Suchergebnisse

[First paragraph]Caribbean Art. VEERLE POUPEYE. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. 224 pp. (Paper US$ 14.95)Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996. MORA J. BEAUCHAMP-BYRD & M. FRANKLIN SIRMANS (eds.). New York: Caribbean Cultural Center, 1998. 177 pp. (Paper US$ 39.95,£31.95)"Caribbean" (like "Black British") culture is (as a Dutch colleague once said of postmodernism) a bit of a slippery fish. One of the books under review here presents the eclectic artistic productions of professional artists with Caribbean identities of varying sorts - some of them lifelong residents of the region (defined broadly to stretch from Belize and the Bahamas to Curacao and Cayenne), some born in the Caribbean but living elsewhere, and others from far-away parts of the world who have lingered or settled in the Caribbean. The other focuses on artists who trace their cultural heritage variously to Lebanon, France, Malaysia, Spain, China, England, Guyana, India, the Caribbean, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and the whole range of societies in West, East, and Central Africa, all of whom meet under a single ethnic label in galleries in New York and London. Clearly, the principles that vertebrate Caribbean Art and Transforming the Crown are built on the backs of ambiguities, misperceptions, ironies, and ethnocentric logics (not to mention their stronger variants, such as racism). Yet far from invalidating the enterprise, they offer an enlightening inroad to the social, cultural, economic, and political workings of artworlds that reflect globally orchestrated pasts of enormous complexity.

Abstract
Fashion has long been a dynamic aspect of Maroon culture in Suriname and French Guiana (Guyane). The textile arts that carry it through from one generation to the next were totally ignored by early writers, who lavished praise on the men's art of woodcarving but said virtually nothing about the artistic gifts of women—most importantly in calabash carving (referred to by one of them as "doodling") and clothing. This article, based on more than fifty years of ethnographic work with Maroons, focuses on textile arts and clothing fashions, running briefly through styles of the past before focusing on current directions. Today, with Maroons participating increasingly in life beyond the traditional villages of the rain forest, the women—like their mothers and grandmothers—have continued to enjoy adopting newly available materials and inventing novel techniques. In the process, they have been producing clothing that reflects both their cultural heritage of innovative artistry and their new place in the multicultural, commoditized society of the coast. The illustrations give an opening hint of the remarkable vibrancy of this aspect of Maroon life in the twenty-first century.

This essay sets Éloge de la créolité (and the créolité movement) in the comparative context of earlier identitarian movements in the Caribbean and Afro-America, such as the Caribbean Artists Movement (anglophone Caribbean), Wie Eegie Sanie (Suriname), and the Grupo Antillano (Cuba). It stresses the extent to which each of these other movements relied on active dialogue among differently positioned individuals, from artists and poets to dancers, musicians, journalists, publishers, and politicians—people with a variety of backgrounds and perspectives and priorities who engaged in debate over a period of years in order to arrive at answers to questions of mutual concern. And it argues that the authors of the Éloge, unlike their cultural forefathers in Martinique, Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant, missed an opportunity to include creative people outside of their own francophone literary universe when composing their manifesto.

Over the past half-century, changes in political, cultural, demographic, and academic realities in the United States have contributed to a significant reorientation in the museological representation of difference. This essay weaves in and out of these different contexts in order to explore some of the ways in which anthropology and art history have been nudged in new directions, with important consequences for museums and their publics. Beginning with shifts in the ethics of field ethnography, it traces changes in the nature of ethnographic writing, the growth of art historical interest in materials that were once the sole domain of anthropology, the involvement of native voices in both disciplines, and the trend toward collaborative anthropology and co-curated museum exhibitions. ; A lo largo del último medio siglo, los cambios en la realidad política, cultural, demográfica y académica de los Estados Unidos han contribuido a una significativa reorientación en la representación museológica de la diferencia. Este texto se teje dentro y fuera de esos diferentes contextos con el fin de explorar algunos de los modos en que la antropología y la historia del arte han sido empujadas en nuevas direcciones, con importantes consecuencias para los museos y sus públicos. A partir de los cambios en la ética del trabajo de campo etnográfico, traza los cambios en la naturaleza de la escritura etnográfica, el uso creciente por parte de la historia del arte de materiales que alguna vez fueron del dominio exclusivo de la antropología, la participación de voces nativas en ambas disciplinas, y la tendencia hacia una antropología colaborativa y el co-comisariado en exposiciones museísticas.

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Fred R. Myers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 410 pp.