In Western European languages, the word mask exerts a powerful presence as a figure of speech. To masquerade is to pretend to be someone or something one is not. By extension, unmasking is a heroic metaphor for exposing a hidden truth. In this volume, art historian Z. S. Strother counters that narrative, using African case studies to offer an alternative vision of masquerading. She explores the aesthetic emotions aroused by masks, or more precisely, by “dances of masks”: joy, wonder, awe, fear, and the release of laughing out loud. She also investigates the uncanny—a sensation of “delicious shiveriness” triggered when familiar spaces and individuals become strange and changeable. Inspired by Strother’s studies in DR Congo, African Masks and Emotions takes a comparative perspective and moves emotion from the periphery to the center of analysis.

• Introduction. The Mask Is Not a Face Fragment
• Part 1. Masks and Metaphors
• Introduction: Truth and Deceit: Definitions of Masks in Europe & North America
• Chapter 1. The Mask in Africa: Hiding? Revealing? No, Hiding!
• Chapter 2. Masks Transform?
• Part 2. Masks and Emotions
• Chapter 3. How Does It Make You Feel?
• Chapter 4. Masks and the Uncanny
• Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
• Bibliography

Z. S. Strother is the Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia University in the City of New York. She has published books and essays on iconoclasm and the politics of restitution, on colonial and postcolonial art history, and on masquerade, sculpture, and photography. Strother has also studied the representation of Africa in the European imaginary. Her publications include Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende (1998); Pende (2008); Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde (with Jeremy Howard and Irēna Bužinska) (2015); and Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art (2016). Strother’s current research concentrates on African-centric models of creativity.