This book brings together important reflections on the arts and is a major step in encouraging dialogue on the relationship between creativity and the human condition in the region. Significantly, it creates a space for academicians who are based in universities to engage in dialogue with artists and writers based outside institutions of higher learning. The conversations will bridge the gap between the two domains for knowledge production and hopefully enrich the creative enterprise in Kenya, in theory and practice.
As the essays in this collection show, the present global situation demands a way to conceptualize and theorize an ever growing cultural interconnected-ness, sometimes manifested in art; an interconnection that draws from a myriad of cultures and experiences. Through the bridges of contact and cultural exchange distant images are mediated and brought closer to us. They are reinterpreted and modified. In the final analysis, culture is shown to be an important aspect of human creativity but its separateness and boundedness is contested. Instead, culture is shown to be malleable and fluid, The essays bring in a new freshness to our reading of the creative arts coming out of Kenya.
