Transformed from the Inside Out: A Review of Joanna Grabski’s Art World City

Dak’Art, Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, is built from within, not without, argues Joanna Grabski in Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar. The Dak’Art Biennale reflects the artists, the urban context in which they create, and art-world globalization. From this artistic activity, the art world is structured, even if an infrastructure of museums, auction houses, and gallery spaces is not readily apparent to visitors to Dakar. Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, supported the arts during his presidency, from 1960 to 1980, but state-supported institutions of arts and culture and their collections declined soon after, in the period of economic stagnation ushered in by economic liberalization. Institutions such as the library and museum of the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, the Théâtre National Daniel Sorano, the Manufacture Nationale de Tapisserie, the Musée Dynamique, the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, and the École Normale Supérieure d’Éducation Artistique struggled without state support. And yet today, Dakar is a thriving center for the visual and performing arts, as well as for literature and fashion. How this has come to be is the story that Art World City tells

Prophets and Profits: Gendered and Generational Visions of Wealth and Value in Senegalese Murid Households1

This paper analyzes the disjuncture between the projected prosperity of male migrant traders of the Murid Sufi order and the actual ability of these traders to maintain the social relations that engender wealth. I focus on an exchange of bridewealth that ultimately resulted in a collapsed marriage to show how households are made and unmade across time and space by diasporic practices. I aim to show how two decades of neoliberal reform in Senegal have had unintended consequences for the prospects of social production. The movement of male traders into transnational trade networks to shore up a stagnant local economy and to reproduce the social and moral order has unanticipated consequences for women's authority. Women claim male earnings not only to run the household, but also to finance the family ceremonies-baptisms, marriages and funerals-and the social payments that accompany these occasions. Women also seek commodities obtained through male trade to exchange in life-cycle rituals. For women, foreign commodities, rather than undermining the production of blood ties, are the very means of making those ties a social fact. In Murid families, the rejuvenation of domestic rituals through access to male earnings abroad sets in motion the production of women-headed households and ultimately of lineages

Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities

The description of Africa as a continent in perpetual crisis, ubiquitous in the popular media and in policy and development circles, is at once obvious and obfuscating. This collection by leading ethnographers moves beyond the rhetoric of African crisis to theorize people's everyday practices under volatile conditions not of their own making. From Ghanaian hiplife music to the U.S. "diversity lottery" in Togo, from politicos in Côte d'Ivoire to squatters in South Africa, the essays in Hard Work, Hard Times uncover the imaginative ways in which African subjects make and remake themselves and their worlds, and thus make do, get by, get over, and sometimes thrive