Burnished : Zulu ceramics between rural and urban South Africa / Elizabeth Perrill.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Perrill, Elizabeth, author.

Series:

African expressive cultures.

African expressive cultures

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pottery, Zulu--South Africa.

Pottery, Zulu.

Pottery, South African.

Women potters--South Africa.

Women potters.

Women and the arts--South Africa.

Women and the arts.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 265 pages) : illustrations (chiefly color), color maps.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2022]

Summary:

"When Zulu women potters innovate or move to a more urban setting, they are asked why they have abandoned tradition. Yet when they continue to follow convention or choose to stay in rural areas, art historians speak of their work as unchanging symbols of the past. Burnished rejects both stereotypes, acknowledging the agency of rural women as innovative artists and complex individuals negotiating a biased set of power structures. Featuring 90 color images, Burnished engages directly with individual artists and specific vessels, fracturing assumptions that Zulu ceramicists are resistant to rural transformation and insulated from urban realities. Elizabeth Perrill shares compelling narratives of women ceramic artists and the sophisticated beer pots they create--their aesthetic choices, audiences, production, and artistic lives. Simultaneously, Perrill documents the manner in which and reasons why ceramic arts, and at times the artists themselves, capitalize upon bucolic stereotypes of rural womanhood, are constrained by artistic methods, or chafe against definitions of what qualifies as a Zulu pot. Revealing how White South Africans and global art gatekeepers have continually twisted the designation of Zulu ceramics before, during, and after apartheid, Burnished provides an engaging look at the artistry of entrepreneurial Black women too often erased from historical records.--Cover.

Contents:

Introduction : departing

An illustrative legacy

Museum ceramics : the first two vessels

Two weddings, sixty years, one career

Demonstrating Zuluness : ceramic performance

The solo exhibition : challenges of arrival

Epilogue.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-253) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780253061898

025306189X

9780253061881

0253061881

OCLC:

1389399044