Kampala Working Group Research is Published in The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 10:02:04 +0000

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa of the Kampala Working Group had her essay, ‘Margaret Trowell’s School of Art, or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African’ published in 2018 inThe Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education, which was edited by Amelia M. Kraehe, Stephen B. Carpenter II and Rubén Gaztambide Fernández of the Another Roadmap Toronto Working Group.

The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education is the first edited volume to examine how race operates in and through the arts in education. Until now, no single source has brought together such an expansive and interdisciplinary collection in exploration of the ways in which music, visual art, theater, dance, and popular culture intertwine with racist ideologies and race-making. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, contributing authors bring an international perspective to questions of racism and anti-racist interventions in the arts in education. The book’s introduction provides a guiding framework for understanding the arts as white property in schools, museums, and informal education spaces.

Each section is organized thematically around historical, discursive, empirical, and personal dimensions of the arts in education. This handbook is essential reading for students, educators, artists, and researchers across the fields of visual and performing arts education, educational foundations, multicultural education, and curriculum and instruction. Emma’s essay concerns the work of a White British woman named Margaret Trowell (1903–1989), who founded anglophone East Africa’s first “professional” school of fine art in the Uganda Protectorate in the 1930s. Trowell is still popularly remembered in Uganda as someone who, contrary to the dominant European views of her day, genuinely believed in Africans’ creative abilities and championed their artistic expression. However, Emma argues that both her pedagogical theories and her teaching practice were strongly influenced by colonial government policy and that as a consequence her stated commitment to supporting the development of a “true African tradition of art” was far less emancipatory than it at first appeared.

A Symposium on Art Pedagogies of the South in Kinshasa (January 2016)

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 19:28:57 +0000

In January 2016, David Andrew (Johannesburg Working Group), Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (Kampala Working Group) and Patrick Mudekereza and Sari Middernacht (Lubumbashi Working Group) participated in the symposium Mediating Past, Present and Future: Dialogues with Global South Experiences at the Academy of Fine Art in Kinshasa, DRC, which brought together researchers, artists, art students, art teachers, policy makers, cultural producers, museum experts and exhibition makers to think about new paths in arts education.

An academically driven transdisciplinary gathering collectively organized by Wits School of the Arts in Johannesburg (ZA) and the Academy of Fine Art in Kinshasa, the symposium was organized as a workshop. The presentations alternated with focus group sessions, and the whole program was interspersed with visits to artist’s studios, cultural places in town and an evening of video art. This formula for discussion turned this academic event into an encounter, or to put it in the words of André Lye Yoka, des retrouvailles: "an event of reunions".

The focus group discussions handled themes ranging from “education/pedagogy from the south,” to “the decolonization of the art institution,” and from “artworks as history,” to “framing time and history,” “comparative methodologies,” and “imaging violence.” However, some topics recurred strikingly often, such as the role of avant-gardism or the frequent differences in local and international appreciation of art projects about versus from the Congo. Congolese initiatives, avant-garde movements and art historians seem to have difficulty achieving international recognition. On the other hand, initiatives promoted from outside triumph every time. In some cases the key probably lies in the frustrating feeling that such initiatives, for different reasons, are generating international appreciation because of “primitivist exoticism” and what is seen as “unbridled eccentricity.”

Read Sari Middernacht's report on the symposium here.

Africa Cluster's contents tagged with "Kampala"

Kampala Working Group Research is Published in The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education

A Symposium on Art Pedagogies of the South in Kinshasa (January 2016)