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.

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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.

CHICAGO (June 13, 2022) –– For the past forty years, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association has supported scholars, artists, and museum professionals engaged with the arts of Africa and its diasporas. Today, this professional organization received a prestigious quarter-million-dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation to bolster its organizational structure, providing a strong base for its critical support and advocacy projects.

Geared at capacity building, this grant falls under the Mellon Foundation’s Arts and Culture program, which aims in part to support historically under-resourced organizations and encourage “new structures and organizational models that reflect their holistic approach to social change.” Running from July 2022 through June 2025, this transformative award is the largest grant that ACASA has received in its history.

ACASA President Dr. Peju Layiwola (University of Lagos) notes “We are excited and elated at receiving a Mellon Foundation Grant. This guarantees that the work of the association will continue with renewed vigor, building on the efforts of our founding members and previous boards. This grant gives us hope for the future.”

Grant-Supported Projects

• Hiring a Board Administrator/Project Manager to streamline structural organization; establish archives; and assist in planning and executing the 2024 Triennial Symposium of African Art. A job description and application for this position will be available on ACASA’s website in late July 2022.
• Expanding ACASA’s global membership, with a focus on attracting Africa- and Caribbean-based members
• Producing a free Wiki of Collectors & Dealers of Historical African Arts to address provenance challenges in the field, including restitution efforts.
• Supporting the activities of ACASA’s Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for North American Museums Holding African Objects (CCRBP) working group.

Please direct inquiries to ACASA President Dr. Peju Layiwola (president@acasaonline.org)

About the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA)

The only professional organization in the United States dedicated to the study of African arts, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) facilitates communication among scholars, teachers, students, artists, museum specialists, collectors, and all others interested in the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora. Founded in 1981–82, ACASA is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. It sponsors the Triennial Symposium on African Art, the premier forum for presenting cutting-edge research on the art of Africa and its Diaspora, presenting awards for the best publications, exhibitions, and leaders in the field. Notable initiatives for promoting the advancement of African art scholarship include a book distribution project to support African and Caribbean museums and libraries, and a publication project that produced the landmark textbook A History of Art in Africa (Pearson Prentice Hall). For more information about the organization, its activities, and its global membership, visit acasaonline.org

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).

Student rates are now 15 USD for undergraduates, and 30 USD for graduate students (MA/PhD).

An ACASA Student Membership lets you…

• Support your interest in African and African diaspora arts
• Connect with colleagues across the globe via our events and Member Directory
• Submit your PhD thesis for the Roy Sieber Dissertation Award (includes cash prize & article-writing mentorship)
• Learn more about the field/share your news in our 3x a year Members Newsletter or via our social media accounts
• Receive discounted rates for the Triennial Symposium on African
• Gain opportunities to participate in ACASA-sponsored panels at major conferences like CAA and ASA  ……and more!

PS. Based in Africa or the Caribbean? Membership is always free

Join ACASA Today

Please share this widely with the students in your life!

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With global membership, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) promotes greater understanding of African material and expressive culture in all its many forms, and encourages contact and collaboration with African and Diaspora artists and scholars.

ACASA is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.

Honorarium of $1000 for Hosts

Deadline to Apply: December 1, 2021

Dear Friends:

I am reaching out on behalf of CAA and the National Committee of the History of Art (NCHA) to encourage you to consider serving as a host for the 2022 CAA-Getty International Program. Since it began in 2012, the program has brought 135 scholars to CAA’s annual conferences, from fifty countries located in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. A preconference colloquium on international topics in art history traditionally inaugurates the week of CAA’s annual meeting, kicking off four days of conference sessions, meetings with new colleagues, and visits to museums and galleries. Subsequent to these events, the program has generated many scholarly collaborations, including publications, conferences, and exhibitions.

Now in its 11^th year, the CAA-Getty International Program will bring twelve scholars from seven countries to Chicago for CAA’s upcoming in-person annual conference, February 16-19, 2022. We are eager to identify six hosts to provide a warm welcome to these colleagues.

Each host will receive an honorarium of $1000 for hosting two international colleagues. In return, we ask that each host please:

• Send, by January 11^th, an email to the participants they are hosting to offer help in meeting American colleagues, proposing conference sessions and events, and/or visiting museums/collections of particular interest;
• Attend the welcome dinner on Monday evening, February 14;
• Participate in the preconference colloquium on Tuesday, February 15, at the Chicago Hilton;
• Attend, if possible, the conference session on Thursday morning, February 18, presented by the CAA-Getty alumni, “Can Art History Be Affective? Empathy, Emotion and the Art Historian,” 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM (CST) at the Chicago Hilton, and the CAA-NCHA Reception, later in the
• Invite, if applicable, their international colleagues to the business meeting of their affiliated society and introduce him/her/them to colleagues in their

Interested? – Please submit a statement of interest (approximately 250 words) and a short CV to Dr. Cali Buckley, Content Manager: Education & Intellectual Property and Director of the CAA-Getty Program, CAA, at CBuckley@collegeart.org, by Wednesday, December 1, 2021.

CAA and NCHA will review the applications with an eye to finding the strongest matches between hosts and grantees based on academic interests. We will notify all host applicants of final decisions by Friday, December 10^th.

Questions? Please reach out to Dr. Cali Buckley, Content Manager: Education & Intellectual Property and Director of the CAA-Getty Program, CAA, at CBuckley@collegeart.org.

Thank you for your consideration.

We look forward to hearing from you! All best,

Anne Collins Goodyear

Vice President, National Committee for the History of Art Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art

President Emerita, College Art Association

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.

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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.

 

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.

We are happy to announce our new ACASA board. Congratulations to all incoming board members. We wish them exciting times!

President: Peju Layiwola (rotating from Vice President)

Past President: Peri Klemm (rotating from President; outgoing: Shannen Hill)

Vice President: Elizabeth Perrill (outgoing: Peju Layiwola)

Secretary: Candace Keller (outgoing: Cynthia Becker)

Treasurer: Kris Juncker (outgoing: Rachel Kabukula)

Webmaster: Kehinde Shobukonla (outgoing: Nadine Siegert)

Newsletter Editor: Kristen Windmuller-Luna (outgoing: Fiona Siegenthaler)

Social Media Editor: Amanda Maples (outgoing: Brenda Schmahmann)

Remaining on the board until ASA 2022 are:

Erica Jones, Website Editor

Olubukola Gbadegesin, CAA Liaison

Find here the recorded conference from February, 17 2021:
https://psu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/newest+Clip+of+Conference+to++Celebrate+the+Contributions+of+Professor+William+Dewey/1_5l5tnx52

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The Yoruba Elders International Society, Rhode Island Chapter, made a lifetime achievement award to Jean Borgatti, a past president of ACASA, on October 19, 2019 at their 10th annual lecture and recognition event held at the Statehouse in Providence, RI. The organization established this award as part of an “Everyday Heroes” award program in support of the UN General Assembly Resolution 68/237 proclaiming the decade 2015-2024 as the International Decade for People of African Descent, and promoting a greater knowledge of, and respect for the diverse heritage, culture, and contributions of people of African descent to the development of society.  Borgatti was also their keynote speaker, talking about the impact of Yoruba culture on artists of the African diaspora both past and present. She is shown here accepting a plaque from Pastor Emmanuel Taiwo, Board Member, Yoruba Elders International Society, and Evangelist In Charge, Celestial Church of Christ, Warwick, RI.