Modern Africa: Art and Decolonization

This course surveys modern African art from the colonial period through the early post-independence decades. Modern forms of African art developed as early as the 1920s and '30s among scattered independent practitioners and in schools and workshops run by colonial educators. Following World War II, a new generation of artists and theorists rose to prominence in conjunction with the growing influence of Negritude. By the 1960s and '70s, modernist movements flourished in some African countries with support from new national governments, while socialist cultural policies often sought to modernize and nationalize local art practices, even as alarms began to sound over new patterns of authoritarianism and foreign intervention. Because classificatory orders in Africa were never so commanding as they tend to be in the West, modern African art stands to be studied in this context through a cross-genre and multi-media lens that examines drawing, painting, and sculpture alongside performance, photography, and film, and that recognizes how divisions between "high" and "low" forms often blurred or were nonexistent.