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This book approaches the reframing of African art through dialogues with collectors, curators, and artists on three continents. It explores museum exhibitions, storerooms, artists’ studios, and venues for community outreach. Part One (Chapters 1-3) addresses the history of ethnographic and art museums, ranging from curiosity cabinets to modernist edifices and virtual websites. Museums are considered in terms of five transformational nodes, which contrast ways in which museums are organized and reach out to their audiences. Diverse groups of artists interact with museums at each node. Part Two (Chapters 4-5) addresses museum practices and art worlds through dialogues with curators and artists examining museums as ecosystems and communities within communities. Processes of display and memory work used by curators and artists are analyzed with semiotic methods to investigate images, signs, and symbols drawn from curating the curators and exploring artists’ experiences. Part Three (Chapters 6-8) introduces new strategies for displaying, disseminating, and reclaiming African art. Approaches include the innovative technology of unmixing and the reframing of art for museums of the future. The book addresses building exchanges through studies of curatorial networks, south-north connections, genre classifications, archives, collections, databases, and learning strategies. These discussions open up new avenues of connectivity that range from local museums to global art markets and environments. In conclusion, the book proposes new methods for interpreting African art inside and outside of museums and remixing the results.

South Africa’s democratization has been celebrated internationally for the remarkable advances of women in political office. Despite these visible steps forward, South Africa continues to face exceedingly high levels of sexual assault, rape, and intimate-partner violence. This book is about this juxtaposition between women’s national political power and these egregious violations of human rights. The South African women’s movement initially pursued state feminism, specifically using insider strategies to construct institutions and enact policies for women’s advancement. Yet the most poignant measure of the shortcomings of state feminism is the persistence of gender-based violence. The recent turn toward carceral feminism, with its focus on arrests and prosecutions, also fails to address the complexity of interpersonal violence. Through fieldwork in nine local communities, this book contains the voices of service providers, religious leaders, traditional leaders, police officers, and medical professionals who address gender-based violence at the community level. Specifically, this book examines how community networks are created on a landscape that is still marked by apartheid legacies of racism, inequality, and violence. It is also a story about understanding how place and space affect policy implementation. Rather than becoming immobilized by this complexity, policy makers could support street-level workers who are at the cutting edge of the struggle to end gender-based violence.

This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively feminine technologies of dress: cascading hair extensions, false eyelashes and nails, heavy and immaculate makeup, and so on. Based on interviews with such stylized women, the book offers a critical consideration of the kinds of feminine subjectivities that they are performing and desiring. Tracing the repertoires of individualist choice, pleasure, entitlement and “can do” that run through the women’s talk, it argues that they subscribe passionately to the notion, or what the book frames more specifically as the “postfeminist promise,” that immaculate and spectacularized feminine beauty now constitutes and signals feminine power. Seeing themselves as “already empowered,” then, what the women do not see is the need for cultural critique, nor for feminism in the form of collective political struggle. The first book on postfeminism both as a cultural formation in the global South and as it interpellates black women, the work offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the culture as performative and transnationally mobile, and a richly theorised account of how women live, embody, and to some extent suffer it, in the flesh.