Art and the End of Apartheid

In this study of South African art in the final two decades of apartheid, Peffer (art and art history, Case Western Reserve U.) is concerned with the ways that the struggle against apartheid impacted the social milieus and the choices of representational forms available to black artists, the social and aesthetic contexts of the development of modernist art among black artists, and the relationship of the local context of South African art to cosmopolitan and nonracial art practice. Alternating between historical overviews; individual case studies of artists; and analyses of aesthetic trends in popular art, late modernist art, and photography, he argues that the development of an oppositional, nonracial aesthetic practice in South Africa helped revolutionize the idea of community and develop novel forms of everyday resistance to government censorship and racial discrimination in a manner that shows artists leading in directions that most politicians and activists would only catch up with much later. Annotation 穢2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)