What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.

Globalization's literary and artistic effects

About the Author

Akin Adesokan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington and author of the novel Roots in the Sky. His writings have appeared in Screen, Textual Practice, Chimurenga, and Research in African Literatures.

Reviews

Adesokan offers a successful, rigorous example of a project that demonstrates the political urgency and conceptual depth of African artists, as well as artists' investment in mercurial global political networks that stretch across generations and continents.32 Spring 2013

* NKA :Jrnl of Contemporary African Art *

Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics is very much a book for postcolonial studies scholars to think with. . . . Adesokan provides a systematic way of thinking about the deep structural links that unite globalization and decolonization, as world-historical social formations, in the work of artists from what was once called the 'Third World.' Borrowing from network theory, Adesokan demonstrates how we might create new cognitive maps of the postcolonial 'Third World' based on links and ties across geographic space and in relationship to the metropoles, an approach that justifies his own pairing of African, Caribbean, and South Asian artists and thinkers.

* African Studies Review *

Scholars of African visual culture will be well served by Akin Adesokan's book, which offers a model for interpreting artworks within the many cultural and economic contexts in which they function. He trains most of his keen analysis on film and written literature, and many of his theoretical interventions will prove salient to the most urgent current discourses in the history and criticism of African art in many media and genres.

* Journal of Contemporary African Art *

Adesokan's erudite study is rich in material and analysis, and the author navigates distinct historical, cultural, and theoretical landscapes with ease.Vol. 43, No. 3

* Research in African Literatures *

Highly recommended.

* Choice *

General readers, researchers, and students will learn from this publication that decolonization and globalization are social ingredients for artists to create a story, and that its ethno-nationalistic and multicontinental perspectives could be the sentinel of eliminating isolated thinking and non-exposure to international artistic freedom of expression.Summer 2015

* Africa Today *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253223456
Author Akinwumi Adesokan
Format Paperback
Page Count 252
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 386g