Welcome to this expanded special issue of Critical Interventions. Titled Interrogating African Modernity: Art, Cultural Politics and Global Identities, this double issue began with papers first presented at the 2007 Mbanefo Foundation Conference, which convened at the University of California Santa Barbara during May 4-5, 2007. This international conference brought together leading scholars of African art to deliberate on the history and critical reception of modern African art. The conference capitalized upon the reemergence of modernism as a primary intellectual concern in all spheres of the humanities and social sciences, especially in art history and cultural studies. Modernity is back in the news and the contemporary era after postmodernism has returned to modernist commitments and strategies with a vengeance, a process I have identified elsewhere as neomodernism.1 In this new dispensation, various theories have emerged to explain the persistence of debate about the nature and parameters of modernism, which suggest that postmodernism's earlier rejection of the modernist project failed to account for how cultures classified as "other" in Western discourses engaged the larger context of modernism. Simply put, the modernism of Western Europe must be linked with a history of global modernism, in which African, Asian, Oceanic, and Native American artists have been critical participants. While by now it is painfully clear that the usual discursive approach to the modernism of Western European artists cannot adequately explain the global phenomena of the modernist project, detailed studies that elucidate the subject in different contexts have only recently begun to appear. Bruce Knauft classifies these processes as alternative modernities.2 Art historical narratives have long subordinated modernist developments in Africa to Eurocentric narratives of modernity. In recent years, the turn to studies of alternative modernities appears to provide a space for engagement with non-Western contexts of modernity such as modern African art. However, too often discourses of alternative modernities actually continue to mediate the reception of non-Western contexts as secondary locations for the unfolding of the European ethos. Dipesh Chakrabarty calls this the historicist model and notes that its imposition on non-Western societies through European colonial conquest displaces alternative narratives of history or modernity in these contexts by subordinating their visual and cultural practices/ discourses to those of Europe.3 This historicist model has unduly victimized modern African art by making it practically impossible for African artists to emerge as active subjects/agents of modernity in art history where their endeavors are always considered superfluous in relation to the hegemonic narratives of the West.

Scholarship in African art history has over the past four decades struggled with the important question of how to make modern African artists emerge as active subjects in histories of modernism. The Interrogating African Modernity conference was convened to counter the historicist narrative by positing a fundamental question: When was (or is) African modernity? What are its specific subject positions and its discourses of visual and cultural representation? The conference subjected these issues to an interdisciplinary analysis to elicit new critical frameworks for interpreting modern African art's intersection with local and global discourses of modernity. I specifically requested papers that analyzed the invention of specific visual languages of African modernist expressions and evaluated how African artists engaged principal questions about the meanings of African culture within the matrix of modern art, and the meaning of their location as Africans and modern artists within nationalist and internationalist discourses. Through this focus, the conference examined changing conditions of modernist practice in African art and the ideologies of formal and conceptual representations that underpinned such changes.

Other issues also underpinned the focus of this conference, mainly with regard to the reception of modern African art in the global context, with particular reference to its discursive value. Like all forms of African cultural production, modern and contemporary African art is undervalued in global discourses. Scholars often underestimate the processes whereby artistic practice and scholarship emerge into discourse especially where such scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary African art. Many exhibitions that have focused on this subject over the past two decades have been soundly critiqued for their suspect characterizations of modern art on the African continent and their relentless focus on explaining a context of modernist practice considered curious at best in art history. You can see the short distance traveled in the discourse so far by comparing important exhibitions such as Africa Explores (1991: curator, Susan Vogel) and The Short Century (2001: curator, Okwui Enwezor), to the recent exhibition Africa Remix (2004: curator, Simon Njami). In these exhibitions, curators compressed broad and generalized views of the continent into single shows designed to provide a quick comprehension of varieties of modern and contemporary art in Africa. These exhibitions were roundly criticized for positioning contemporary African art as a context of unrelenting neo-primitivism (Olu Oguibe, commenting on Africa Explores), for narrating a truncated history of modern African art whose emphasis on postcolonial practice marginalized significant developments dating back to the mid-19th century that locate Africa firmly within the global project of modernism (John Peffer, commenting on The Short Century), and for suspect categorization of forms of contemporary African art (Anthony Downey, commenting on Africa Remix).4 Despite these criticisms, these were in fact groundbreaking exhibitions and, as Jules-Rosette and Osborn remind us, we should not lose sight of their greater achievement in mediating the reception of specific African artists into global space. The truth is that it is extremely difficult to secure funding for exhibitions of African art that engage modern and contemporary African artists as individual subjects focused on national or even regional concerns. Usually, funding is provided for generalized overviews of African art, a fact that affects not only the types of exhibitions produced but also the kind of scholarship extant in the field of African art history.

The 2007 Interrogating African Modernity conference is significant in this respect because it was wholly funded by the Mbanefo Foundation as part of a substantial research grant to support scholarship on African art history at the University of California Santa Barbara. The funding made it possible to invite important scholars who presented thoroughly engaging perspectives on principal issues in the discourse of African art and visual culture. The articles collected in this special volume include papers developed from conference presentations and additional solicited articles that complement the focus of the conference. They cover a wide range of analyses and all call for drastic revision of established dogma in African art history. Everlyn Nicodemus leads the charge by arguing that modern African artists need a professional and seriously analytical art history as a framework for their practice but because institutions and infrastructure still are underdeveloped and resources are lacking in most African countries, efforts to develop a well researched art historical scholarship have to be made in a wider context, involving scholars in Africa, in the Diaspora and in other parts of the world, including the West. Bennetta Jules-Rosette and J. R. Osborn's jointly authored article addresses three exhibitions— Africa Remix (2004), African Art Now (2005), and Josephine Baker: Image and Icon (2006)—in terms of the political economy, audiences, and semiography of their displays as they move across diverse venues and reconfigure contemporary African art in relationship to avant-garde genres, new aesthetic themes, and contrasting audience demands. Their analysis incorporates Rosette's reviews of other reviews of these exhibitions and her critique of the primitivist images of Josephine Baker, especially those that show the performer wearing banana-skirts costumes. The article moves onto unstable ground in its analysis of primitivist images of Baker, since their reproduction in this context works against Jules-Rosette and Osborn's attempt to criticize the reception of these images in discourse and popular culture. The authors nevertheless provide an interesting intervention in the reception of Josephine Baker by interrogating the rather unquestioning acceptance of these problematic images of the performer in recent exhibitions focused on her professional practice. Moyo Okediji evaluates the semiotics of African modernist representation by questioning the locations, relocations, and collocations of African modernity in a world fragmented and alienated by colonial, neocolonial, and counter-colonial dislocations and insurgencies.

Okediji's article is an experimental piece of art writing that uses narrative interspersion and lots of circumlocution to investigate the highly unstable discursive structures of contemporary art history. Okediji's analysis, which appropriates the linguistic complexity and wry wit of Yoruba "Ewi" poetry, uses multiple recursive strategies to tease out a critique of modernity based on the highly numinous form and representations of Mamiwata in global African spiritual exegesis. His virtuoso interpretation of how various ideologies shaped African engagements with modernity uses feints, artifice, and subterfuge to shepherd controversial ideas past the gatekeepers of "mainstream" discourse. My own essay picks up on that question by interrogating the aesthetic regimes of the Nsukka through its focus on indigenous culture and how the idea of ethnicity plays out in forms of expression and performance of the self that its artists adopted. I posit the aesthetic regime of the Nsukka School (where I also received training during the 1980s) as a topical response to the dictates of global modernity channeled through a focus on Igbo culture and ethnicity. Jennifer Bajorek scrutinizes the reception of well-known Malian studio portraitist Seydou Keïta, devoting specific attention to the claims that his photographic portraits documented the coming of independence to West Africa. Through close readings of several of Keïta's photographs as well as through key critical and theoretical texts, Bajorek explores the connections posited in these interpretations between self-fashioning or self-determination in front of the camera and the expression of a desire for political self determination.

In a similar vein, John Peffer's essay calls for a wholly different approach to South African art history. (Peffer, my co-editor, took a temporary leave of absence from this issue in order to complete his book, which is excerpted here.) He begins with a case study of Gerard Sekoto, and goes on to emphasize the paradoxes of what he terms the "grey areas" of South African modernism. He subsequently explains how the development of a "black" modernist art before the end of apartheid occurred within social and intellectual milieux that were "more multicultural, more internationally inclined and intellectually curious than most of the rest of South Africa's polarized black and white society." Peffer thus proposes a new interpretation of South African modernism based on the intellectual and cultural foment generated in these contexts. Complementing this approach, Julie McGee considers the implications of modern and contemporaneous "appropriations" of indigenous cultural forms in South African art by evaluating Garth Erasmus' interrogation of South African modernity. Erasmus' revisioning of Khoisan art suggests that artistic "appropriations" of indigenous cultural forms can deconstruct or at the very least interrogate the constructed modernities imposed upon "indigenous" peoples whose art bears the burden of history in South Africa.

Hakim Abderrezak investigates modes and representations of modernity as encountered in the northern African countries of Morocco and Algeria. He approaches Maghrebi (North African) modernity by focusing on popular language and culture, literature and cinema. While Hakim argues for a specific Maghrebi interpretation of modernity, Monique Fowler Paul Kerman investigates changing perceptions of artists of African descent in Britain by focusing on their specific responses to modernism and reviewing how they negotiated their marginalization within the turbulent ethnic politics of their new homeland. The question of whether one embraces or is victim of marginalization lingers in how specific aspects of African modernity are received in African art history and cultural studies. In this regard, Gitti Salami contests the marginalization of contributions to the aesthetics of a globalizing world made by African artists who live in kinship-based communities and create meaning through community-based genres of artistic production as a means of deconstructing the scholarly division between "contemporary" art and "traditional" art. Salami frames aspects of indigenous cultural practice as "contemporary art" specifically to situate them in a coeval time frame of contemporaneity. Building on this theme, Nicholas J. Bridger analyzes Christian art in African art history with particular emphasis on the challenge of researching Yoruba-Christian art, a genre created through the collaboration of Yoruba artists and Irish Catholic missionaries in the context of the Oye-Ekiti Workshop. Bridger's analysis tries to answer the perplexing question of why African art historians seem to have avoided or worked around this mid-century Yoruba-Christian fusion despite its importance to the development of contemporary Yoruba art. In his paper, Afe Adogame explores how versions of Pentecostal- Charismatic Christianity are increasingly engaging religious video technology (appropriated from Nollywood—Nigerian video films) as conduits for the dissemination of their religious ideologies, and as a means of developing new visual publics and negotiating old and new identities.

So as not to overly fetishize the gallery art or popular culture aspects of African modernities, for the "archives" section of this issue we have reprinted a canonical article by Cornelius Adepegba which focuses on novelty as an accompaniment of genuine creativity in "traditional" Yoruba art, and how royal patronage mediated the emergence of new forms. Our inclusion of Adepegba's essay also inaugurates a new concept (in the sankofa—"go back and pick" mode) for the Critical Interventions "recollections" section, one that we hope future contributors will consider as an option, that is: a close re-reading of and critical reflection upon a classic earlier essay by a contemporary scholar, in order to tease out its continuing relevance. In this issue Adepegba's article is paired with a critical analysis by Francis Ugiomoh who executes a counter-reading of Adepegba's Ara allegory, aiming to repossess its context by showing how the historical framework of emergent newness inspired by royal patronage constitutes an important intervention in the progress of form in African art. Adepegba passed away in 2002 and our reproduction of his article here pays homage to his immense contributions to Nigerian and African art history. For our "archives" section, we have also reproduced the text and images from a booklet that narrates and comments upon the graffiti performance in Cape Town in 1982 at an opening by the German-born South African artist Manfred Zylla. This important document of Zylla's infamous "Inter-Action" event (where the audience was invited to assault the artist's drawings of apartheid/authoritartian types) was banned as soon as it was printed. Though well known in South African art circles, it has rarely been seen in its entirety either there or abroad. We are grateful to the artist for allowing us to present this historic material. We also include a portfolio of paintings and graphic work by the Nigerian-born artist Victor Ekpuk, whose visual explorations of indigenous African writing systems in his contemporary art, and renewal of the modernist traditions of the Zaria rebels and the Nsukka school engages these artists in a transgenerational dialogue.

We cap out this issue with Peter Probst's tribute to Susanne Wenger (1915-2009) who passed away in January after spending six decades living and working in Osogbo in Western Nigeria. Probst proposes a reading of Wenger's life and career as a "fight of modernism against modernity" structured by her Austrian origins, her early involvement in post-Secessionist movements in Vienna, and her sustained interrogation of Yoruba cultural forms in the decades she spent in Osogbo immersed in Yoruba culture and religion. Probst's analysis of Wenger's life and career offers many correctives to the canonical narrative of the artist but clearly marks her location as a modernist working within Austrian and Yoruba modernisms with marked orientation towards artistic integration and metamorphosis of both contexts. As we go to press, we also note with sadness the passing of South African pioneer modern artist Cecil Skotnes (1926-2009), who exerted a profound influence on 20th century South African art through his work as an artist and art educator. Like many other numinous personalities analyzed in this issue of Critical Interventions, Skotnes' life and that of Susanne Wenger encompassed multiple identities and provide a fitting conclusion to our interrogation of African modernity.

Notes

1 The term "neomodernism" is generally described as a return to the certainties of formalist modernism in art and design. An early use of the word appears in Victor A. Grauer, "Modernism/ Postmodernism/Neomodernism." The Downtown Review, 3, 1-2 (1981-82). My use of neomodernism focuses on the political implications of the modernist sublime in relation to African discourses of modernity in art. For an extensive analysis of neomodernism in relation to African art history, see Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, "The Perils of Unilateral Power: Neomodernist Metaphors and the New Global Order", in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds. Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

2 Bruce Knauft, ed. Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

3 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For a sustained analysis of Chakrabarty's theory applied to modern African art, see Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Rochester: The University of Rochester Press, 2008), 9-12.

4 The exhibitions cited are documented in Susan Vogel, ed. Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (New York: Center for African Art, 1991); Okwui Enwezor, ed. The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994 (Munich: Prestel, 2001); Simon Njami, ed. Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2007). The critical reviews cited are Olu Oguibe, "Review of Africa Explores," African Arts 22, 1 (1993), 16-22; John Peffer, "Recalling Africa's Modernity," Art Journal 63, 2 (2004), 94- 96; and Anthony Downey, "Curating Africa: Africa Remix and the Categorial Dilemma," Wasafiri 46 (2005), 47-55.