Katleho Kano Shoro

This is a multisited and multimodal ethnographic project which focuses on litema and bambolse: seemingly similar, multisensorial, women-dominated creative practices existing in Lesotho and Ghana. The central question of this dissertation project is: What kind of philosophies of aesthetics and personhood lay dormant when the creative, embodied practices and knowledge of Black, African women are invisibilized? This project further asks: Can theoretical and philosophical threads be drawn across these disparate countries and regions through these practices (litema and bambolse) in ways that illuminate a broader, beyond-colonial philosophy of African aesthetics? The project aims to grapple with these questions by examining litema and bambolse and taking seriously the kinds of embodied and conceptual knowledge that undergird the practices. Furthermore, it grapples with the possibility of understanding these practices – named “mural arts” in academia – in ways not overdetermined by colonial logics. Fundamental to the question of whether an African aesthetic philosophy exists is the understanding that valuations of art and aesthetics have implications for the ways that objects, people and anthropological knowledge are understood and ordered. Thus, what is at stake is not simply the philosophies of the practices but the conceptualizing of humanness.