Is African Art History?

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Critical Interventions, a peer-reviewed journal of advanced research and writing on African art history and visual culture. Our mission is to provide a forum for leading-edge scholarship in African art history and for sustained analysis of issues of urgent concern for the discipline. 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 art and life in Africa 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 thus aims to establish an international platform for questions of visual modernity and Africa.

Critical Interventions 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. The need for such a platform has been increasingly noted in the field. For example, Susan Vogel recently claimed that the study of African art has entered a new era of analysis and reflection. In this new era the importance of examining the archive is taking precedence over the kinds of salvage ethnography (with only secondary importance attached to historical process) that used to characterize fieldwork on art in Africa.

Suzanne Blier, considering all of the new vibrant forms of modernist art now being made in a global context, has suggested further that the present moment is a new golden age for African art. What we propose, through the establishment of this journal, is that these two perspectives might usefully be considered in tandem. We propose to foreground both the history of Africa’s modernity and the historiography of African Art History.

Critical Interventions focuses on the arts and visual cultures of global Africa, which encompases 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.

The question of value is topical because the generic undervaluing of African arts, cultures, and knowledge systems contributes directly to the minimal support given to its discourses by institutional funders and publishers. Critical Interventions engages the current crisis in academic publishing by offering a novel platform for advanced writing on African art. Publishing on African art is increasingly characterized by the production of patron-oriented picture books and generic anthologies, while fewer research-oriented or critically minded essays of substantial length have appeared in academic journals. Major academic presses now decline to publish intensive studies of African art unless printing costs are independently subsidized or they appeal to a popular audience such as the market for books related to African Diaspora issues. The deserving attention focused on Diaspora contexts is commendable, but unfortunately it seems to provide an additional basis for
the marginalization of continental Africa. Funding for doctoral and post-doctoral work in African art has also diminished and, increasingly, only a small number of individuals working on “safe” topics, or well-established scholars are granted the opportunity to continue substantive fieldwork or to see their research into print. This climate of reduced publishing and funding opportunities curtails in-depth original and independent scholarship on African art from all eras. The situation truncates the aspirations of those anticipating a career in the field, and it jeopardizes the tenure prospects of younger scholars. The result is paradoxical: at the exact moment that the field is poised to become more fully art historical it is also threatened with extinction.

Is African art history? This need not be true in the double sense. The situation is dire but not yet hopeless. However, it will take concerted positive efforts on the part of all concerned African art historians and Africanists to ensure that the current downturn in the field does not devolve into a permanent state of affairs. African art history is a severely constrained field whose institutional support structures are gravely endangered and whose research paradigms are in desperate need of broader horizons. With this need in mind, Critical Interventions offers a space for informed dialogue on future trends in our field, for ideas on the relationship of African art history to other fields, and for examination of the larger questions faced by all African art history and visual culture researchers as they confront the current politics of publishing and funding in the academy. Critical Interventions also provides established scholars a space to share their accumulated wisdom, and to propose new ideas expressed with the kind of intensity that helped found our discipline in the first place.

Critical Interventions is the first journal devoted to analysis of the metahistory and critical framework of African art history, and thus expects to play a leading role in reframing research for a new generation of scholars. It also differs from existing journals in the field by its strict adherence to the peer review process for its essays, by its emphasis on original scholarship over curatorial agendas, by its resistance to art patronage-oriented exegesis, and by its primary focus on the historiography of African visual modernity.

The intellectual orientation of Critical Interventions is colored by the content of the essays received as much as it is shaped by the eclectic research interests of its editors. For research-based essays the journal follows the guidelines for peer-review publications defined by the College Arts Association. It accepts research essays of substantial length and also accepts methodological or analytical interventions, manifestoes, and artist and curator statements for review. Additionally, Critical Interventions is committed to presenting the best international research on global African art: each issue will contain reprints and translations of classic essays that have fallen out of general circulation or are less accessible to the American audience, and a “Recollections” section in which senior scholars and artists engage the history of African art via interviews, autobiographical reminiscences, and critical reappraisals of earlier fieldwork. This flexible format allows for a healthy intergenerational and intercontinental dialogue that we hope will help bring a new vitality to the
field of African art studies as it moves into its second century.

Critical Interventions favors strategic experiments in research and writing and will thus adapt the contents of the journal as the need arises. We are open to a flexible use of the journal as a venue for the production of festschriften, to foreground collections of essays by founders in our field or on topical issues, for sustained examination of the work of individual artists and scholars, and for analysis of specific regional traditions. We welcome constructive dialogue on the possibility of other critical formats. As the contributors to the present issue attest, we are also committed to representing the views of our colleagues working in Africa and Europe. This inaugural issue of Critical Interventions includes the diverse perspectives of a philosopher (Souleymane Bachir Diagne), a writer and critic (Chinua Achebe), artists (Modou Dieng and Uche Okeke), as well as art historians. We asked only that the authors for our first issue address in some way the idea of history in relation to African art. The selected essays were chosen, in part, to reflect the interdisciplinary orientation of the journal. They initiate the kinds of broad questions and challenges to assumptions in the field that will be explored further in future issues. We look forward to more of this kind of
intellectually stimulating exchange as we negotiate together the changing terrain of African art history.