简介

Professor Brett-Smith is currently writing a book on Bamana mud cloth or bògòlanfini. This monograph is designed to balance her previous work on the production of ritual sculpture by Bamana men with an in-depth investigation of female art-making. The book will discuss the history of the mud cloth tradition, the technique of manufacture, the symbolism of the designs on the cloth, and the important role of mud cloth at critical moments -- excision, marriage, childbirth and death -- in women's lives. Her recent publications include: The Making of Bamana Sculpture: Creativity and Gender, Cambridge University Press, 1994 -- winner of the Arnold J. Rubin Award for the most outstanding book on African Art, 1993, awarded by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and winner of Honorable Mention for the 1995 Victor Turner Prize, awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, The Artfulness of M'Fa Jigi: An Interview with Nyamaton Diarra (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), and "The Mouth of the Komo," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 31 (1997): 71. Professor Brett-Smith's new book on mud cloth, The Silence of the Women Bamana Mud Cloths, will be published in August, 2014 by Five Continents Press. A download of the introduction to this book can be found on Academia.edu under Dr. Brett-Smith's page. In addition earlier articles and the introduction to Dr. Brett-Smith's 1994 book, The Making of Bamana Sculpture, can also be downloaded from this page.