China and Africa have long shared a history of allegiance and contact points through global political forces from the time of colonialism and the Cold War. With China’s rise as the new superpower, its presence in Africa has expanded, leading to significant economic, geopolitical and cultural shifts. While issues such as trade, aid and development have received much attention, Chinese and African encounters through the lens of the visual arts and material culture is a neglected field.

This text focuses on cities as the dominant form of human settlement for the future, examining the transformation that is happening in urban connobations worldwide today. The last few decades have seen a rate of change and growth in cities that has never been seen before, resulting in giant metropoles with over twenty million inhabitants. This book tackles the causes of these changes, and looks at how the planning and design of cities can shape the urban future.

The study of vernacular architecture explores the characteristics of domestic buildings in particular regions or localities, and the many social and cultural factors that have contributed to their evolution. In this book, vernacular architecture specialist Paul Oliver brings together a wealth of information that spans over two decades, and the whole globe. Some previously unpublished papers, as well as those only available in hard to find conference proceedings, are brought together in one...

Popular culture in Africa is the product of everyday life: the unofficial, the non-canonical. And it is the dynamism of this culture that makes Africa what it is. In this book, Karin Barber offers a journey through the history of music, theatre, fiction, song, dance, poetry, and film from the seventeenth century to the present day. From satires created by those living in West African coastal towns in the era of the slave trade, to the poetry and fiction of townships and mine compounds in S...

This ground breaking new work draws together a cross-section of South African scholars to provide a lively and comprehensive review of the under-researched area of heritage practice following the introduction of the National Heritage Resources Act.Looking at the daily heritage debates, from naming streets to projects such as the Gateway to Robben Island, Desire Lines addresses the innovative strategies that have emerged in the practice of defining, identifying and developi...

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contesting such characterizations, the co...

East Asia today is a hotbed of urban expansion. Cities such as Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai are expanding at a prodigious rate, and this ongoing process of expansion and modernization is bringing rapid and widespread change to this part of the globe.Peter G. Rowe’s East Asia Modern is a timely comparative study of urban expansion in the region, examining the processes by which new city building has taken place in recent years. The author, well know...

A revised edition of this seminal title, surveying the diverse, ever-evolving field of contemporary African art from the 1950s to today, illustrated in color throughout.Contemporary African art has grown out of the diverse histories and cultural heritage of the African continent and its diaspora. It is not characterized by one particular style, technique, or theme, but by a bricolage-like attitude toward art making, incorporating and building upon the structures fr...

In Monrovia Modern Danny Hoffman uses the ruins of four iconic modernist buildings in Monrovia, Liberia, as a way to explore the relationship between the built environment and political imagination. Hoffman shows how the E. J. Roye tower and the Hotel Africa luxury resort, as well as the unfinished Ministry of Defense and Liberia Broadcasting System buildings, transformed during the urban warfare of the 1990s from symbols of the modernist project of nation-building to reminders of...

The expansion of cities in the late C19th and middle part of the C20th in the developing and the emerging economies of the world has one major urban corollary: it caused the proliferation of unplanned parts of the cities that are identified by a plethora of terminologies such as bidonville, favela, ghetto, informal settlements, and shantytown. Often, the dwellings in such settlements are described as shacks, architecture of necessity, and architecture of everyday experience in the modern a...

An interdisciplinary account of the life of Johannesburg, South Africa's "global south city"Anxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary global South city. Global South cities are often characterised as sites of contradiction and difference that produce a range of feelings around anxiety. This is often imagined in terms of the global North’s anxieties about the South: migratio...

The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past while at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narr...