Word: african
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This helps explain why his cartwheeling midcareer retrospective, which just opened at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, is called "Yinka Shonibare MBE." The show, which originated last year in Sydney and moves on in November to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, presents us with the work--sculpture, paintings, staged photographs and two short films--of a man who is both a consummate product of colonial empire and a shrewd decoder of its false assumptions...
...best known for making headless mannequins like the ones in his How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies). They come outfitted in 18th or 19th century dress, but in a wild-style fabric that's from another time and place altogether. It looks at first like "traditional" African patterned cloth--and it is--but the tradition turns out to be complicated. As Shonibare discovered years ago, those "African" wax-print textiles are actually produced by the Dutch, who borrowed them from the batik cloth of their Indonesian colony, then started selling them in Africa, where they were adopted...
...Africa, the 14 life-size figures arranged around a table represent the colonial powers that carved up Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where they helped themselves to what King Leopold II of Belgium called a "slice of this magnificent cake." But in their eye-sizzling faux-African costumes, the figures offer themselves to us in the crazy plumage of the future their colonialist misadventure will create, a world so teeming and cross-pollinating that it's well beyond their grasp. And beyond ours too, though we like to tell ourselves otherwise...
...just going to slather it in sauce and cook it 'til it falls off the bone? - it became a dietary staple for impoverished Southern blacks, who frequently paired it with vegetables like fried okra and sweet potatoes. The first half of the 20th century saw a mass migration of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities, and as they moved, they took their recipes with them. By the 1950s, black-owned barbecue joints had sprouted in nearly every city in America. Along with fried chicken, corn bread and hush puppies, barbecue came to be known as a "soul...
...Commission's 370-page report collected more than 20,000 statements and took three years and several million dollars to complete. It investigates the causes and consequences of Liberia's conflict, a war that displaced a third of the people in the small West African country, left a quarter of a million dead, and countless more raped, disabled, and traumatized. Johnson Sirleaf is among 50 people the Commission recommends should not be allowed to hold public office. The Commission also says that dozens of individuals should face further investigation and prosecution, though does not include Johnson Sirleaf on those lists...