Critical Interventions, is a peer-reviewed journal of advanced research and writing on African art history and visual culture. Our mission is to provide a forum for cutting-edge scholarship in African art history and for sustained analysis of issues of urgent concern for the discipline that foregrounds both the history of Africa’s modernity and the historiography of African Art History. The journal proposes a critical intervention at a moment of great contradiction, when there are diminishing opportunities for new and in-depth scholarly research on African arts but also a parallel rise in interest in Africa’s modernity among scholars and students. We believe that studies grounded in research in Africa and based on deep knowledge of historical and contemporary experiences of African art and visual culture can illuminate the fields of modern and contemporary art history in ways that are otherwise invisible to specialists in contemporary art in general.

Critical Interventions focuses on the arts and visual cultures of global Africa, which encapsulates African and African Diaspora identities in the age of globalization. It provides a forum for investigating the value of African art/cultural knowledge in the global economy and its mediation protocols, reviewing in particular how this value is created via the politics of reception and commodification. The journal thus inaugurates a formal discourse on the aesthetics, politics, and economics of African cultural patrimony and African ownership of the intellectual property rights of its indigenous knowledge systems and forms of cultural practice. Through this focus it stakes out a ground on what promises to be the principal site of discursive engagement for the field of African art history in this century. Critical Interventions also hopes to make a substantial contribution to the future of African art studies by promoting the highest standards of critical analysis and by encouraging research that engages the intergenerational dynamics of the field.

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