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Housekeeping:

• TBA

Agenda:

Post-Colonial Era

Group Work: Re-Visioning the Past

A lot of Post-Colonial art involves understanding the past from new perspectives. For example, Post-Colonial art criticism brought to light the ways in which traditional African art influenced "high art" in Western culture.

Break into groups and compare these two traditional African sculptures with Pablo Picasso's painting. Consider the way the human figure is abstracted into geometric shapes. What sort of message does this create? 

Reliquary Head (Nlo Bieri), 19th–20th century
Gabon; Fang, Betsi group
Wood, metal, palm oil; 18 5/16 x 9 3/4 x 6 5/8 in. (46.5 x 24.8 x 16.8 cm)
The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979 (1979.206.229)

Seated Male, 19th–20th century
Côte d'Ivoire; Baule
Wood, beads; 20 1/16 x 5 1/4 x 7 1/8 in. (51 x 13.3 x 18.1 cm)
The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1969 (1978.412.425)

Woman in an Armchair, 1909–10
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)
Oil on canvas; 32 x 25 3/4 in. (81.3 x 65.4 cm)
The Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls Collection, 1997 (1997.149.7)
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Wounded New World:

Wilfredo Lam. "The Jungle." (1943) Gouache on paper mounted on canvas.

Lam painted The Jungle, his masterpiece, two years after returning to his native Cuba from Europe, where he had been a member of the Surrealist movement. The work, “intended to communicate a psychic state,” Lam said, depicts a group of figures with crescent-shaped faces that recall African or Pacific Islander masks, against a background of vertical, striated poles suggesting Cuban sugarcane fields. Together these elements obliquely address the history of slavery in colonial Cuba. - Museum of Modern Art

Source: The National Museum of Cuba. Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1978, fig. 116.

Retrieved from: http://dept.sfcollege.edu/HFL/hum2461/slidelectures/cuba/lam.htm

Image: Wifredo Lam, "The Third World" (1965, oil on canvas). This painting is in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.
Comments: This painting is by perhaps the greatest Cuban painter from the middle of the twentieth century, Wifredo Lam (1902-1982). His birth name was Wifredo Oscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla. Lam's father was a Chinese immigrant to Cuba, and his mother was the daughter of a former Congolese slave and a Cuban mulatto. His grandmother was a Santería (African culture) priestess. Hence, Wifredo Lam was thoroughly acculturated to Afro-Cuban humanities and culture. Like his heritage, his art is known for his hybrid (syncretic) style and content. He studied law in Havana from 1918 to 1923, after which he went to Madrid, Spain, where he discovered the full scope of European art. In 1929 he married Eva Piriz. In the 1930s he came in contact with Surrealism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) he worked on the side of the democratic Republic. In 1938, he joined Picasso in Paris. In 1941, he accompanied the famous French anthrolopogist Claude Levi-Strauss to the Caribbean island of Martinique. After being jailed and released, he moved back to Cuba, where he returned to his Afro-Cuban roots. During his Cuban period he fused Surrealist and Cubist techniques with Cuban imagery. In 1943, he painted his most famous work. (For a view of Wifredo Lam's most famous painting, see: => Lam #2.) In 1946, he travelled to Haiti, where he broadened his familiarity with Afro-Latin American culture and art. From 1952 onward his principal residence was in Paris, but in 1966 he painted "The Third World" for Fidel Castro's presidential palace in Havana. During his lifetime, Lam had more than one hundred solo exhibitions of his works. For a major Hispanist's brief statement about Lam, see: => Schraibman.

Discussion Questions: Wounded World

• How is a wounded world illustrated in the works of Lam?
• What is the point of illustrating a history of pain and abuse?
• Can we put these images in conversation with mainstream European images?

Hugo Gerhard Simberg "The Wounded Angel" (1903) - Finnish Symbolist Painter

Leon Bakst "Terror Antiquus" (1908) - Russian Symbolist

Maus I & I: Post-Colonial Trauma 

• Why does Spiegelman relive the trauma of the Holocaust?
• How does Spiegelman's work relate to the trauma in these Post-Colonial works? 
  

Motherhood and Post Colonial Narratives

Throughout postcolonial literature, motherhood appears in the form of metaphors, imagery, and political discourse. Authors maternalize the natural: land, water, and farmland take on feminine characteristics in their creation of a mother land.

Motherhood and the female body become symbols for the combination of new and old in the Post-Colonial world. The sexual history of women is the sexualized history of the nation. It's a past that cannot be undone. But the future does not need to repeat the abuse patterns of the past. The sexual victim can also be the mother of new life. This theme looms large in A Grain of Wheat.

Paintings of the Weya Women:

Zimbabwean Stone Sculptures

African Art: Aesthetics and Meaning

Discussion Questions: Post-Colonial Women

• What do these images suggest to you?
• How is the female body a canvas for the post-colonial message? 

Post-colonial theory is about challenging assumptions and asking new questions! 

Post-Colonial Era Resources

• Postcolonial and Postimperial Web
• Post-Colonial Drama
• Post-Colonial Studies Emory University