Berman, Esmé. The Story of South African Painting. Cape Town: A A Balkema, 1975.

This book opens in the 19th century: as the narrative unfolds, it charts the course of modern South African artistic endeavour from the descriptive records of the ‘Africana painters’ to the avant-garde expression of the 1970’s.

[Source: Clarke’s].

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Ben-Amos, Paula. The Art of Benin. Rev. ed. London: British Museum Press, 1995.

Ben-Amos describes the development of the artwork of the Benin kingdom (Nigeria), its social and religious significance, and the African and European absorption which influenced but never overshadowed the character of the unique masks, jewelry, pottery, and statuary.

[Source: Google Books].

Bargna, Ivan. African Art. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2000.

The concept of Africa as an entity is a recent and largely artificial idea. Africa is made up of very diverse cultures, tribes, religions, traditions and geographies and it is constantly changing. In this thought-provoking study of African art, Bargna emphasises the need to connect individual items to ethnographic information with the aesthetic experience. It is important also, not to bring to the study of African art the trappings of the traditional artistic judgements with which Western art is viewed. The rich and varied production of the African continent is viewed and interpreted in terms of its close relationship with the world of the sacred, of myth and of religious ritual practices.

[Source: Google Books].

Bajorek. Jennifer. Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2020.

In Unfixed, Jennifer Bajorek traces the relationship between photography and decolonial political imagination in Francophone west Africa in the years immediately leading up to and following independence from French colonial rule in 1960. Focusing on images created by photographers based in Senegal and Benin, Bajorek draws on formal analyses of images and ethnographic fieldwork with photographers to show how photography not only reflected but also actively contributed to social and political change. The proliferation of photographic imagery — through studio portraiture, bureaucratic ID cards, political reportage and photojournalism, magazines, and more — provided the means for west Africans to express their experiences, shape public and political discourse, and reimagine their world. In delineating how West Africans’ embrace of photography was associated with and helped spur the democratization of political participation and the development of labor and liberation movements, Bajorek tells a new history of photography in west Africa— one that theorizes photography’s capacity for doing decolonial work.

[Source: Duke University Press].

Arnold, Marion I. Women and Art in South Africa. New York, N.Y: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

This book tackles gender-based topics, first examining pre-twentieth century women artists and the depictions of women in South Africa by artists of both genders. Landscape painting and botanical art, areas that attracted women artists, are discussed in separate essays. “Portrait of servitude” examines depictions of women as servants. The painter Irma Stern (1894-1966) is the focus of another essay, and women’s self-portraits, yet another. Moving to the more recent period, Arnold critiques the work of sculptors and their depictions of the body. Feminist perspectives overflow in a final essay on modern women artists active in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

[Source: Smithsonian Libraries]

Nair, Chitra Thrivikraman. "Negotiation of Socio-Ethnic Spaces: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s African National and Ethnic Identity", Matatu (Journal for African Culture and Change) 45,1 (2014): 203-215, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401211093_013

This essay examines the Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun as an articulation of Biafran and Igbo negotiation of a space for themselves in the geo-political landscape in Nigeria after the Nigeria–Biafra civil war. The novel also conveys the paradox under-lying the novel's concerns. Adichie, while affirming the need to preserve and maintain ethno-political Igbo identity, seems to argue in favour of hybridity via the white character Richard. Strongly rooted in the Igbo tradition, Half of a Yellow Sun brilliantly captures the lives of the characters caught in the vortex of the ethnic, cultural, and religious tensions unleashed by the war. Adichie explores tribal disputes against the background of Nigeria's national history, and how the characters struggle with the issues of love, class, race, family, and profession against a wartime backdrop.

[Source: Excerpt from article abstract].

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