ACASA

Arts Council of the African Studies Association

African Critical Inquiry Programme Announces 2022 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards

By

The African Critical Inquiry Programme has named Vanessa Chen, Min’enhle Ncube and Suzana Sousa as recipients of the 2022 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards. Chen, a South African student in the Department of Historical Studies, and Ncube, a Zimbabwean student in Social Anthropology, are both pursuing PhDs at University of Cape Town. Sousa is an Angolan student in History and a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Support from ACIP’s Ivan Karp Awards will allow each of them to do significant research for their dissertations. Chen will work in Dutch archives for her dissertation, Collecting and Convening the Visual and Material Cultural History of Chinese Convicts, Exiles and “Free Blacks” at the Cape (circa 1654-1838). Ncube will conduct fieldwork in Zambia for her project Mapping the Ethics of Care Associated with Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Healthcare Infrastructures in Zambia. Sousa’s award will support her research at Angolan museums for her project “Angola Avante?” Making and Contesting Political Narratives of the Nation through Art and Visual Culture.

Founded in 2012, the African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research at University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University in Atlanta. Supported by donations to the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund, the ACIP fosters thinking and working across public cultural institutions, across disciplines and fields, and across generations. It seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions, and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa through an annual ACIP Workshop and through the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, which support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences enrolled at South African universities.

About Vanessa Chen’s project:

Despite the documentary record of the early history of Chinese convicts, exiles, and ‘free blacks’ at the Cape (1654 – 1838) being fragmentary and scattered in multiple places, it is and should be seen as significant in the making of South Africa’s social history. Researchers have undertaken the task of bringing the stories of this subaltern group to the forefront, however, they have not reckoned with the making of this collection of documentary sources. Collecting and Convening the Visual and Material Cultural History of Chinese Convicts, Exiles, and “Free Blacks” at the Cape (circa 1654-1838) works to do so, and to re-curate these sources as an archive in and of itself. Chen’s dissertation examines the history of the extant documentary archival slivers that speak of Chinese presence at the colony alongside non-documentary materials, tracing and accounting for their presence and absence. She has already worked with archival sources in South Africa, and next will do on-site research at the National Archives of the Netherlands. Her final archival work will be in Indonesia. In the Netherlands, she will locate and collate records for document analyses, consult with archivists regarding the records’ biographies – their movement and reshaping to and from different repositories across time – copyright regulations and accessibility and negotiate permission to digitise and include the records in an eventual digital curation. Chen’s dissertation will enable a more comprehensive understanding of the nature and extent of the Cape Chinese archive, address deficiencies of colonial archiving, and underscore both the importance of representation and what can be made despite of the lack thereof.

About Min’enhle Ncube’s project:

Mapping the Ethics of Care will be the first in-depth ethnographic study on the ethics of care associated with artificial intelligence adopted in healthcare infrastructures in Zambia. Artificial intelligence software is increasingly being adopted to support healthcare infrastructure, raising issues underscored by postcolonial quandaries, neoliberalism from Copperbelt mining, and other developmental paradigms. Through eighteen months of research in Zambia, Ncube will investigate the creation of AI tools, the implications of adopting these into the healthcare infrastructures, and how this contributes towards the ethics of care in the area. The project will examine whether machine learning, its inputs of big data, and software development support or challenge the diversity and inequalities in southern Africa. Ncube’s project is a part of a larger strategic programme, Future Hospitals: 4IR and Ethics of Care in Africa, at the Institute for Humanities in Africa that reflects critically on data and AI’s implications for care infrastructures on the continent. Ncube will use epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2011) as a framework to interrogate technology infrastructures, their epistemology, the fundamentals of ‘intelligence’ and its relevance in a post/neo-colonial landscape of care. With a dearth of literature on ethics associated with AI in the Global South, Ncube’s research addresses this gap in the context of broader anthropological inquiry in Zambia, which includes works from colonial-era and postcolonial Zambia (or Northern Rhodesia). It builds on scholarship regarding the anthropology of ethics and technology while fostering connections with past anthropological work to further the development of anthropology and social science in the region. The research also advances anthropology’s relevance in innovation praxis on the African continent.

About Suzana Sousa’s project:

“Angola Avante?” Making and Contesting Political Narratives of the Nation through Art and Visual Culture is concerned with the nation-building process in Angola after its independence in 1975, a process that occurred through arts and culture. It examines the history of cultural nationalism in the country and the political narrative that has engaged this history to legitimise the nation. This also involves exchanges between politics and visual culture in the context of civil war and the construction of national identity. The process of making the nation was enacted through cultural policy, national arts organisations, and museums that maintained an affinity with colonial ethnography. Sousa engages with the development of visual arts and the making of museums in the aftermath of the civil war. She argues that the policies and practices promoted by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) have continued to be entrenched in colonial categories and distinctions. Her research seeks to understand these complexities and contradictions through fieldwork in two museums in Angola, the Dundo Museum and the National Anthropology Museum. The latter was founded a year after independence in the country’s capital and the former is a colonial enterprise from 1936 located in the east of the country, in an area administered by the mining company Diamang. The museums’ locations, Luanda and Dundo, are also an entry point to the diverse constructions of identity within the nation.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Information about the 2023 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards for African students enrolled in South African Ph.D. programmes will be available in November 2022. The application deadline is 1 May 2023.

For further information, see http://www.gs.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html and https://www.facebook.com/ivan.karp.corinne.kratz.fund.

African Critical Inquiry Programme

By

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

AFRICAN CRITICAL INQUIRY PROGRAMME
IVAN KARP DOCTORAL RESEARCH AWARDS
FOR AFRICAN STUDENTS ENROLLED IN
SOUTH AFRICAN Ph.D. PROGRAMMES

Closing Date: Monday 2 May 2022

The African Critical Inquiry Programme is pleased to announce the 2022 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards to support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled at South African universities and conducting dissertation research on relevant topics. Grant amounts vary depending on research plans; the maximum award is ZAR 40,000.

The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa. The Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards are open to African postgraduate students (regardless of citizenship) in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Applicants must be currently registered in a Ph.D. programme in a South African university and be working on topics related to ACIP’s focus. Awards support doctoral research projects focused on topics such as institutions of public culture, museums and exhibitions, forms and practices of public scholarship, culture and communication, and the theories, histories and systems of thought that shape and illuminate public culture and public scholarship. Awards are open to proposals working with a range of methodologies, including research in archives and collections, fieldwork, interviews, surveys, and quantitative data collection.

For full information about this opportunity and how to apply, see the Call for Proposals listed under “ACIP Opportunities” on our website: http://www.graduateschool.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html.

ACIP is a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia (USA).

In Memoriams: Robert Farris Thompson (1932-2021)

By

Robert Farris Thompson, born December 30, 1932, was the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art, on the faculty since 1965, and Master of Timothy Dwight College, at Yale University, 1978 until 2010. He passed away on November 29, 2021, at 88 years of age.

Professor Robert Farris Thompson – “Who is this man,” I thought when I first met him. It was around 1974, and I was dutifully cataloguing slides at the Eliot Elisofon Archives, Museum of African Art, as a young master’s student, and new archivist. He rushed into the room, gasping for images of Africa, and awe-struck by everything he saw, exclaiming in Yoruba, complete with expletives, wild with enthusiasm, and finding gold mines of evidence everywhere. I was a student of dance and art, with pretensions of becoming an art historian, and a few years later, the head of my dance department, Shirley Wimmer, called me up with great excitement, saying she had just heard a lecture by Robert Farris Thompson, and knowing my desire to get into African art, she said “You have to go to Yale.”

Robert Farris Thompson was a legendary professor of the history of art in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere and throughout the world. Yale University was his home throughout his adult life, and Thompson and Yale have been synonymous for thousands of Yale graduates for a half century. From Yale, he received his BA in 1955, his MA in 1961, and his PhD in 1965. He studied for the doctorate under Professor George Kubler, then a specialist in Spanish art. But his heart was in African American and Latin American culture. His dissertation fieldwork was conducted among the Yoruba in Nigeria because he wanted to find the sources of African American arts and culture. He began teaching in the History of Art in 1961, and was later honored as the Col. John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art. His undergraduate course, “From West Africa to the Black Americas: The Black Atlantic Visual Tradition,” was considered part of the tradition for any Yale College student. From 1978 to 2010 he served as Master of Timothy Dwight College, the longest run of any serving master. TD students revered him as “Master T,” and the College produced sweatsuits showing a caricature of Thompson as a muscular bodybuilder, with the word “ashe” – the Yoruba term for “inner power.”

Probably his most pivotal piece of writing was the article in which he explored “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” appearing in African Forum, in 1966. Thompson is known internationally for his continually groundbreaking publications, beginning with the catalogue for an exhibition at UCLA based upon his PhD dissertation, entitled Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at UCLA (1971). In 1974, UCLA and the National Gallery of Art, sponsored an exhibition that revolutionized thinking about African art and culture, with a book entitled African Art in Motion: Icon and Act in the Collection of Katharine Coryton White. Again, for an exhibition at the National Gallery in 1981, he published, with Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. In 1984, drawing upon his decades of lecturing on the arts of Africa trans-Atlantic world, he published one of the most influential works on the continuity of African art in the new world, entitled Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. His Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas, in 1993, for the Museum for African Art, New York, accompanied the exhibition that traveled around the world to great acclaim as an examination of ensembles of sculpture never before considered by art historians. 

Thompson was born to a wealthy El Paso, Texan, family, son of Dr. Robert Farris Thompson, a surgeon, and Virginia Hood Thompson, a patron of the arts, and received a patrician education attending secondary school at Phillips Academy Andover, in Massachusetts, before admission to Yale. But he was anything but orthodox, despite his tweed sport coats and penny loafers. As a “Yalie,” he would slip out of New Haven and go down to New York to the smoky Black jazz clubs, where he got to know all the early jazz greats. He started out, after getting his BA in 1955, traveling to Paris, with the hope of becoming a jazz player. He later championed such musicians as Tito Puente and Coltrane. His earliest article was on “Afro-Cuban dance and music,” published in 1958, followed by another in 1961 on “African Music.” He wrote a book on Tango, and his last teaching years were devoted to his course, “New York Mambo: Microcosm of Black Creativity.” 

His art history was published in the traditional academic venues, but also in The Village Voice, The Fat Abbot, Rolling Stone, and Saturday Review. Among his many exhibitions, two of his most monumental were at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC: African Art in Motion, 1974; and The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds, 1981. He was recognized by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association with its “Leadership Award” in 1995. He was awarded the College Art Association’s inaugural “Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Art Writing” in 2003, and was named CAA’s Distinguished Scholar in 2015. In 2007, Thompson was honored with the “Outstanding Contribution to Dance Research” award by the Congress on Research in Dance. In 2021, Thompson was awarded the honorary degree – his fourth Yale degree — Doctor of Humanities, by the President of Yale University. The College Art Association aptly described him as a “towering figure in the history of art, whose voice for diversity and cultural openness has made him a public intellectual of resounding importance.”

Long before “globalism” was even a word, he was preaching it in his classroom. The first day in class, the students were shown a slide of the world which Thompson zoomed in on until he reached Tokyo, Japan, and this was his springboard to upset all the preconceived notions about a bounded and traditional Africa. If he could find Africanisms in Japan, it was not such a leap to the Americas. He coined the term, “The Black Atlantic.” His forceful 1983 work, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, was the culmination of his lectures at Yale, and was as much a praise song to African American culture as a tediously-researched, groundbreaking work of scholarship.

No one who ever sat through a Thompson lecture ever forgot it. It was an extravaganza of masterful drum playing, dance, song, and all the poetry and cadence of a southern preacher in the Black church. His performance never diminished — even when he was stuck in a little seminar room with three of us graduate students around a table, our jaws dropped to the floor. He would assign us readings in any language – You don’t read Dutch? — get a dictionary. He would punctuate his lectures with Haitian Creole, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Kikongo, Portuguese, Spanish, Yoruba, and other languages, without translation. He once told me the secret to his success: “I am shameless.” His kiKongo wasn’t perfect, and he didn’t have a dancer’s body, but he never let that stop him from going full out to learn every tango and mambo dance step, every multimeter rhythm, every chant and praise song that he could. He didn’t care if you liked it. He liked it, and that was abundantly obvious as he reveled in all that he did.

Bob will be greatly missed by his dozens of Yale protégés now prominent in the fields of African and African American Art, thousands of Yale College graduates, and the world of lovers of African and African American music, dance, and art. A memorial service will be held in the Spring at Yale University.

— Frederick John Lamp, Yale University PhD, 1982; Retired Curator of African Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and Lecturer in Theater Studies and The History of Art, Yale University

 

In Remembrance of Robert Farris Thompson

I first met Robert Farris Thompson when I was a student at UCLA. He had come to campus to give a lecture for the opening of his Yoruba exhibition Black Gods and Kings. I got to help him set up his slides in the auditorium sound booth and all of a sudden he just started drumming on the counter. I started drumming along with him and next thing I knew he invited me on stage to drum with him in the middle of his talk. As he moved through his lecture he presented ideas and issues I rarely heard other art historians engage, and I was honestly in awe. Two Yoruba gentlemen were sitting in the front row, and they liked what he was saying too, nodding as he repeatedly made critical points. Of all the things that impressed me, what captured me most completely was his ability to demonstrate and bring to life the fundamental relevance of art to social life and human imagination. His talk was liberating.

Shortly thereafter I moved to New Haven and become one of his graduate students, and then I became a graduate assistant for his big African survey course. That was a transformative experience, not just for me but for the huge number of undergraduates who found themselves most fortunate to be taking such a class. He brought artists up from New York city to share their knowledge and experiences with us. He maintained a huge class bulletin board for the class that was mind boggling in its dense, rich, near chaotic presentation of words and images. He had a penetrating consciousness that virtually compelled you to think. As his student, he seemed to me a paradox: rigorous and demanding and very attuned to scholarly detail on the one hand, while simultaneously offering a freedom to explore that I found exhilarating. He made boundaries seem ripe with the potential to be challenged. He made you work, very hard. But he made you feel tremendous. I loved art history before I met Robert Farris Thompson. Being his student stretched the discipline’s worthiness for me in wonderful ways. 

He has never stopped being all that to me. And more. Once after I finished my degree and was off teaching, I came back to New Haven to give a lecture. He was then the Master of Timothy Dwight College and known to all as Master T. We went to coffee and then he showed me his Master’s living quarters. There were several bedrooms, each with a double bed.  And piled high on all of them were books and articles and notes and photographs; an enormous jumble of material, some quite rare and hard to find, with each bed’s treasures dedicated to a different research project. He kept vocabulary flash cards in a number of languages in his bathroom. He never stopped working with those flash cards or on each bed’s lush array of data. Put that together with the ways he totally submerged himself with people in the cultures where the arts he loved were made, and it is hardly a surprise that his research was spectacular, his writing evocative.

 I very often think of RFT, and what he gave me. He made it clear, all the time, that you should understand the people whose art you study as full of sophisticated and complex ideas, rich practices and significant experiences, all worthy of our attention. His sense of humanity, his profound dedication, his ability to balance philosophy and practicality, his mind as fertile as minds can get: these qualities will always define my memories of a person I deeply cared for.

– Patrick McNaughton

Party at the ancestors’!
There will be music: a Big Band, Gwo Ka, and thumb pianos
There will be a toast with Guédé at the other high noon
Dancing with Egungun.
Party at the ancestors’!
There will be T-less Yalies
A table at Morey’s
They have been waiting for you.
High five, man! it’s cool, man…
We can hear the laughs from here, man
across the Kalunga
it’s Legba’s last trick, not yours.
Party at the ancestors’!
Altar’s ready, flashcards are ready,
Head, hand, spirit
Faces up, pencils down
Let’s go, mambo.

-Cécile Fromont

African Critical Inquiry Programme Announces 2021 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards

By

The African Critical Inquiry Programme has named Bongiwe Hlekiso and Robert Uys as recipients of the 2021 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards. Both are South African students in History at the University of the Western Cape. Support from ACIP’s Ivan Karp Award will allow Hlekiso to do significant research for her dissertation, Becoming a Hidden Treasure: A Biography of Umbhaco and its Interrupted Trajectories, including work on collections and display histories at the Amathole Museum and East London Museum in the Eastern Cape. Uys will use his Ivan Karp Award support to pursue research in uMgungundlovu (Zululand), Ulundi and Pietermaritzburg for his project The Place Where the Elephants Meet: Nationalist Myth-making at uMgungundlovu and Dingaanstat, 1838-2020.

Founded in 2012, the African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research at University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University in Atlanta. Supported by donations to the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund, the ACIP fosters thinking and working across public cultural institutions, across disciplines and fields, and across generations. It seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions, and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa through an annual ACIP Workshop and through the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, which support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences enrolled at South African universities.


About Bongiwe Hlekiso’s project

Becoming a Hidden Treasure will trace biographies of umbhaco, a skirt that is worn by Xhosa-speaking women when getting married, attending ceremonies and on other special celebratory occasions. It is mainly – although not always – identified through its off-white colour, floor length span and horizontal black lines in the bottom half of the skirt. Yet, the pattern, colour and length continually change as it undergoes different processes of production, circulation and consumption. This has led me into tracing the different spaces through which umbhaco moves, including shops in the Woodstock area in Cape Town, small trading shops in Voortrekker road and Bellville, museums and art galleries. Umbhaco has also been repurposed in the fashion industry by designers such as Stoned Cherrie and many more in clothing lines for women and men.

The project starts with locating umbhaco within Iziko South African National Gallery (ISANG), where it was displayed in the Hidden Treasures exhibition from August 2017 to January 2020. Yet the garment is far from being merely a museum object, sometimes portrayed there as fixed in meaning for what is often incorrectly referred to as Xhosa culture and tradition. I will examine the multifaceted use of umbhaco in and beyond the spaces of the museum and these other imaginations of tradition, examining the making of umbhaco by different producers and what stories are told through its making. The project will include working with collections, accession records and histories of umbhaco display at the Amathole Museum and East London Museum in the Eastern Cape, as well as at ISANG and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum. I will also interview producers, distributors and wearers of umbhaco to analyse the various narratives around its diverse uses. Becoming a Hidden Treasure will interrogate the garment as a cultural commodity and how different and changing meanings and values are placed on it.

 


About Roberty Uys’ project:

The Place Where the Elephants Meet is concerned with the stories of uMgungundlovu (the gathering place of elephants) – a mythically and narratively textured site in Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal. uMgungundlovu is historically charged and the site of origin for some of South Africa’s most salient nationalist myths. It’s located near the Zulu Valley of the Kings and was the site of the royal enclosure and capital built by Dingane Senzangakhona Zulu after he assassinated his half-brother Shaka and became king in 1828. It is a site ingrained within the mythic consciousness of what would become known as the Zulu people. Simultaneously, uMgungundlovu has a central role in Afrikaner nationalist myth – this is the place where Voortrekker Piet Retief and the seventy Burgers who sought Zulu land were massacred at Dingane’s order. This research will consider the intersecting nationalist mythologies of uMgungundlovu. It will consider how these myths were created, propelled and rebelled against through the different sets of structures built at the site: Retief’s grave and a monument erected in 1922, a Dutch Reformed Church mission station inaugurated in 1949 (and burned down in 1989), a replica of Dingane’s royal enclosure dating from the 1980s, and a new Multimedia Centre with displays on Zulu history built in 2008. I will explore some of the fallacies of the myths affiliated with these structures. However, the point of convergence will be on how myth was utilized as a positive force, something that brought depth and meaning to people’s lives living in and around uMgungundlovu.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Information about the 2022 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards for African students enrolled in South African Ph.D. programmes will be available in November 2021. The application deadline is 2 May 2022.

 

For further information, see http://www.gs.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html and https://www.facebook.com/ivan.karp.corinne.kratz.fund.

 

We made it! ACASA Triennial 2021

By

The ACASA Triennial 2021 happened online from June 16 to 20, 2021. It was a dynamic, interactive meeting, taking into consideration our magnitude and scope, our various time zones and internet capabilities, and our need for thoughtful engagement outside panel presentations.

African Studies Association Awards

By

The African Studies Association is pleased to announce that they are accepting nominations for the following awards and prizes in 2019. All applications are due April 30, 2019.

The ASA Book Prize (Herskovits Prize) is awarded to the author of the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year..

The ASA Program Cover Art Prize recognizes the best artwork submitted that directly addresses the Annual Meeting theme. This year’s theme is “Being, Belonging, and Becoming in Africa”.

The ASA Film Prize recognizes an outstanding film, whether fiction or documentary, made in the preceding two calendar years by an African filmmaker.

The Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize is awarded to the author of the best book on East African Studies published in the previous calendar year.

The Distinguished Africanist Award recognizes a lifetime of distinguished contributions to African studies. Deadline for nominations: April 30.

The Paul Hair Prize is presented every two years and is awarded to the best critical edition or translation into English of primary source materials on Africa published during the preceding two years.

The Gretchen Walsh Book Donation Award offers an annual grant program to assist book donation projects with shipping costs to send books to African libraries and schools.