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"This is an extraordinarily original, powerfully argued book; provocative in the best sense of the word. The sheer juxtaposition of the terrible history of Zaire as painted by a Zairean popular artist who lived through some of the worst of it, the artist's precise and eloquent explications of his work, a bluntly factualist account of the events depicted, and Fabian's searching ethnographical commentary, without privileging any of these so different types of discourse over any of the others, raises some of the most fundamental and most difficult questions in history, art, and anthropology. "Remembering the Present is a major step forward in both the presentation of cultural materials and in their analysis."--Clifford Geertz
About the author
Johannes Fabian is Professor and Chair of Cultural Anthropology and Non-Western Sociology, University of Amsterdam, and author of Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo (California, 1991), and many other works. Tshibumba Kanda Matulu worked as a self-taught artist in the mining towns of southeastern Zaire. He thought of himself as a historian and educator of his people; his History of Zaire was intended to help them overcome the trauma of colonization. Many of his paintings have been exhibited in Europe and the United States.
