Bøger af Kimberly Cleveland

In the past few decades, Western studies of Afrofuturism have grown to encompass examples deriving from multiple sites across the diaspora, as well as from the African continent. However, an increasing number of Africans and Africanists have voiced their concerns about grouping African work under the larger umbrella of Afrofuturism without distinction and have emphasized the need to investigate the differences between African American and African production. This book offers an introduction to Africanfuturism--a body of African speculative works that is distinguishable from, albeit related to, US-based Afrofuturism. Kimberly Cleveland uses Africanfuturism as an intellectual lens to explore works that embody combinations of possibilities, challenges, and concerns related to what lies ahead for the continent and its peoples. This book highlights twenty-first-century film, video, painting, sculpture, photography, tapestry, novels, short stories, comic books, song lyrics, and architecture by African creatives of different nationalities, races, ethnicities, genders, and generations. Cleveland analyzes the ideas and opinions of African intellectuals and cultural producers, combining interviews with historical research. Each chapter features one of Africanfuturism's most common themes: space and time exploration, creation of worlds, technology and the digital divide, Sankofa and remix, and mythmaking. This investigation of Africanfuturism is geared toward students, academics, and Afrofuturism enthusiasts, and its included discussion questions facilitate classroom use. The book illuminates Africa's place in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy and how Africanfuturist work builds on the continent's own traditions of speculative expression. Because these creative works disrupt the history of Western domination in Africa, Cleveland also connects Africanfuturism with the process of decolonization and addresses specific ways in which African creatives (re)center indigenous beliefs, strategies, and approaches in their production. Africanfuturism encourages both imaginative possibilities and potential real-world outcomes, highlighting the rich contributions of Africans to the vision of future worlds.

Wet nursing in Brazil dates to approximately the late eighteenth century when upper-class families used black women slaves to breastfeed their white infants. Soon use of a black wet nurse became the norm among elite families in various parts of the country. Wet nursing developed into a business based on the need for breast milk, and the purchase, sale, and renting of slaves to meet the demand. In the late nineteenth century, a growing number of medical experts and abolitionists lobbied against wet nursing. Their efforts, combined with the abolition of slavery and the switch to a Republican government, triggered a decline in the practice. Nevertheless, this custom had become so deep-rooted and widespread that it only became fully obsolete in the 1920s. Brazil s history of wet nursing was recorded in artistic renderings. Europeans were the first to depict these black women slaves in their paintings and prints in the first half of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, international and national photographers created studio portraits of wet nurses with their white charges. Only in the twentieth century, when the nation was struggling with race relations post-abolition, did white artists acknowledge that the black women wet nurses were biological mothers, themselves, in their paintings. Since then, a small number of sculptors have used the black wet nurse as an artistic subject. While scholars have identified samba, Carnaval, and Candombl as forms of expression through which to explore the topic of race in Brazil, more studies of how art has functioned as a reflection of race relations are needed. One might expect the anonymous black wet nurse to have faded into obscurity well before the start of the twenty-first century; yet, this female figure remains a durable subject of artistic renderings and discourse on racial politics. This study uses renderings of the black wet nurse as a lens through which to explore broader social developments in Brazilian history and to analyze how artistic representations of this body of women have both followed and challenged dominant attitudes toward race and the memory of slavery. Of the enslaved blacks who were used for a variety of types of labor in the urban and rural settings, and who also feature in artistic renderings, this black wet nurse is the only one who continues to be referenced in contemporary visual culture and discussions of race relations in Brazil. This is the first study to bring together a number of prints, photographs, paintings, and sculptures of this female figure from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, from Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and S o Paulo, and to not only consider the works in their individual artistic and historical contexts, but also in relation to each other. The range of different types of artworks underscores the fact that the black wet nurses were not simply marginalized types, relegated to the memory of the era of slavery, but a complex group of women who, in fact, nourished a nation. Black Women Slaves Who Nourished A Nation: Artistic Renderings of Wet Nurses in Brazil is an important book for art history, Latin American, and African diaspora collections.