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Advance praise for The Art of Life in South Africa

“The Art of Life in South Africa is a richly suggestive and moving contribution to South African intellectual history. Weaving in a highly imaginative way the two concepts of life and art, Magaziner opens unique pathways for research in the historical sociology of the object-worlds South Africans invented, created, and inhabited during the long twentieth century. Written with extraordinary clarity and precision, this book will appeal to anyone curious about new trends in the historiography of culture.”

—Achille Mbembe, author of Critique of Black Reason

“The Art of Life in South Africa contributes to a global conversation about ‘art’ and ‘craft’ at the same time as it challenges neat distinctions between center and periphery, metropole and margins. Art education provides rich terrain through which the entangled relations of modernity, subjectivity, and materiality can be explored. This book is as important for students of global modernism as it is for scholars of South African art, history, and politics.”

—Tamar Garb, author of Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography

“Magaziner tells a profoundly human story of the institutional and social constraints under which African artists operated and the different ways in which they sought to find a way to produce beauty in the midst of oppression.”

—Frederick Cooper, author of Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State

“The Art of Life in South Africa is beautifully rendered, well researched, and tells an important, scarcely told story. Combining in exciting ways intellectual, cultural, and social historical approaches, Magaziner offers a meditation on what happens if we examine a past that is shaped by broader historical forces (in this case apartheid) but that cannot be reduced to them.”

—Clifton Crais, coeditor of The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics

“In this beautifully written book, Magaziner opens a small story to reveal expansive, deep questions. The Art of Life in South Africa offers an unexpected and transcendent intellectual history of African self-making and art practice.”

—Julie Livingston, author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic

“The Art of Life in South Africa is an astonishing book, powerfully constructed, intricately researched, and gorgeously written. From the focused study of individual lives and practices that flourished in and around the Ndaleni art school, Magaziner extends the possibilities of a more democratic form of art history.”

—David Doris, author of Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria