Go to AfricaBib home

Go to AfricaBib home Africana Periodical Literature Go to database home

bibliographic database
Line
Previous page New search

The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here

Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Africa and Avant-Garde, Anthropology: The Psychoanalysis of Exoticism
Author:Janis, MichaelISNI
Year:2006
Periodical:Cahiers d'études africaines
Volume:46
Issue:183
Pages:567-596
Language:English
Geographic term:Africa
Subjects:anthropology
Anthropology and Archaeology
History and Exploration
colonialism
Bibliography/Research
About person:Michel Julien Leiris (1901-1990)ISNI
External link:https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.6009
Abstract:Africa profoundly alters modernist culture, art, and anthropology in the twentieth century, leaving an impression that is nowhere better described - registered in the breadth of its psychological and philosophical complexity - than in the writings of Michel Leiris. As an anthropologist, with well-known titles such as 'L'Afrique fantôme' (1934) and 'La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Éthiopiens de Gondar' (1958), who is perhaps still better known for his idiosyncratic autobiography 'La Règle du jeu' (1955), Leiris has a long career, from life on the fringe of Dada and Surrealism as a young man seeking escape from bourgeois society in négrisme and primitivism to thoughtful writings on African culture as an ethnographer with the Musée de l'Homme. His avant-garde ethnography marks the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial, securing his place as a critic of colonialism and as chronicler of African culture from Mali to Ethiopia. Reading Michel Leiris gives rise to pivotal questions on the metaphysics of the exotic, in the expanded sense of the relation between self and other. If Leiris's autobiography exoticizes the self, his anthropology of African cultures de-exoticizes the other, while always contemplating the ontological subtlety of cross-cultural experience. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]
Views
Cover