African Dream Machines - A Book Review

I recently received a copy of the soft cover book African Dream Machines: Style, Identity and Meaning of African Headrests. The book was written by Anitra Nettleton, a professor of the Wits School of Art in Johannesburg and the author of many influential books on the material culture of southern Africa.

Below is an excerpt from the press release:

African headrests have been moved 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 through a case study of headrests of the ‘Tellem’ of Mali, and demonstrates the shortcomings of defining a single formal style model as exclusive to a single ethnic group.

African Dream Machines questions the assumed one-to-one relationship between formal styles and ethnic identities or classifications by tracing the distribution of a single formal headrest type – those with a single column support and round, conical base. The notion of ‘authenticity’ as a fixed value in relation to African art is de-stabilised, while historical factors are used to demonstrate that ‘authenticity’, in the form sought by collectors of antique African art, is largely a construct, which has no basis in historical reality. The final chapter seeks to understand the significance of African headrests in relation to a number of different perspectives: the western fascination with the headrest as a synecdoche for “otherness”; their iconography in terms of subject matter (human and animal figures); and the ways in which headrests are used as support to the head of a sleeping person.

The book is published by the University of the Witwatersrand Press . It is available now in the U.S. at Transaction Publications and will be available in March, 2008 at Amazon.com

Daniel Rootenberg
JacarandaTribal.com