Anselm Franke Knihy

On the image politics of Aby Warburg's legendary lecture on the Hopi snake ritual Aby Warburg's famous lecture on the Hopi snake ritual in Arizona is one of the most commented-upon art history documents of the 20th century. But while Warburg's essay is firmly anchored in the canon of art history, to a wider public--especially in Europe--little is known about its source, the snake ritual and its history. A Kind of World Waraddresses what Warburg largely ignored himself: that not only the ritual, but also the images of the ritual--to whose global distribution Warburg contributed--have a political history. The volume seeks to demonstrate that Warburg's art history, insofar as it outlines an internal history of the European psyche, must be read in conjunction with its external counterpart, the history of colonization, war and cultural entanglement.

Artists and writers explore Sylvia Wynter's postcolonial dismantling of origin myths and cosmologies According to the influential Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, "we humans cannot pre-exist our origin myths any more than a bee can pre-exist its beehive." Drawing inspiration from her seminal essays "The Ceremony Must Be Found" (1984) and "The Ceremony Found" (2015), Ceremonydraws on Wynter's thinking to suggest that "modernity," contrary to its own self-image as rational and secular, is also determined by origin myths that emerged through the "mutations" of Christian cosmology after the dawn of capitalism in the Middle Ages. With over 25 contributions and commentaries on Wynter's propositions from artists and writers, this publication constitutes a critical reference point for those seeking to construct and envisage a "counter-cosmogony" to the dispossession, slavery and extractivism of modernity that so endanger planetary life for humankind.