Introduction to African Art and Visual Culture

3 units

This course provides an introduction to African cultures through analysis of arts and other forms of symbolic communication. It evaluates African material production in relation to the history and diversity of the continent and also in relation to perceptions and representation of Africa born out of its encounter with European cultures both in antiquity and in the late 15th century. Its premise is that the arts in Africa constitute sophisticated structures of symbolic communication whose meanings are not exhausted by an appeal to aesthetics defined in terms of European notions of Beauty and Ugliness. Rather, it views African arts as visual languages with elements of encoding and decoding that must be learned in order to aid our comprehension of different forms of African visual culture. To engage this process, we will evaluate how African art contributes to the constitution of society and analyze specific manifestations of art in different African societies.