Jeremy Harding
speaker
341 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Jeremy Harding’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They're drawn into what in effect is a long proxy war between the Soviet Union and Washington.
And the question is, what are artists doing?
What are they doing in the run-up to independence?
And what are they doing once they face the colossal truth that their independence has actually been scotched?
by white minority rule, having a predominant military position over their own.
And for me, that kind of starts, the example I've picked there is in the 60s when there's, you know, there's about to be armed struggle in Mozambique.
And I look at a writer whose short stories are kind of a very, very gentle satire, a guy called Luis Bernardo Honuana.
And I look at the illustrator called Bettina Lopez, another Mozambican, who was asked to do the first edition of his books.
And what you're seeing there, coalescing, of course, in this anti-colonial movement, are kinds of modernism, the kinds of European modernism.
I mean, it's Africa looking outwards, seeing what it's seen in Europe, these long traditions since before World War One, bringing it in, looking at it and deciding on what terms they wish to reproduce that and to what extent they can Africanize these European traditions and vice versa.
And this for me is one of the most interesting periods in art of all.
In Bertina Lopez's case, the painter, she starts off with sort of abstraction and not very satisfactory kind of abstraction, like a bit in the way of analytical cubism.
But then it's not long before she becomes a figurative painter.
And the figurative paintings
to my mind, are an extraordinary success because they do what's necessary to Africanize this modernist tradition.
And it's the same with Rwanda's writing in a way.
There's a nice flat kind of Africa's approach in some sense that you might have found in
you know a novel in the 40s coming out of Germany or France but at the same time it's kind of quickened with stuff that you it is just so specifically African and of course it has to it has in some sense to tell stories with a beginning a middle and an end that have to do with
colonial issue so i think that to me is a kind of typical way in which some of the best kinds of art were responding to to the issue but at the same time i think this is something kevin and i were talking earlier you've got to remember that there were people who had already crossed the threshold of independence in particular i think in the in french west africa and the other two
photographers whose work I'm very, very fond of were studio photographers, one of whom, Cedric Cato, was working across the moment from pre-independence to independence in Mali.
Showing 81–100 of 341 · page 5 of 18
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