Academic literature on the topic 'Postcolonial art'

[Abstract]: This is research on cultural identity and the history of design. The project, by applying aspects of postcolonial theories (third space, border theory and hybridity) to the history of the four women designers in the Art Deco period in Europe, explores the influences of Eastern cultures in developing their Western designperspective.Their experience in fighting against patriarchal society toward success is a useful analogy for my country Taiwan’s struggle to win recognition in the world. It isthrough the recognition of these four women designers’ contributions to design history that I present their stories as models to my design students in Taiwan toassist them in establishing their own design identity.The research findings indicate that these women designers’ benefited from Eastern culture and created a successful cultural mélange between the East and West. Similarly, my design students in Taiwan will have the opportunity toreverse the pathway in appropriating from the West to create new possibilities in the East. I argue that hybridity is a key component for responding to and foraddressing the identity crisis and internal disruption in present-day Taiwan. Through knowing and understanding these women designers’ achievements, Taiwanese students have a model for self-reflection to recognise the importance of our own cultural value to the world.

Through a new idea of ‘the art of decolonisation’, this thesis explores the possibility of socially engaged art in the postcolonial context of East Asia. Japan, throughout its national history as an expanding empire from the late 19th century to the Second World War, has left a large number of unresolved legacies of colonialism in East Asia. These problematic legacies had remained almost intact within the architecture of Cold War, the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, formed immediately following WWII. After the collapse of the Cold War structure in the late 1980s, then, the task of ‘decolonisation’ has become extremely pressing in East Asia. This thesis aims to unearth the potential contribution of art to the incomplete project of decolonisation, with its emphasis on, first, its visual and sensory nature and, second, the significance of ‘participation’ and ‘collaboration’ as method. The first part of this thesis is an art-historical and cultural studies investigation of discursive practices of decolonisation in East Asia and Britain. It accompanies a theoretical reconsideration of the concept of ‘decolonisation’ and a historical reflection of the postcolonial statuses of these regions. The second part is a practice-based investigation on art’s potentiality in tackling postcolonial issues in East Asia. It discusses and analyses my own art projects conducted in Japan and Korea between 2014 and 2016. ii This thesis will help advance decolonisation of knowledge in two directions. The contribution to knowledge of this thesis is twofold. First, it expands the notion of ‘socially engaged art’ theorised in the West by examining works and projects in East Asia in conjunction with a geo-historical setting of the non-Western world. This will contribute to the development of the scholarship critical to Euro-American centrism, dominant in Cultural Studies, in understanding non-Western art. Second, it proposes applied methods integrating artistic practice for addressing the contentious agendas that stem from colonial historiography of East Asia. This will lead us to a viable methodology that might open up alternative pathways toward more reconciled postcolonial relations among East Asian countries and regions.

The study critically examines public art in postcolonial Zimbabwe‘s cities of Harare and Bulawayo. In a case by case approach, I analyse the National Heroes Acre and Old Bulawayo monuments, and three contemporary sculptures – Dominic Benhura‘s Leapfrog (1993) and Adam Madebe‘s Ploughman (1987) and Looking into the future (1985). I used a qualitative research methodology to collect and analyse data. My research design utilised in-depth interviews, observation, content and document analysis, and photography to gather nuanced data and these methods ensured that data collected is validated and/or triangulated. I argue that in Zimbabwe, monuments and public sculpture serve as the necessary interface of the visual, cultural and political discourse of a postcolonial nation that is constantly in transition and dialogue with the everyday realities of trying to understand and construct a national identity from a nest of sub-cultures. I further argue that monuments and public sculpture in Zimbabwe abound with political imperatives given that, as visual artefacts that interlace with ritual performance, they are conscious creations of society and are therefore constitutive of that society‘s heritage and social memory. Since independence in 1980, monuments and public sculpture have helped to open up discursive space and dialogue on national issues and myths. Such discursive spaces and dialogues, I also argue, have been particularly animated from the late 1990s to the present, a period in which the nation has engaged in self-introspection in the face of socio-political change and challenges in the continual process of imagining the Zimbabwean nation. Little research focusing on postcolonial public art in Zimbabwe has hitherto been undertaken. This study addresses gaps in this literature while also providing a spring board from which future studies may emerge.<br>Microsoft� Word 2010<br>Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in

La situation des femmes dans les colonies et celle des peuples Autochtones dans les colonies de peuplement est mentionnée dans les études postcoloniales, mais souvent à titre de question secondaire. Elle se trouve au cœur de cette thèse, qui porte sur les littératures contemporaines d’un groupe social dont l’expérience du sexisme est toujours en même temps façonnée par celle du racisme, les femmes des Premières Nations d’Australie. En s’appuyant sur un corpus large, composé d’œuvres de plus de trente artistes et autrices dont elle fait apparaître les liens intertextuels, elle affirme l’existence d’un positionnement collectif féministe blak, d’après l’auto-définition Autochtone qui prévaut en Australie depuis les années 1990. Le corpus permet donc d’observer la manière, additive, intersectionnelle ou consubstantielle, dont de multiples oppressions sont représentées. Il vise ainsi une meilleure compréhension des réserves des femmes Autochtones australiennes à l’égard d’un certain féminisme blanc, en les mettant en perspective avec les critiques adressées depuis les années 1980 par les féministes noires anglo-américaines au féminisme hégémonique. Les liens entre politique et littérature y sont repensés, à la faveur de l’analyse de la résistance à l’impérialisme et au patriarcat, telle qu’elle s’exprime dans ces canaux alternatifs que sont la poésie et l’art contemporains. Les textes, sélectionnés pour leur force d’interpellation et leur portée intersubjective, engagent enfin une réflexion sur les positions d’objet et de sujet de la recherche, à partir de la situation de la chercheuse et ses implications sur la production de savoirs<br>Postcolonial studies address the situation of women in the colonies and of Indigenous peoples in settler colonies, but often as a secondary concern. Adopting an opposite approach, this thesis centers on this very question by examining the contemporary literature written by First Nations women of Australia, a social group whose experience of sexism is simultaneously shaped by that of racism. Drawing out intertextual links throughout a large body of works comprised of over thirty artists and writers, this dissertation affirms the existence of a collective feminist standpoint qualified as blak, an appellation which appeared with the Indigenous self-presentation of the 1990s and still prevails in Australia today. The collection of works reveals the ways in which multiple oppressions are represented through additive, intersectional or consubstantial models. Its examination aims at improving the understanding of Indigenous women’s reservations about a specific kind of white feminism, by putting them in dialogue with the criticisms addressed by Anglo-American black feminists toward hegemonic feminism since the 1980s. The relations between politics and literature are thus reexamined through the analysis of resistance to both imperialism and patriarchy, as it is expressed through alternative channels such as contemporary art and poetry. The texts, selected for their formal features of direct address and their intersubjective dimension, spark a reflection upon the positions of object and subject in research, which begins with the acknowledgment of the researcher’s own situation and its consequences on the production of knowledges

This practice-led research project investigates how new postcolonial conditions require new methods of critique to fully engage with the nuances of real world, 'lived' experiences. Framed by key aspects of postcolonial theory, this project examines contemporary artists' contributions to investigations of identity, race, ethnicity, otherness and diaspora, as well as questions of locality, nationality, and transnationality. Approaching these issues through the lens of my own experience as an artist and subject, it results in a body of creative work and a written exegesis that creatively and critically examine the complexities, ambiguities and ambivalences of the contemporary postcolonial condition.