ANALOGUE AFRICA, notes on the anti-colonial imagination

215pp., illus., hardback, d.w., Verso, London, 2026

ISBN: 9781804295946

In this incisive collection of essays Jeremy Harding celebrates the ingenuity with which African artists – and a handful of Europeans – have reimagined the colonial encounter and voiced their impatience with white minority rule. Among the filmmakers, photographers, writers and painters discussed are William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory, Sarah Maldoror, John Akomfrah and Binyavanga Wainaina.

Harding also argues that Western museums with priceless African holdings – the British Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium – are now the latest sites of a struggle over the colonial past.

"Jeremy Harding's essays and reportage have established him as one of our most remarkable writers, equally fluent in the languages of aesthetics and international affairs. In Analogue Africa, he is writing at the peak of his powers: eloquent, perceptive, attentive at once to questions of form and to the moral and political stakes involved in the creation of postcolonial culture." Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel's Clinic

Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. His books include Border Vigils; Small Wars, Small Mercies and Mother Country.