Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis work should be of great interest to students, scholars, and a general audience interested in African visual culture.
* African Arts *
This well-written, meticulously researched study will be valuable to all who are interested in African arts.
* Choice *
Humor and Violence is an excellent book of art historical scholarship and a pleasure to read.
* African Studies Review *
Strother's expertise, notably, the "reading" of objects as texts is both highly compelling and thought-provoking, and ultimately, herein lies the book's strength. It is well written in accessible narrative style lavishly accompanied by color and black-and-white photographs, together with hand-drawn sketches. This book will no doubt find itself on the bookshelves of those interested in African art.
* African Studies Quarterly *
Humor and Violence's depth of research and radical interdisciplinarity is breathtaking.
* The Art Bulletin *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Warning! What do you see? A white man? Or an over-dressed one?
3. New Commodities on the Loango Coast (1840-1880)
4. Depictions of Human Trafficking on Loango Ivories in the 1880s
5. Humor in the Hygiene of Power (ca. 1885-1915)
6. By Congolese, for Congolese (1910s-40s)
7. The African Victim in the Congolese Imaginary (1950s-1997)
Coda: Congolese Perspectives on Humor and Redemption
Notes
Bibliography
Index
