Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora

This book explores the politics of artistic creativity, examining how black artists in Africa and the diaspora create art as a procedure of self-making. Essays cross continents to uncover the efflorescence of black culture in national and global contexts and in literature, film, performance, music, and visual art. Contributors place the concerns of black artists and their works within national and transnational conversations on anti-black racism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, migration, resettlement, resistance, and transnational feminisms. Does art by the subaltern fulfill the liberatory potential that critics have ascribed to it? What other possibilities does political art offer? Together, these essays sort through the aesthetics of daily life to build a thesis that reflects the desire of black artists and cultures to remake themselves and their world.

Abimbola Adelakun teaches in the African and Africana Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.
Toyin Falola is University Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, as well as Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

1. Introduction.- 2. Rewriting Algeria: Transcultural Kinship and Anticolonial Revolution in Kateb Yacine's L'Homme aux sandales de caoutchou .- 3. Revolution and Revolt: Identitarian Space, Magic, and the Land in Decolonial Latin American and African Writing.- 4. Family Politics: Negotiating the Family Unit as a Creative Force in Chigozie Obioma's The Fishermen and Ben Okri's The Famished Road .- 5. Auteuring Nollywood: Rethinking the Movie Director and the Idea of Creativity in the Nigerian Film Industry.- 6. Nollywood in Rio: An Exploration of Brazilian Audience Perception of Nigerian Cinema.- 7. Re-Producing Self, Community, and "Naija" in Nigerian Diaspora Films: Soul Sisters in the United States and Man on the Ground in South Africa.- 8. A Single Story: African Women as Staged in US Theatre.- 9. Silêncio : Black Bodies, Black Characters, and the Black Political Persona in the Work of the Teatro Negro Group Cia dos Comuns.- 10. New Orleans: America's Creative Crescent.- 11. The Hashtag as Archive: Internet Memes in Nigeria's Social Media Election.- 12. Black Creativity in Jamaica and Its Global Influences: 1930-1987.- 13. Ethics and Aesthetic Creativity: A Critical Reflection on the Moral Purpose of African Art.- 14. From Saartjie to Queen Bey: Black Female Artists and the Global Cultural Industry.