African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity [Paperback]

Focusing on the theme of warriorhood, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir weaves a complex history of how colonial influence forever changed artistic practice, objects, and their meaning. Looking at two widely diverse cultures, the Idoma in Nigeria and the Samburu in Kenya, Kasfir makes a bold statement about the links between colonialism, the Europeans' image of Africans, Africans' changing self representation, and the impact of global trade on cultural artifacts and the making of art. This intriguing history of the interaction between peoples, aesthetics, morals, artistic objects and practices, and the global trade in African art challenges current ideas about artistic production and representation.

To help alter and broaden the meaning that some of her western professional colleagues associate with African objects, art historian and curator Kasfir (Emory Univ.) applies and draws lessons from certain anthropological practice from the 1980s and literary theory from the 1990s to two examples of African artifacts. Sustained fieldwork undergirds her study of the spears of the pastoralist Samburu of the Rift Valley, in Kenya, East Africa, and of the masks of the agricultural Idoma in Nigeria, West Africa. The comparison of these two quite different tribes and their artifacts unfolds in four parts: warriors and warriorhood, artists and their products, the objects themselves, and commodification and globalization. Practicing anthropologically, Kasfir digs into the cultural fabric of the tribes and applies it to their artifacts. She recognizes the different impacts of varied British colonial policy upon the tribes and records some of the misreadings of tribal culture by European explorers, colonial officials, and settlers. As historian, she underlines cultural change and the consequent meaning of embedded artifacts over timesomething that western artists and curators (let alone tourists) do not always apply to their reading of African objects. A provocative and usl£)