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 complicate 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 and informed by a need to treat Africa as a metaphor.

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 Ruth Motau. 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.
1145552813
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 complicate 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 and informed by a need to treat Africa as a metaphor.

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 Ruth Motau. 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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Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination

Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination

by Jeremy Harding
Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination

Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination

by Jeremy Harding

Hardcover

$26.95 
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Overview

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 complicate 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 and informed by a need to treat Africa as a metaphor.

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 Ruth Motau. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781804295946
Publisher: Verso Books
Publication date: 03/17/2026
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

I: Finders Keepers
Chapter 1: Report from Sirius B: Colonial Curiosity on the Rampage
Chapter 2: A Visitor’s Guide to Three Museums
-Jungle Fever at Quai Branly
-RIP 2000: The British Museum at the Turn of the Century
-Decolonisation for Beginners: The AfricaMuseum, Tervuren

II: Unauthorised Versions
Chapter 3: This site is under Reconstruction: Albert Camus and Kamel Daoud
Chapter 4: Mangy-Dog in Mozambique: Bertina Lopes and Luís Bernardo Honwana
Chapter 5: ‘Women who struggle’: Sarah Maldoror

III: A Pathway for the Colonised
Chapter 6: The West African Photographer’s Studio
-One Pose, A Single Exposure: Seydou Keïta, Studio Photographer, Mali
-We’re dancing tonight: Sanlé Sory, Studio Photographer, Burkina Faso
Chapter 7: Apartheid in Monochrome
-White Dreams and Proprieties: David Goldblatt, Photographer at Large
-Raise, Focus, Shoot, Conceal: Ernest Cole, Photographer at Large

IV. Remasters
Chapter 8: Binyavanga Wainaina: Writer, Sampler, Spam
Chapter 9: William Kentridge and John Akomfrah
-Descent of the Coffee Plunger: William Kentridge
-Archive Science: John Akomfrah

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