Emergency

The new Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla and Le*n, opened in Spain in 2005 with an exhibition of Alfredo Jaar’s Emergency, a dark pool from which a fiberglass model of the African continent is constantly, slowly rising and resubmerging. This revised and expanded black book of essays–whose back cover leads to black endpapers and black title pages–extends Jaar’s piece with reflections on the continent from such brilliant African writers as Ama Ata Aidoo (of Ghana, via Stanford University’s creative writing program), Buchi Emecheta (of Nigeria and London), Nawal el Saadawi (Egypt’s onetime Director of Public Health, the only woman ever to achieve such a position), and Nuruddin Farah (a novelist exiled from Somalia).