Publications
What does a people, made up of more than 1.2 billion souls living on a continent of more than 30 million square kilometres, have to say about itself? Africa is the repository of a collective memory, the receptacle of civilisations with moving boundaries whose gestures have crossed the centuries. What binds the populations of the African continent is the consciousness of living on the same territory, of belonging to the same history, and of facing the same challenges on the African soil: access to education and health; the respect of fundamental human rights; the right to free movement, self-determination and economic emancipation. Over time, this African consciousness has created a sense of belonging – sometimes tenuous – to the same land, the same people and the same destiny. Pan-Africanism, this collective ideal of political, social, economic and cultural emancipation, is the foundation of an unprecedented project.
Contents
Narratives of Womanhood
- Introduction: Is Writing the History of Women’s Art in Africa, Writing the Art that is Coming? Being African, Woman and an Artist Nadine Hounkpatin
- Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Sociopolitical Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia Gladys Kalichini
- An Aesthetic and Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Three Generations of Cameroonian Woman Artists Ruth Colette Afane Belinga
- Algerian Women Artists: Between History, Appropriation and Deconstruction of an Image Nadira Laggoune
- An Art of Proximity Rachida Triki
Institutional Narratives
- Introduction: Escaping the Vicious Circle Sonia Recasens
- Breaking Boundaries and Borders: Undoing Stereotypes with the Stereotypes (The Case of Contemporary Art from Africa) 3POINTS . . . (Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Alice Korror Ebeheakey, Bernard Akoi-Jackson
- Modern Women: Archiving African Modernism Perrin Lathrop with Ndidi Dike
- Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and Miranda Burney-Nicol: Fragments of Trajectories of African Visual Artists Between Paris and London at the Time of Decolonisation Through the Lens of the Magazine Le Musée vivant. Amandine Nana
- One Museum under the Lens: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Representation of Women Making Art Karen E. Milbourne
Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Sociopolitical Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia
Gladys Kalichini
Abstract
There are thousands of archival photographs that relate to independence inside Zambia’s national archives. Amid the myriad of photographs, there is a notable absence of women’s narratives. As a point of entry into the broader conversation of narratives of women marginalised in certain historicised events, this essay highlights the visual narratives of Julia Chikamoneka (1910–1986) and Alice Lenshina (1920–1978) that are held in the collective memory and history of Zambia. Beyond considering what might possibly be absent in the archives, this essay situates the archive as a space of recuperation and highlights invisible stories. It also discusses select archival photographs associated with women freedom fighters, while focusing particularly on the encounters of Chikamoneka and Lenshina with and against British rule in then Northern Rhodesia at the cusp of 1964, the moment of Zambia’s national independence. In contributing to the broader theme of Narratives of Womanhood, this essay reflects on a photographic archive of these two women performing particular actions in public and discusses the corporeal function of performances by women’s bodies in public space and within specific cultural and political contexts. In responding to the question of “how notions of the ‘feminine’ and ‘womanhood’ shape what is accepted, recorded, or understood in the formation of art historical narratives”, this paper highlights acts of solidarity and gestures of remembering as opposed to forgetting.
