African Modernism

A new edition of the most comprehensive survey of modern architecture in Africa to date. When the first edition of African Modernism was published in 2015, it was received with international praise and has been sought after constantly ever since it went out of print in 2018. Marking Park Books' 10th anniversary, this landmark book becomes available again in a new edition. In the 1950s and 1960s, most African countries gained independence from their respective colonial power. Architecture became one of the principal means by which the newly formed countries expressed their national identity. African Modernism investigates the close relationship between architecture and nation-building in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. It features one hundred buildings with brief descriptive texts, images, site plans, and selected floor plans and sections. The vast majority of images were newly taken by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster for the book's first edition. Their photographs document the buildings in their present state. Each country is portrayed in an introductory text and a timeline of historic events. Further essays on postcolonial Africa and specific aspects and topics, also illustrated with images and documents, round out this outstanding volume.

Stereomodernism and amplifying the Black Atlantic -- Sight reading: early Black South African transcriptions of freedom -- Négritude musicology: poetry, performance and statecraft in Senegal -- What women want: selling hi-fi in consumer magazines and film -- 'Soul to soul': echo-locating histories of slavery and freedom from Ghana -- Pirate's choice: hacking into (post- )pan-African futures -- Epilogue: Singing songs.

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response fr

This book works across established categories of modernism and postcolonialism in order to radically revise the periods, places, and topics traditionally associated with anti-colonialism and aesthetic experimentation in African literature. The book is the first account of Olive Schreiner as a theorist and practitioner of modernist form advancing towards an emergent postcolonialism. The book draws on and broadens discussions in and around the blossoming field of global modernist studies by interrogating the conventionally accepted genealogy of development that positions Europe and America as the sites of innovation. It provides an original examination of the relationships between metaphor, postcolonialism, and modernist experimentation by showing how politically and aesthetically innovative African forms rely on allegorical structures, in contrast to the symbolism dominant in Euro-American modernism. An original theoretical concept of the role of primitivism and allegory within the context of modernism and associated critical theory is proposed through the integration of postcolonial, Marxist, and ecocritical approaches to literature. The book provides original readings of Schreiner’s three novels, Undine, The Story of An African Farm, and From Man to Man, in light of the new theory of primitivism in African literature by directly addressing the issue of narrative form. This argument is contextualised in relation to the work of other Southern African authors, in whose writings the impact of Schreiner’s politics and aesthetics can be traced. These authors include J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Solomon T. Plaatje, and Zoe Wicomb, amongst others. This book brings the most current debates in modernist studies, ecocriticism, and primitivism into the field of postcolonial studies and contributes to a widening of the debates surrounding gender, race, empire, and modernism.

An intellectual biography of a modern African artist and his immense contribution to twentieth-century art history. The history of world art has long neglected the work of modern African artists and their search for forms of modernist expression as either irrelevant to the discourse of modern art or as fundamentally subservient to the established narrative of Western European modernist practice. With this engaging new volume, Sylvester Ogbechie refutes this approach by examining the life and work of Ben Enwonwu (1917-94), a premier African modernist and pioneer whose career opened the way for the postcolonial proliferation and increased visibility of African art. In the decades between Enwonwu's birth and death, modernization produced new political structures and new forms of expression inAfrican cultures, inspiring important developments in modern African art. Within this context, Ogbechie evaluates important issues such as the role of Anglo-Nigerian colonial culture in the development of modern Nigerian art, andEnwonwu's involvement with international discourses of modernism in Europe, Africa, and the United States over a period of five decades. The author also interrogates Enwonwu's use of the radical politics of Negritude ideology to define modern African art against canonical interpretations of Euro-modernism; and the artist's visual and critical contributions to Pan Africanism, Nigerian nationalism, and postcolonial interpretations of African modernity. First and foremost an intellectual biography of Ben Enwonwu as a modern African artist, rather than an exhaustive critical exploration of the discourse of modernism in African art history or in modern art in general, Ben Enwonwu situates the artist historically and interprets his work in ways that surpass traditional discourse around the canon of modern art. Sylvester Ogbechie is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other white-dominant regimes through tropicalist representation. With depictions of tropical scenery and landscapes situated throughout the African diaspora, performances staged in tropical settings, and bodily expressions of tropicality during Carnival, artists such as Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Josephine Baker, and Maya Angelou developed what Noël calls “tropical aesthetics”—using art to name and reclaim spaces of Black sovereignty. As a unifying element in the Caribbean modern art movement and the Harlem Renaissance, tropical aesthetics became a way for visual artists and performers to express their sense of belonging to and rootedness in a place. Tropical aesthetics, Noël contends, became central to these artists’ identities and creative processes while enabling them to craft alternative Black diasporic histories. In outlining the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the artistic and cultural practices of Black modernist art, Noël recasts understandings of African diasporic art.

Africa after Modernism traces shifts in perspectives on African culture, arts, and philosophy from the conflict with European modernist interventions in the climate of colonialist aggression to present identitarian positions in the climate of globalism, multiculturalism, and mass media. By focusing on what may be called deconstructive moments in twentieth-century Africanist thought – on intellectual landmarks, revolutionary ideas, crises of consciousness, literary and philosophical debates – this study looks at African modernity and modernism from critical postcolonial perspectives. An effort to sketch contemporary frameworks of global intersubjective relations reflecting African cultures and concerns must resist taking modernism as a term of African periodization, or master-narrative, but as a constellation of discursive and subjective forms that obtains upon the present moment in African literature, philosophy, and cultural history. Africa after Modernism argues for a philosophical consciousness and pan-African multiculturalist ethos that operate, after the deconstruction of Eurocentrism, beyond self/other paradigms of exoticism or West/Africa political ideologies, in dialogue with postcolonial approaches to cultural reciprocity.