Congo Style : From Belgian Art Nouveau to African Independence

• Main Author: Sacks, Ruth
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Ann Arbor, Michigan University of Michigan Press 2023
• Series: African Perspectives
• Subjects: African; African city; African history; African independence; African Studies; Architecture; Architecture, Colonial; Art & Art History; art history; Art Nouveau; Art, Colonial; Art, Congolese (Democratic Republic); Belgium; Book Industry Communication; city theory; colonial architecture; colonial history; Congo; Congo style; Congolese modernism; Democratic Republic of the Congo; entanglement; History; History and Archaeology; History of art; History of art / art & design styles; Humanities; imagined communities; King Leopold II; Kinshasa; Mobutu Sese Seko; Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945); modernism; nationalism; Political aspects; post-independence art; postcolonial modernism; postcolonial theory; Regional & national history; Ruth Sacks; The Arts; The arts: general issues; The arts: general topics; The Arts: treatments and subjects; thema EDItEUR; theory from the south; total artwork; totalitarianism; urban theory; utopian architecture; Zaire; 20th century; Congo (Democratic Republic)
• ISBN: 9780472903887; 0472903888; 0472076310; 9780472076314; 047205631X; 9780472056316
• DOI: 10.3998/mpub.11519375

Congo Style presents a postcolonial approach to discussing the visual culture of two now-notorious regimes: King Leopold II’s Congo Colony and the state sites of Mobutu Sese Seko’s totalitarian Zaïre. Readers are brought into the living remains of sites once made up of ambitious modernist architecture and art in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the total artworks of Art Nouveau to the aggrandizing sites of post-independence Kinshasa, Congo Style investigates the experiential qualities of man-made environments intended to entertain, delight, seduce, and impress. In her study of visual culture, Ruth Sacks sets out to reinstate the compelling wonder of nationalist architecture from Kinshasa’s post-independence era, such as the Tower of the Exchange (1974), Gécamines Tower (1977), and the artworks and exhibitions that accompanied them. While exploring post-independence nation-building, this book examines how the underlying ideology of Belgian Art Nouveau, a celebrated movement in Belgium, led to the dominating early colonial settler buildings of the ABC Hotels (circa 1908–13). Congo Style combines Sacks’s practice as a visual artist and her academic scholarship to provide an original study of early colonial and independence-era modernist sites in their African context.