Yorùbá Art and Aesthetics - (Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies) by Barry Hallen (Hardcover)

About the Book

Leading Yoruba scholars and artists show how to and how not to understand the art of an African culture.

Book Synopsis

An introduction to the art and aesthetics of southwest Nigeria using the writings of Yorùbá scholars and artists who have made these subjects their special interest over the last forty years.

Barry Hallen brings together the writings of four pioneering Yorùbá thinkers who write about the art and aesthetics of their own culture: J.R.O. Ojo, Babatunde Lawal, Rowland Abiodun and Wole Soyinka. All were based at the Obafemi Awolowo University, named Great Ife because of the faculty and students' conviction that it was committed to achieving all of the great things that a university community can. Each is responsible for developing indigenous concepts in which African art derives its importance and meanings in the world.

Never before has their work been set side-by-side. By treating their work as interrelated we see how when combined they offer a better and higher level of understanding of that remarkable and fascinating form of life associated with the name Yorùbá. Each chapter provides a 'taste' of their philosophy as they reveal what they have to say about how they view and value their art internal to their culture.

Hallen places attention on the methodologies each of them uses to arrive at and defend their ideas. Together they tell a story about how badly things can go when human cultures believe they are categorically different from one another. They also argue that the more comprehensive one's experience and knowledge of the culture is, the better one is prepared to appreciate the conception and interpretation of its art.

This is the first book of its kind to take such a discursive and analytic approach to Yorùbá art and aesthetics. Disentangling African art from Eurocentric stereotypes, it represents exciting new scholarship in the disciplines that have come to be known as African philosophy and African art history.

Review Quotes

Barry Hallen continues to unravel Yoruba concepts about reality in its different presentations and configurations. Following his analytically incisive work on Yoruba epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, Yoruba Art and Aesthetics now gives us Yoruba concepts of visual form in reality, driving and illuminating an understanding of how Yoruba artists reproduce different form configurations on objects. In this book, Hallen further enriches the debate on the subject by bringing together, side-by-side, four well known scholars of Yoruba art, themselves Yoruba, to problematize the conventional academic categorization of Africans' practice of reproducing visual form on objects as examples of "Art." This, like all of Hallen's other philosophical work, is a provocative text as it pushes African scholars to grapple with the idea of "Art" in African philosophy. Not only is this book a reaffirmation of Barry Hallen's already well known philosophical prowess, it is indeed also an invaluable addition to texts in African philosophy and art history in Africa, and cleverly evokes in a new light an aspect of the old debate about the philosophical content and significance of traditional practices as much as it suggests that philosophers reflect on the beliefs and practices of everyday people steeped in the practice of life as they best know how and why.

Barry Hallen has assembled an authoritative work on the theoretical discourses that shaped and defined the scholarship on Yoruba art and aesthetics from pioneer indigenous Yoruba scholars and culture bearers and from their Euro-American counterparts and how their unique experiences continue to enrich our understanding of the compelling power and beauty of Yoruba expressive and cultural traditions.

About the Author

Barry Hallen has been Reader in Philosophy, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria; Fellow and Associate, Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; Professor of Philosophy, Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia. He is author of Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft, The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, African Philosophy: Analytic Approach and Short History of African Philosophy.