A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

 Abrus precatorius It isn't bad scholarship if you call it a commentary on the colonial-archival roots of African art history as a discipline.  I’m still working on the A Dance of Assassins readalong, but this sort of post is the real reason why I made this blog: things that would have (and maybe should have) otherwise stayed ugly half-formed pet theories have the space to grow into grosser and meatier forms than ever before! Been thinking about abrus seeds a lot in my spare time, thanks to the wonderful work of African art expert Bruno Claessens. As a brief intro for the uninitiated: Claessens is a scholar and gallerist who maintains a really cool blog that used to run under the name...uh, Bruno Claessens’ Art Blog...that's now folded into the website for his Duende Art Projects gallery. Though I'm still firmly convinced that even his far-reaching reform project for the African art wing at Christie's couldn't save the institution, which should be firebombed alon

  Figure invested by the matrilineal ancestors of the Hemba-Tabwa chief Lusinga lwa Ng’ombe. Taken with his skull to Belgium as a prize of war by Émile Storms.   I love A Dance of Assassins . There are dense informative books and there are beautiful heartbreaking books and every so often there are books that are both. Allen F. Roberts makes it look effortless, all the more stunning in a field where the writers aren't typically known for the elegance of their prose. Now that I've written the story below, I'm going to do a notes + review of the book very soon to contextualize it, but as a brief summary: Roberts draws on his expertise in Central African art history and explorations of precolonial Tabwa culture to provide new ways of looking at one particular event - the beheading of transcultural chieftain and nascent empire-builder Lusinga Iwa Ng'ombe (called a "sanguinary potentate" in the writings of at least one colonial observer) by Belgian officer Émile St