Postgraduate Course: African Art and the Production of Meaning (HIAR11144)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course explores how African art produces meaning through multiple sites including process, materiality, iconography, ritual function, performance and cross-cultural encounter. Drawing examples from various African art and cultural traditions, it examines how these sites of meaning overlap, interact and diverge; and how they are grounded in peoples cosmologies, spirituality, socio-economic and political life. It explores the conceptual tools for understanding African art, such as agency, ephemerality, relationality and embodiment, that emerge with the production of meaning. |
| Course description |
This course explores how meaning is produced in African art through making, materiality, iconography, ritual function, performance and cross-cultural encounters; shifting interpretive focus from what an artwork means to how it acquires meaning. Case studies are drawn from historical African art traditions across the continent. Process is examined through examples like Igbo Mbari art, where communally built ritual houses incorporating artworks are left to decay after use, locating meaning in acts of co-creation and impermanence rather than in the object itself. Materiality is explored through, for example, Asante culture, where gold as an artistic medium signified wealth, prestige and authority. Iconography as a system of meaning is considered in terms of how forms, motifs and patterns shaped by artistic principles, articulate cultural ideas. Masking practices among the Bamileke, Mende and other cultures are used to discuss how art objects produce meaning through performance comprising embodied presence, movement and sound. The potential of ritual to mediate, activate and animate matter is investigated through objects like the Congo nkisi figure. The question of how African artworks generate new meanings through cross-cultural encounters, including Islamic and European colonialism, past and present, is also confronted.
Students on the course examine the ways in which these diverse systems of meaning overlap, interact and diverge as well as their grounding in peoples cosmologies, spirituality, socio-economic and political life. By foregrounding agency, ephemerality, relationality, embodiment and other conceptual tools, the course challenges common assumptions about African art as well as established interpretive models within Art History.
The course is structured as a series of ten weekly two-hour seminars. Each seminar combines lecture-style delivery with critical, student-driven discussion, grounded in independent reading and both individual and collective analysis of specific artworks and cultural practices from diverse African traditions.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2026/27, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 10,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 10,
Feedback/Feedforward Hours 1,
Summative Assessment Hours 1,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
This course has 1 component of assessment.
1) Essay, 4000 words, 100%, weeks 10-12 (revision week), relates to all Learning Outcomes.
The resubmission arrangements for this course are as follows:
Assessment type is one and remains the same. Students will submit to the original assessment and will receive further resubmission information as per University regulations as necessary.
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| Feedback |
FORMATIVE FEEDBACK:
Students will receive feedback from peers and the CO throughout the semester during class discussion. An essay plan will be prepared as a formative assessment with feedback provided by the CO; see Learn for details.
SUMMATIVE FEEDBACK:
Written feedback will be provided on essays with the option of a one-to-one meeting with the CO available on request.
Summative feedback will be provided according to University regulations.
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| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate a broad understanding of African artistic traditions as embedded in local cosmologies and social relations, moving beyond object-centred interpretations.
- Critically assess art historical assumptions and interpretive approaches in light of evidence from African cultures.
- Identify and explain the conceptual tools relevant to analysing African art and material objects and apply them when working with materials in other cultural contexts.
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Reading List
Alozie, Bright. 'Between the Sensuous and Sacred: A Postcolonial Reading of African Spirituality, Sexuality, and 'The Erotic' through Mbari Art in Igboland, Nigeria. Meridians 24, no. 1 (2025): 63-88.
Coombes, Annie. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. Yale University Press, 1994.
Phillip, Ruth. 'Masking in Mende Sande Society Initiation Rituals.' In The Performance Art in Africa: A Reader, edited by Frances Harding. Routledge, 2013.
Poynor, Robin and Onibode Babatunde. "I Hold in My Hand-Prestige, Rank, and Power." African Arts 57, no. 3 (2024): 44-65.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Critical thinking: Students on the course will critically assess the ways that African objects and artistic traditions are presented in writing and exhibitions, and will evaluate art-historical norms in light of this material. The question of how art produces meaning will be considered comparatively, through a range of case studies drawn from diverse cultural traditions.
Problem solving: Engaging with systems of meaning in African art will prepare students to imagine alternative ways of interpreting works of art, and to translate and apply these approaches within different contexts of art historical analysis.
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| Keywords | African art,African material culture,masking,materiality,ephemerality |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr George Agbo
Tel: (0131 6)51 5800
Email: gagbo@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
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