Title: An Indigenous Epistemological Revivalthrough Visual Art
Stream: Higher Education
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Nombeko Mpako, University of South Africa, South Africa
Abstract:
The paper will reflect on an art practice teaching methodology that encourages students to embrace their indigenous knowledge and cultural meanings as a point of departure, culminating into visual narratives. The method inculcates re-claiming of the almost forgotten African thought and literature through understanding the formation of indigenous epistemological ideals. Since the advent of colonial epistemic discourses in higher education the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge has been positioned mainly for social justice rather than being the subject by which holistic African epistemologies can be pursued. Given that creative arts are by nature intersecting and parallel with other communicative languages and literature this re-claiming of indigenous epistemic perspective can give way to continuing inter-trans-disciplinary dialogues pertinent to meaningful academic discourses. The paper provides an overview of a selection of Xhosa language speech acts, analysis and interpretation of the visual narratives resulting from this methodology. It further gives details of how Xhosa cultural meanings are constructed through common language that subsequently influence the behavioral world of the speakers. The whole process becomes cathartic for the students-artists-researchers. This is because it begins with the artists-researcher feeling transcendent and unleashed in their creative processes culminating into artworks that are meaningfully evocative not only for the artist, but also to the viewers. Consequently, the emergent visual narratives become subjects for the sustainability of the indigenous culture and in particular the language, as well as being the objects for further research.
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