Manthia Diawara

Soft Power: A Conversation for the Future accompanies an exhibition of recent work and new commissions by twenty artists from around the world organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. These artists understand themselves as social actors, question their responsibility as citizens, and are active in their role as public intellectuals and provocateurs. Artists featured include Nairy Baghramian, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Carlos Motta, and Xaviera Simmons, among many others. The artists bring a broad range of approaches to the work featured in the volume. For example, Frazier's work is known for its searing photographic depictions of African American family and communal history, as well as addressing the effects of gentrification and urban displacement. Xaviera Simmons' photos and video work address memory -- especially notions of landscape-- from the perspective of a Black woman who descended from slaves and European colonizers. This expansive catalogue includes six long-form essays by curators, artists, and other writers, as well as brief texts and interviews introducing the exhibition artists, and features a wide range of work, including video, photography, painting, sculpture, architectural interventions, and performance. Each work of art in its own way considers the collectivehistories and construction of ideologies and other underlying power structures that influence our world. THE BOOK ACCOMPANIES A MAJOR EXHIBITION, THE LARGEST EVER MOUNTED AT SFMOMA: This major exhibition will be staged on every floor of the museum, the first time a group exhibition has ever commanded that amount of space in the museum's history. NEWLY COMMISSIONED WORK: SFMOMA is commissioning new work for the exhibition from several artists, which will be prominently featured in the book INTERNATIONAL FOCUS: Probably one of the most truly international large-scale exhibitions to be mounted of late, this catalogue will feature approximately twenty artists, from cities ranging from Cairo to Goa, India, to Bangkok, Thailand. Soft Power: A Conversation for the Future accompanies an exhibition of recent work and new commissions by twenty artists from around the world organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. These artists understand themselves as social actors, question their responsibility as citizens, and are active in their role as public intellectuals and provocateurs. Artists featured include Nairy Baghramian, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Carlos Motta, and Xaviera Simmons, among many others. The artists bring a broad range of approaches to the work featured in the volume. For example, Frazier's work is known for its searing photographic depictions of African American family and communal history, as well as addressing the effects of gentrification and urban displacement. Xaviera Simmons' photos and video work address memory -- especially notions of landscape-- from the perspective of a Black woman who descended from slaves and European colonizers. This expansive catalogue includes six long-form essays by curators, artists, and other writers, as well as brief texts and interviews introducing the exhibition artists, and features a wide range of work, including video, photography, painting, sculpture, architectural interventions, and performance. Each work of art in its own way considers the collectivehistories and construction of ideologies and other underlying power structures that influence our world. THE BOOK ACCOMPANIES A MAJOR EXHIBITION, THE LARGEST EVER MOUNTED AT SFMOMA: This major exhibition will be staged on every floor of the museum, the first time a group exhibition has ever commanded that amount of space in the museum's history. NEWLY COMMISSIONED WORK: SFMOMA is commissioning new work for the exhibition from several artists, which will be prominently featured in the book INTERNATIONAL FOCUS: Probably one of the most truly international large-scale exhibitions to be mounted of late, this catalogue will feature approximately twenty artists, from cities ranging from Cairo to Goa, India, to Bangkok, Thailand.

"There I was, standing alone, unable to cry as I said goodbye to Sidimé Laye, my best friend, and to the revolution that had opened the door of modernity for me--the revolution that had invented me." This book gives us the story of a quest for a childhood friend, for the past and present, and above all for an Africa that is struggling to find its future. In 1996 Manthia Diawara, a distinguished professor of film and literature in New York City, returns to Guinea, thirty-two years after he and his family were expelled from the newly liberated country. He is beginning work on a documentary about Sékou Touré, the dictator who was Guinea's first post-independence leader. Despite the years that have gone by, Diawara expects to be welcomed as an insider, and is shocked to discover that he is not. The Africa that Diawara finds is not the one on the verge of barbarism, as described in the Western press. Yet neither is it the Africa of his childhood, when the excitement of independence made everything seem possible for young Africans. His search for Sidimé Laye leads Diawara to profound meditations on Africa's culture. He suggests solutions that might overcome the stultifying legacy of colonialism and age-old social practices, yet that will mobilize indigenous strengths and energies. In the face of Africa's dilemmas, Diawara accords an important role to the culture of the diaspora as well as to traditional music and literature--to James Brown, Miles Davis, and Salif Kéita, to Richard Wright, Spike Lee, and the ancient epics of the griots. And Diawara's journey enlightens us in the most disarming way with humor, conversations, and well-told tales.

"Manthia Diawara is quite simply the best critic (in any language) currently writing on African cinema." —Robert Stam "Diawara has produced a useful history, a cogent analysis, and, in his arguments on how African cinema should develop, an undoubtedly controversial book." —Studies in Popular Culture "This is a good, solid and reliable history of filmmaking on the African continent, beginning with colonial production and moving on to independent filmmaking . . . an important and welcome reference source." —Classic Images "Diawara's work is comprehensive, based on rigorous research and sound analyses . . . it aptly illustrates the intricate correlations between politics, economics and culture." —Black Film Review "In a relatively new field of historical 'film theory', African Cinema: Politics and Culture will become indispensable." —The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Vol. 1-3, 1996 Drawing on political science, economics, history, and cultural studies, Diawara provides an insider's account of the development and current status of African cinema. He discusses such issues as film production and distribution, and film aesthetics from the colonial period to the present.