Up Close and Far Away: Artists, Memorialization, and Uganda’s Troubled Past

In the past ten years, the term “heritage” in African art studies has gone from being a cliché used only by cultural bureaucrats to a burgeoning academic growth industry, brought into being by studies of collective memory or national trauma in relation to both historical and invented pasts. In this lecture, Sidney Kasfir, Professor Emerita at Emory University, asserts that one of the important ways heritage is given substance as an idea is through memorialization, both through public monuments and smaller-scale artworks. In Buganda, a long-embattled African kingdom, these works of art and architecture give substance to memories of greatness, on the one hand, and victimhood, suffering, and loss, on the other.


This lecture is part of an art history lecture series cosponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. The Friends of the Institute have also provided support for these lectures.