Joshua I. Cohen | African Modernism Beyond the Nation-State

Name: Joshua I. Cohen | African Modernism Beyond the Nation-State
Start: 2025-03-05T16:00:00-08:00
Location: 424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA, United States, California 94305

Schedule

Wed, 05 Mar, 2025 at 04:00 pm

UTC-08:00

Location

424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA, United States, California 94305 | Stanford, CA

The 1891 Lectures in the Humanities
This lecture grapples with questions of how to situate and define modernism in African visual art. Existing projects in the field of modern African art history have tended to view transcontinental exchanges as mere facets of, or preludes to, the primacy of nationally based production. But many artists and critics worked extensively across political and geographic divides, making their modernism something other than a nation-building enterprise. Amid the decolonization struggles of the mid-20th century, pan-Africanist commitments drove Afro-modernist practices as artists and intellectuals elaborated (critical) responses to Negritude and other manifestations of black internationalism, even as race became a central Cold War preoccupation that prompted competing cultural investments from both the East and West. In this context, modernism stands to be conceptualized as a cross-media, cross-genre, globally oriented, and highly politicized phenomenon. Modern African art encompassed shifting engagements with local and popular forms of material culture, avant-garde legacies from Europe and elsewhere, and state-sponsored institutions, media, and diplomacy.
Learn More: https://shc.stanford.edu/events