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.
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