Description:
The traumas of conflict and war in postcolonial Africa have been widely documented, but less well known are their artistic representations. A number of recent films, novels and other art forms have sought to engage with and overcome postcolonial atrocities and to explore the attempts of reconciliation commissions towards peace, justice and forgiveness. This creativity reflects the memories and social identities of the artists, whilst offering a mirror to African and worldwide audiences coming to terms with a collective memory that is often traumatic in itself. The seeming paradox between creative representation and the reality of horrific events such as genocide presents challenges for the relationship between ethics, poetics and politics. In Art and Trauma in Africa, Lizelle Bisschoff and Stefanie Van de Peer bring together multiple ways of analyzing the ethical responsibility at the heart of an artist's decision to tackle such controversial and painful subjects. Also, to study trauma, conflict and reconciliation through art in a pan-African context offers new perspectives on a continent that is often misrepresented by the Western media.
The inexpressible nature of atrocities that are the crux of how Africa is generally regarded from the outside is challenged with new art forms that in and of themselves question perception and interpretation. African artists are renewing the field of trauma studies through representing the unrepresentable in order to incessantly invigorate insights and theories. Art and Trauma in Africa examines a diverse range of art forms, from hip hop in Nigeria and dance in Angola to Moroccan films and South African literature, taking an original pan-African approach. It is in doing so that this groundbreaking volume will inspire those interested in African history and politics as well as those with an interest in trauma, cultural and artistic studies.
Brief description: Stefanie Van de Peer is Reader in Film & Media at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, UK. She is specialised in Arab and African cinema, with a focus on women's roles in the film industries. She has written two books, Negotiating Dissidence: The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary (2017) and Women in African Cinema: Beyond the Body Politic (2020) and three edited collections, Art and Trauma in Africa (2013), Film Festivals and the Middle East (2014) and Animation in the Middle East (2017). In addition, she programmes Arab cinema for international film festivals, and she works for the Africa in Motion film festival in Scotland.
Review Quotes:
""Bischoff and van de Peer are to be congratulated on bringing together a particularly timely book, which will provide a valuable and accessible resource for students of trauma studies, reconciliation and peace studies, and African studies. At the same time as drawing to attention the diversity and complexity of conflict situations in Africa, this volume also provides testament to the remarkable range of artistic responses that have emerged in post-conflict nations and communities, and provides a powerful and nuanced argument for the potential of creative practice to stimulate a number of empathetic connections, which in turn underpin broader processes of social and political reconciliation."" - Anne Whitehead, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Theory, Newcastle University