Overview

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 by picking out specific episodes, specific practices – cinema, art, ethnography and journalism -- that rescue us from generalisations. 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. 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.

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9781804295946

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Reviews

Jeremy Harding's essays and reportage have established him as one of our most remarkable writers, equally fluent in the languages of aesthetics and international affairs. In Analogue Africa, he is writing at the peak of his powers: eloquent, perceptive, attentive at once to questions of form and to the moral and political stakes involved in the creation of postcolonial culture. -- Adam Shatz, author of <i>The Rebel's Clinic</i>

Harding makes his ambitious, continent-crossing arguments in economical, sometimes elegant, usually understated prose. -- Andy Beckett, <i>Guardian</i> (praise for <i>Border Vigils</i>) a groundbreaking chronicle of migrant voices rarely heard. Ranging from the southern shores of Italy and the backstreets of England to the embattled US-Mexico front line, Harding's brilliant work could not be more timely-and timeless. -- Jeff Biggers, author of <i>State Out of the Union</i> (praise for <i>Border Vigils</i>) Harding is a conjurer. Give him a long-since demolished stairwell, and he'll give you a world-its sound, its smell, the feeling that you could stumble upon it still -- Rachel Cooke, <i>Observer</i> (praise for <i>Mother Country</i>) Beautifully written, funny and sad, this book is simply captivating. -- Cressida Connolly, <i>Daily Telegraph</i> (praise for <i>Mother Country</i>)

Author Information

Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. His books include The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man’s Gate, Small Wars, Small Mercies, and Mother Country.

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