Essays

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  Sela Kodjo Adjei

  ‘Dotokpo’ and Soak Up the Ancestral Logic in the Ghanaian Spoken-word Poet Yom Nfojoh’s Record Alter Native

  This critical essay offers deep insights into the Ghanaian performance-poet and writer Yom Nfojoh’s EP Alter Native. Yom shares allegories, autobiographical accounts, confessions, and critical self-reflections aimed at attaining personal freedom, self-decolonization, and self-reformation. For Yom, the radical decision to publicly share his personal struggles and issues of national concern through music, storytelling, and spoken-word poetry served as a liberating force that freed his mind from the colonial aftershock, the burden of personal guilt, and the Eurocentric education affecting contemporary African societies. As a result, both critical self-reflection and a scathing assessment of neocolonial problems serve him as a rebellious path to self-discovery, self-care, healing, and mental emancipation. By means of textual analysis and a systematic reading of Yom’s spoken word poems, the author deconstructs key verses and stanzas in his poems to reveal decolonial praxis, self-disclosure, and coded messages. Wielding his oratory skills as poetic license to freely ‘speak his mind,’ Yom also confesses the ‘sins’ and ‘ills’ of political elites to publicly reveal the post-colonial plight of Africans in contemporary times. Yom’s self-disclosure and self-decolonization processes operate as what Foucault diagnosed as ‘beasts of confession.’ Through this transformative creative process of sublimation, Yom employs spoken word poetry to achieve agency and to reassert personal power for self-reformation and positive national consciousness. Broadening the discussion, this essay incorporates the author's personal perspectives as an artist who likewise pursues decolonial aesthetics by highlighting his engagement with Aŋlᴐ-Eʋe Vodu art in relation to his artistic research and practice.

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  Anonymous Author

  The Craft: On the Neo-Surrealist Sanctuary of Russian Feminist Art

  This essay observes and analyzes the practices of a new generation of Russian women artists and their regionally unique politicized and feminist engagement with esoterica and the tactics of occultism and mythmaking. By exploring the work of Alisa Gorshenina (Alice Hualice) and Katerina Lukina in particular, this contribution aims to investigate the highly gender-and time-specific conception of artistic and feminist sanctuary that emerges through Gorshenina’s and Lukina’s neo-Surrealist methods, as well as their relation to the legacies of Western Surrealist and Dada traditions. Drawing on the theories and rhetorical tactics of folk-oriented precursors such as Silvia Federici, and her establishment of the direct link between the transition to (late) capitalism and the increase in misogynist violence and demonizing othering of women; the Zurich Dada scene, with its deployment of theatricality and mimetic excess to critically mine the depth of performed and performative normativity; as well as others such as Briony Fer, Rosalind Krauss, Michael Taussig, Georges Bataille, and Hal Foster, this text investigates and outlines the way in which the expanded neo-Surrealist practices of Gorshenina and Lukina reflect, and reflect upon, the fragile and complex historical position of the female subject within Russian society of the last decade, as well as attempt to construct a creative sanctuary for its re-affirmation.

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  A. A.

  Disentangling from Epistemic Violence: Contemporary Photographers Unfixing the Image of Africa

  This essay looks at ways of disentangling from epistemic violence in visual production in African urban contexts. Tracing parallels between the colonial intrinsically violent gaze and contemporary attempts to disentangle from epistemic violence, the author seeks to problematize the violence of images of Africa. The essay examines works of photographers who explore urban environments in West Africa by establishing an intimate relationship with a place, opening avenues for multiple ways of seeing. This contribution shows how this personal dimension allows photographers to transcend objectivity and go beyond epistemic violence based on the opposition of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ Contemplation of the city occurs both in thoughtful relation with the self and with the surrounding environment.

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  Dzifa Peters

  Places of Sanctuary in the Artistic Work of Liz Johnson Artur

  This essay deals with the concept of sanctuary in relation to Afrodiasporic and postmigrant formations of identity. It discusses coexisting and alternating cultural identities through the work of Russian-Ghanaian artist and photographer Liz Johnson Artur, who has been accumulating her Black Balloon Archive of Black culture and diasporic identities for the past 30 years, travelling through different countries, lifestyles, and classes. The idea of the sanctuary as a place of refuge, safety, and hospitality has informed the discourse around diasporic migration in a postcolonial world for many decades. Comparatively analyzing the politics of representation and discourses on agency through Johnson Artur’s cross-cultural and intimate photographic practice, this essay explores her articulation of conditional shelters, demarcations of diasporic identities, and ultimately the archive itself as a place of sanctuary.