Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics

This publication has won a 2007 Arnold Rubin Book Award

The Award is given by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association in the United States. Beautiful/Ugly received the award as a recognition for the best edited book in African art history. The Library expresses its warmest thanks to all those who have made this success possible. Arts Council of the African Studies Association

About the Publication

In Cameroon, a monumental ''statue of liberty'' is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are idead of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring schulpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion and urban design, the contributers engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness. They show how theories of aesthetics are enriched by attention to anti-aesthetics. And, by suggesting that beauty is in some sense future-oriented, the essayists propose that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope in the midst of hardship.

Sarah Nuttall, Editor:

While the issue of beauty has recently resurfaced after a long silence in Europe and North America, Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics is the first book of its kind to tackle the subject of beauty in Africa.Taken together, the essays in the book engage with, and depart from, canonical interpretations of beauty in their concern with its moral and ethical powers, its abstractness and with the sublime or unknowable.The essays pluralise the concept of aesthetics and suggest that we cannot understand beauty if we do not, at the same time, study ugliness and various forms of abjection. In seeking to draw beauty, ugliness and abjection together as a predicament or a conundrum, the book challenges theories of beauty which have most often sought to keep these concepts separate. Beautiful Ugly is not a book about ‘African beauty’ but a set of reflections on beauty and its
forms which draws from Africa and its elsewheres.The essays work with the idea of beauty distributed across the senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and smell – and in forms such as sculpture, photography, art, music, fiction, food, clothing and urban design. The originality of the book is twofold: it shows forcefully how our reading of beauty can be enriched not only via a history of aesthetics but of an anti-aesthetics.
It also shows that to rekindle a politics of hope and anticipation in Africa and elsewhere in the South, there’s no better starting point than taking beauty seriously.

Contributors include: Simon Gikandi (Kenya/US), William Kentridge (South Africa), Achille Mbembe (Cameroon/South Africa), Françoise Vergès (Réunion/France), and Mia Couto (Mozambique).

Sarah Nuttall has published widely on South African and African culture. She is a senior researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Also read ´Beauty is a Basic Need´ by Els van der Plas

 

 

Article on Beautiful/ Ugly that was published in Mail&Guardian

''Finally, a book that explores African and African Diasporic concepts of aesthetic with depth and theoretical sophistication. A marvellous collection of theoretically well thought out and finally crafted essays by a diverse group of scholars and artists and other practitioners on concepts of beauty and ugliness as they relate to artistic and aesthetic practices in Africa and its Diaspora. An important reference book and a must read for the specialized and the general public alike."

- Salah M. Hassan, Director of Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University

 

''Beautiful/Ugly is a theoretically sophisticated, enormously insightful, and refreshing read of the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics, terrifically well illustrated and beautifully arranged and designed.''

- David Theo Goldberg, author of The Racial State

 

isbn 0 7957 0186 1
publishers Duke University Press and Kwela Books with Prince Claus Fund Library, 2005
paperback, 17 x 22cm. 416 pages. 112 colour and 14 b&w illustrations.
price €34.50/rand 275
rights world, Duke University Press & Kwela Books

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