The Art of Emergency: Aesthetics and Aid in African Crises

The Art of Emergency charts the maneuvers of art through conflict zones across the African continent. Advancing diverse models for artistic and humanitarian alliance, the volume urges conscientious deliberation on the role of aesthetics in crisis through intellectual engagement, artistic innovation, and administrative policy. Across Africa, artists increasingly turn to NGO sponsorship in pursuit of greater influence and funding, while simultaneously NGOs-both international and local-commission arts projects to buttress their interventions and achieve greater reach and marketability. The key values of artistic expression thus become "healing" and "sensitization," measured in turn by "impact" and "effectiveness." Such rubrics obscure the aesthetic complexities of the artworks and the power dynamics that inform their production. Clashes arise as foreign NGOs import foreign aesthetic models and preconceptions about their efficacy, alongside foreign interpretations of politics, medicine, psychology, trauma, memorialization, and so on. Meanwhile, each community embraces its own aesthetic precedents, often at odds with the intentions of humanitarian agencies. The arts are a sphere in which different worldviews enter into conflict and conversation.

To tackle the consequences of aid agency arts deployment, volume editors Samuel Mark Anderson and Chérie Rivers Ndaliko assemble ten case studies from across the African continent employing multiple media including music, sculpture, photography, drama, storytelling, ritual, and protest marches. Organized under three widespread yet under-analyzed objectives for arts in emergency-demonstration, distribution, and remediation-each case offers a different disciplinary and methodological perspective on a common complication in NGO-sponsored creativity. By shifting the discourse on arts activism away from fixations on message and toward diverse investigations of aesthetics and power negotiations, The Art of Emergency brings into focus the conscious and unconscious configurations of humanitarian activism, the social lives it attempts to engage, and the often-fraught interactions between the two.

Author: Chérie Rivers Ndaliko
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 02/03/2020
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780190692339

About the Author
Chérie Rivers Ndaliko is an interdisciplinary scholar, activist, and Director of Research and Education at the Yole!Africa cultural center in the DRC. The focus of her research is art and social justice in warzones. With data gathered through empirical research, ethnography, and community based participatory methods, she advocates for a paradigm shift in the application of arts activism within humanitarian and charitable aid. Her analyses of contemporary sociopolitical artworks draw from the fields of African studies, ethnomusicology, film/media studies, and cultural theory.

Samuel Mark Anderson is an ethnographer who researches expressive culture and its encounters with violence, politics, and public health in Sierra Leone and elsewhere in West Africa. His work has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program.