Kwame Anthony Appiah Analysis

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a well known Ghanaian-American (British-born), who was born on 8th may 1954, Appiah main interests include cultural theorist, novelist and philosopher. He bases his attention on the issues that relate to political facts, moral theory and the philosophy of mind and language which relates to African intellectual history.

Kwame Anthony Appiah was originally born London, England and raised in Kumasi, Ghana, he studied at Clare College and Cambridge University were he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1972-75. Appiah was the Laurance S. Rockefeller university professor of philosophy at the University of Princeton, before deciding to transfer to New York University in the year 2014, where he currently based and holds appointments

at NYU’s Department of Philosophy and NYU’s School of Law.

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Anthony Appiah explains the question of what is African art? From the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Africa: The Art of a continent’ at the Royal Academy in London in 1995. He states that ‘it’s only recently the idea of Africa came to figure importantly in the thinking of many Africans, and those who took up this idea got it, by and large, from European culture’. In addition to that, Appiah is hinting at a new kind of

Pan-Africanism,
Which brings us to that fact that there is ‘Not one African’, but many’ in the world today that central cultural fact of African life remains not the sameness of Africa’s cultures, but their enormous diversity.

With been said, it would be perfectly reasonable to argue that the term ‘African Art’ is redundant, not least because African is, and always has been, a diverse, global phenomenon. However, if we are to use the term it must not be with the restrictive connotations of the past, in which African art became synonymous with the mask, woodcarvings, drums and weapons that were the staple of the ‘ethnographical’ displaying museums. These magnificent works of art must be essential to any discussion of Africa’s artistic heritage, but they must be seen in the context of much bigger and more comprehensive picture which includes art form the very distant past, such as the hand axes found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

The stone hand axes found in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, were made about a million years ago and these hand axes were tools used for chopping wood, shaping wood, cutting meat, smashing bones and many other uses for the tools. They are the products of the first technological invention by tribal Africans, Arguably, these tools are the first works of African art in the making.

The mark the gradual evolution of creative intelligence among early human and the dawn of cultural life.

About a million years ago, early humans spread out of Africa into Asia and Europe. These tools remind us that human technology, culture and the species itself all began in Africa.

art from what is sometime termed the the ‘classical’ period, such as the great brass and bronze castings from western Africa, (need to write more about this) add ref

and art which is often referred to as ‘Contemporary African art’, produced by many artists’ designers not Just in Africa but also around the world. Africa art, can now be seen throughout objects ancient and modern sculptures, in the many contexts which invite pertinent questions of history, culture and contemporary politics.

The British museum houses arguably the world’s finest and most comprehensive collection from Africa – over half a million objects representing two million years of history tell the story of vast continent of diverse cultures. For many years the collections of the department of Africa, Oceania and The Americas (formerly the Department of Ethnography) were displayed at the Museum of Mankind in

Piccadilly.

The collections were transferred back to the main Bloomsbury site in 2001, which recontextualized African material by moving it from a self-contained ‘Ethnographic’ museum into one that features major collections from the classical world and indeed from around the globe. An emphasis on contemporary art and living African societies – not least those from Egypt and North Africa- provides a more rounded view of the continent and challenges not only our preconception of Africa and its diverse arts, but also our notices of how these arts should be displayed.