Desert Vision: Climate Change, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Artistic Creativity in Northwestern Kenya, 1926-1963

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways that climate change and British colonization transformed the artistic production of northwestern Kenya during the late colonial period. Focusing its attention on a series of novel, innovative, and somewhat aberrant artworks—objects that in some way deviated from long-established formal structures—it contends that the unique formal properties of these works were brought about by the region’s increasingly unstable climate and the policies of the British colonial administration. By rewriting the scripts of social life in which certain object types were embedded, these twin irruptions fundamentally altered the aesthetics of the region, creating a series of new and hybrid forms. As such, it becomes possible to periodize the aesthetics of northwestern Kenya, differentiating between those objects created prior to British effective occupation in 1926 and those created afterwards.