LITERATURE REVIEWS

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LITERATURE REVIEWS
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Invoking the literature Mark I

• The most intractable problem when discussing
  contemporary African art is the continents
  extreme cultural diversity. While colonialism and
  postcolonial state-building have attempted to
  weave eight hundred or more language groups into
  fifty-plus national identities, there is still a
  major problem in trying to write about the art in
  the second half of the twentieth century in so
  broad a region. Recent studies have tried to deal
  with this problem by focusing on the seven or
  eight best-known movements or workshops (Jean
  Kennedys New Currents, Ancient Rivers
  Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of
  Change, 1992), following Ulli Beiers earlier
  pioneering study (Contemporary Art in Africa,
  1968) or by dividing the continents recent art
  forms into categories based primarily on the
  patrons for whom the art is made rather than on
  history or geography (Susan Vogels Africa
  Explores 20th Century African Art, 1991). More
  recently, Andre Magnin and Jaques Soulillou
  (Contemporary Art of Africa) selected about sixty
  artists from all over the continent and divided
  them into three groups (Territory, Frontier, and
  World) according to the scope of each artists
  vision, while the curators of Seven Stories about
  Modern Art in Africa (held at the Whitechapel Art
  Gallery in London in 1995) rejected the idea of
  coverage altogether. They went back to most of
  the same movements or experiments treated by
  Beier and later Kennedy, but presented them from
  the perspective of African curators, some of whom
  were artists who had participated in the
  movements they wrote about. This study, while
  making use of each of these approaches and
  drawing liberally upon them as sources, is
  organised thematically. It attempts to deal with
  some of the major issues surrounding the history
  of contemporary African art since the 1950s, such
  as patronage and the workshop, the development of
  new genres, the commodification of art,
  postcolonial art and national consciousness, and
  the effects of globalisation. (Kasfir, 19997)

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The Literature Review

• Creating an architecture
• Informing the study
• Scholars before researchers
• The author writes back

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Role and purpose of the literature review

• Contextualization
• Critical engagement
• Explanation
• Generative

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Locating literature

• Encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, indices
• Electronic databases
• NISC, SA www.nisc.co.za
• Nexus http//www.hsrc.ac.za/nexus.html
• Wilson Art Index, published by SilverPlatter
  www.silverplatter.com
• Main authors, theorists
• Current research in subject journals

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What to do with all the info?

• Present results of similar studies
• Relate your study to ongoing dialogue in the
  literature
• Provide a framework for comparing results of your
  study with other studies
• Invoke the literature appropriately

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Invoking the literature Mark II

• Apart from brief citations in your
  Introduction/Chapter 1,
• Critical engagement with literature in Chapter
  2/Literature Review
• Explanation in your Chapter 5/Discussion of
  findings

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Writing up the Literature Review

• Thematically
• Chronologically
• Argumentatively

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Skills

• Scholar
• Critical synthesizer
• Library literate
• Academic writer
• Then only, a research methodologist

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Criteria to evaluate the quality of a literature
review

• Categories
• Coverage
• Synthesis
• Methodology
• Significance
• Rhetoric

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Criteria

• Inclusion/exclusion
• What has been done/what needs to be done?
• Positioning of topic/problem in broader scholarly
  literature
• Historical context of the field
• Acquired/enhanced the subject vocabulary
• Complexity of the topic

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(cont)

• New perspective on the literature
• Assess research methodologies in the research
  literature
• Related ideas in the research methodology
  literature
• Practical significance of the research
• Scholarly research significance
• Written with a coherent, clear structure that
  supported the review