by Jon Lackman | 29 February 2008 | Africa, Architecture
The Winter 2007 issue of Africa Today is devoted to “Visual Experience in Urban Africa.” Guest editor Joanna Grabski writes:
Cities in Africa, like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, are intensely visual environments … Rather than positioning the city as a backdrop or stage, the articles [here] explore the relationships and processes connecting visual experience to urban life … How do visual forms operate as individual expressions and collective urban resources? How is belonging—whether to community, city, or nation—articulated and engendered through urban visual experience? How do visual projects entangle and interface with political agendas, social practices, and expressive forms inflecting urban life? How do urban residents engage the world of images to make images? … the specific theme of visual experience in urban Africa remains relatively underdeveloped. To some extent, its underdevelopment reflects what Holston describes as the long-standing primacy of “the rural paradigm” in Africanist scholarship. Until the 1990s, research in Africanist art history consisted primarily of studies about objects associated with specific ethnic groups, predominantly in West and Central Africa. Attention to the rural environment and concomitant assumptions about the locus of authenticity precluded the focus on visual expression associated with urban centers.
