African Dream Machines: Style, Identity and Meaning of African Headrests

African Dream Machines takes African headrests out of the category of functional objects and into the more rarefied category of ‘art’ objects. Styles in African headrests are usually defined in terms of western art and archaeological discourses, but this book interrogates these definitions of style and demonstrates the shortcomings of defining a single formal style model as exclusive to a single ethnic group.
Among the artefacts made by southern African peoples, headrests were the best know...