the extent of the functions and roles fulfilled by the body, as well as the number of critical perspectives it can serve. However, by and large, African representations of the body have been overlooked. This coherent volume brings together essays on the portrayal of the body in African art, film, literature, photography and theatre. The book includes thematically linked contributions which explore issues of power and representation, and reflects current trends in the study of the body and more broadly within the field of African Studies.
Table of ContentsContents: Charlotte Baker: Introduction: Expressions of the Body in African Text and Image – Ndubuisi Ezeluomba: Powerful Representations: The Human Body in Eighteenth Century Benin Art – Fetson Kalua: Claiming the Body: Unity Dow’s
The Screaming of the Innocent – Serazer Pekerman: The Framed Intimacy of
Becoming-Woman: The Representation of the Mutilated Body in Ousmane Sembène’s
Moolaadé – Kevin Dumouchelle: Beyond the Body Boundary: Queer(y)ing the Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Samuel Fosso – Brenda Schmahmann: Bodily Issues as Subject Matter: Abjection in the Works of Penny Siopis and Berni Searle – Médard Djatou: The ‘Wrong’ Colour? Representations and Perceptions of Albinism among the Bamileke of Western Cameroon – John Masterson: Posing, Exposing, Opposing: Accounting for Contested (Corpo)Realities in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
Half of a Yellow Sun – Kevin McCarron: The Powerful and the Powerless: African, African American Bodies and Imprisonment – Laura Mann: Breeze from an Open Door: Foreign Spirits, National Bodies and Egyptian Imaginative Resistance – Isabel Hollis: Metamorphoses in Migration: Fawzia Zouari’s
Ce pays dont je meurs – Thomas Spreelin MacDonald: Shifting Bodies: Death and the Public Function of Post-Apartheid South African Literature – Heather Hewett: Translating Desire: Exile and Leila Aboulela’s Poetics of Embodiment – Charlotte Baker/Patricia Lund: A Visible Difference: Images of Black African People with Albinism – Natasha Gordon-Chipembere: Claiming Sarah Baartman: The Politics of Representing Black Women in the Twenty-First Century – Laurian R. Bowles: Imaging Migrant Women and the Embodied Market: Accra, Ghana – Anne Harris: Performativity, Identity and the ‘Found Girls’ of Africa: Sudanese Women Talk Education.
