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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.

This book expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation diaspora framework that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. This book is arranged around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, the chapters offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America.

Breaking new ground in the understanding of sexuality's complex relationship to colonialism, this book illuminates the attempts at regulating prostitution in colonial Nigeria. As the book shows, British colonizers saw prostitution as an African form of sexual primitivity and a problem to be solved as part of imperialism's “civilizing mission.” The book details the Nigerian response to imported sexuality laws and the contradictory ways both African and British reformers advocated for prohibition or regulation of prostitution. Tracing the tensions within diverse groups of colonizers and the colonized, the book reveals how wrangling over prostitution camouflaged the negotiating of separate issues that threatened the social, political, and sexual ideologies of Africans and Europeans alike. This, the first book-length project on sexuality in early twentieth century Nigeria, combines the study of a colonial demimonde with an urban history of Lagos and a look at government policy to reappraise the history of Nigerian public life.

A host of international organizations promotes the belief that education will empower Kenya’s Maasai girls. Yet the ideas that animate their campaigns often arise from presumptions that reduce the girls themselves to helpless victims of gender-related forms of oppression. Heather D. Switzer’s interviews with over one hundred Kenyan Maasai schoolgirls challenge the widespread view of education as a silver bullet solution to global poverty. In their own voices, the girls offer incisive insights into their commitments, aspirations, and desires. Switzer weaves this ethnographic material into an astute analysis of historical literature, education and development documents, and theoretical literature. Maasai schoolgirls express a particular knowledge about themselves and provocative hopes for their futures. Yet, as Switzer shows, new opportunities force them to face, and navigate, new vulnerabilities and insecurities within a society that is itself in flux. Daring in its conclusions and rich in detail, When the Light Is Fire evokes hope about schoolgirls even as it critiques the oversimplified, incomplete narratives about their potential and their place in the global economic order.