Call for Papers: African Cultures, Visual Arts & the Museum, 06/2002

From: Tobias Doering, FU Berlin <tdoering@zedat.fu-berlin.de>
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000

CALL FOR PAPERS: MATATU 2002

"Sights/Sites of Creativity and Conflict: African Cultures, Visual Arts, and the Museum"

The Journal MATATU is planning a special issue on "African Cultures, Visual Arts, and the Museum", to be published in June 2002 to coincide with the opening of documenta XI. This major international art exhibition is being curated by Okwui Enwezor, who was born in Nigeria and has worked in the US, South Africa, and elsewhere. His profound vision of contemporary art as a frictional and transformative force in the conflicts of globalization and modernization promises to enable challenging African creative interventions in this project and calls for critical responses.

European and American perceptions of the arts from Africa have long been dominated by the ethnographic gaze and its fetishization of "primitive" otherness. Recently, however, artists engaging with African traditions and modernities, both on the continent and elsewhere, have staked a powerful claim on participation in international dialogue about and across contemporary art forms, provoking a serious questioning of stock notions of cultural authenticity.

What network of relationships between territories, identities and discourses is established here? How are the visual arts located in the political arena and how can they redefine it? In what ways do contemporary artists draw on what is signified as African heritage and/or Western iconographies and how may both be reconfigured in the process? How do contemporary art forms interact with other media such as video, performance, theatre and literature? And how do they interact with the space of presentation, the gallery or the museum, in which they are most often seen?

MATATU invites critical essays, interviews, portraits, poems, exhibition reviews and phtotographs that address these issues. We are particularly interested in contributions that concern creative media cross-overs and the transgression of familiar boundaries. Please send a detailed abstract or description (ca 500 words) to:

Dr Tobias Doering
FU Berlin
Institut f. Englische Philologie
Gossler Str. 2-4
D - 14195 Berlin
Germany

Fax: +49-30-83872323
email: tdoeringQzedat.fu-berlin.de
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MATATU is a journal on African literatures and societies dedicated to interdisciplinary dialogue between literary and cultural studies, historiography, the social sciences and cultural anthropology. For more than ten years it has been published by Editions Rodopi (Amsterdam, Atlanta GA) and is currently edited by Gordon Collier, Geoffrey V. Davis, Tobias Doering, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Frank Schulze-Engler, Chantal Zabus.