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The Africa Institute hosts William Gallois, Professor of the History of the Mediterranean Islamicate World at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, as part of its Faculty Seminar Series on November 9, 2022.

Professor Gallois’ presentation titled, “Analyzing Visuality Outside Hegemonic Eurocentric Themes: `The Example of Mohammed Racim”, was moderated by Professor Elizabeth Giorgis, Associate Professor of Art History, Theory & Criticism.

Professor Gallois discussed some of the themes presented in Professor Giorgis’s award-winning book titled, ‘Modernist Art in Ethiopia’. In her groundbreaking study of ‘Modernist Art in Ethiopia’, Elizabeth Georgis addresses the difficulty entailed in “analyzing visuality outside Eurocentric themes.” This analytic, she notes, is further complicated by how “haughty” and “lofty” aesthetic expectations of western audiences and critics may not tally with the ways in which Southern visual texts “participate” in the lives of their audiences.

Using this frame of thought, as well as the work of Rowland Abiodun and recent anthropological studies of artmaking, Professor Gallois presents the work of the Algerian artist Mohammed Racim (1896-1975 C.E.) as an exemplary guide towards a terrain in which visuality can be analyzed “outside hegemonic Eurocentric themes.”

Starting from the premise that Racim should be viewed as a teacher as much as an object or subject of study, Professor Gallois’s research introduces both Racim’s small oeuvre of painterly works and a hitherto unknown body of unsigned chromolithographs, prints and commercial illustrations which circulated widely amongst Algerian and north African audiences in the colonial period. He concludes his research by exploring the ways this body of art ought not to be incorporated into enriching narratives of global modernisms and multiple modernities but instead can be seen as entry points paving a new critical path.

The Africa Institute hosts William Gallois, Professor of the History of the Mediterranean Islamicate World at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, as part of its Faculty Seminar Series on November 9, 2022.

The Africa Institute hosts William Gallois, Professor of the History of the Mediterranean Islamicate World at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, as part of its Faculty Seminar Series on November 9, 2022.

Professor Gallois’ presentation titled, “Analyzing Visuality Outside Hegemonic Eurocentric Themes: `The Example of Mohammed Racim”, was moderated by Professor Elizabeth Giorgis, Associate Professor of Art History, Theory & Criticism.

Professor Gallois discussed some of the themes presented in Professor Giorgis’s award-winning book titled, ‘Modernist Art in Ethiopia’. In her groundbreaking study of ‘Modernist Art in Ethiopia’, Elizabeth Georgis addresses the difficulty entailed in “analyzing visuality outside Eurocentric themes.” This analytic, she notes, is further complicated by how “haughty” and “lofty” aesthetic expectations of western audiences and critics may not tally with the ways in which Southern visual texts “participate” in the lives of their audiences.

Using this frame of thought, as well as the work of Rowland Abiodun and recent anthropological studies of artmaking, Professor Gallois presents the work of the Algerian artist Mohammed Racim (1896-1975 C.E.) as an exemplary guide towards a terrain in which visuality can be analyzed “outside hegemonic Eurocentric themes.”

Starting from the premise that Racim should be viewed as a teacher as much as an object or subject of study, Professor Gallois’s research introduces both Racim’s small oeuvre of painterly works and a hitherto unknown body of unsigned chromolithographs, prints and commercial illustrations which circulated widely amongst Algerian and north African audiences in the colonial period. He concludes his research by exploring the ways this body of art ought not to be incorporated into enriching narratives of global modernisms and multiple modernities but instead can be seen as entry points paving a new critical path.

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