ABSTRACT
When the academic sub-discipline of Africanist art history was first established in the 1960s, its pioneers focused almost exclusively on ‘traditional’ and ‘pre-modern’ arts. Most scholars studied African art in terms of anthropology, taking the arts as expressions of cosmology, belief, and communal identity. Yet by the late 1980s, new avenues of analysis started to emerge. Scholars engaged post-colonial criticism, interrogating the hegemonic assumptions that worthwhile African cultural production must conform to a vaguely defined category of the ‘traditional’. Scholars and critics began reconsidering how to write about nineteenth- and twentieth-century African arts without resorting to Eurocentric assumptions about Africa's fundamental ‘otherness’. They focused on Africa's contemporaneity via tradition's opposite: its modernity. By the late 1990s the study of African art and visual culture had been radically transformed. Now much scholarship focuses on academically trained artists whose work is studio-based, urban, and avant-garde. Themes like subject formation, independence struggles, post-colonial nationhood, and neoliberal crisis are emphasized. Many African and diasporic artists are celebrated globally; they are the focus of major exhibitions and academic monographs. Artists such as Ibrahim El Salahi, El Anatsui, Yinka Shonibare, and Julie Meheretu are considered central to the history of global modernism.
