Analogue Africa:Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination

A ground-breaking collection of essays on African art, culture and de-colonial imagination.

Africa is a convenient abbreviation for 54 countries in which more than a thousand languages are spoken. This book offers a side-long glance, one that complicates the idea of a single continent. So much of what we understand about these places comes from western media sources, which too often treat Africa as a metaphor for their own anxieties. Yet, by picking out specific episodes and practices – cinema, art, ethnography and journalism -- Harding rescues us, and Africa, from such patronising generalisations.

Analogue Africa excavates the many facets of the anti-colonial imagination: cinema, photography, art and journalism. The book celebrates the ingenuity with which African artists – and a handful of Europeans -- have reimagined the colonial encounter and the struggle against white minority rule . This includes artists, filmmakers and photographers such as John Akomfrah, William Kentridge, Binyavanga Wainaina, Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory and Sarah Maldoror. Harding also looks at the role of western museums - The British Museum, the Musée du quai Branly, Tervuren- that display African art, and what it says about the post colonial imagination.