Johannes Scott
Mar 5, 201420 min read
Voodoo Child, the Other, and Postcolonialism
Content 1. Other 2. Colonialism and representation 3. Black Atlantic cultural production 4. Voodoo Child Bibliography Photograph...
Earthenware ceramic vases, hand built and glazed fired at 1060 degrees Celsius with an additional firing for decals and gold at 760 degrees Celsius.
Postcolonialism. A series of vases in the form of a visual narrative on Black Atlantic culture.
The installation body acts as one work of art representing Black Atlantic culture as stream of consciousness disseminating across the trading rim of the slave routes on the Atlantic Ocean, leaping back and forth in time and space.
The work is inspired by Professor Paul Gilroy’s publication titled, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). The work invokes musical, religious, and colonial texts appropriated from literary sources such as those of Lorand Matory, Umberto Eco, and Macka B.
The body of work was selected as Award Finalist for Spier Contemporary 2007 and toured the major art museums throughout South Africa.
Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked.
Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures.