This article addresses ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ as two distinct categories in African artistic practices and art history. It engages with exhibitions as sites of knowledge production and examines how they construct narratives of artistic modernism, modernity, and contemporaneity. By focusing on the Tendances et Confrontations exhibition, at the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres Dakar in 1966, and Dak'Art biennials since 1992, it explores the role of the two exhibition platforms in shaping artistic practices and discourse in two moments in African art and history in the last 50 years. The article also places particular emphasis on the interpretation of artworks in Tendances et Confrontations and Dak'Art to outline a transformation in artistic practices and knowledge production.

The contemporary present and modernist past in postcolonial African art

This article explores the cultural and ideological link between the New Negro Movement of Harlem and the Negritude Movement of Paris from 1920s to the 1940s. It examines how the works of African Am...

Faces of Blackness: The Creation of the New Negro and Négritude Movements in Harlem and Paris:

Traditional or modern? Art or artisanry? Craft or contemporary art? The same African artwork can move in and out of the apparently mutually exclusive binary taxonomies of visual culture over the co...

Converging Pedagogies in African Art Education Colonial Legacies and Post-independence Aspirations

This paper suggests that Senghor's political and poetic work can be understood as connected to his position as a sophisticated critical thinker. In order to move past a hasty rejection of his work, one might analyse Senghor's work as part of the more serious anti-colonial, epistemological activism that emerges in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that, for Senghor, politics is an art of interrupting discursive closures. I characterize Senghor's thinking as focused on epistemological questions, a recognition of the embeddedness of these questions in everyday political decision-making, and an awareness of the way his own thinking develops over time. I examine Senghor's On African Socialism in order to unpack the nuances in his approach. In thinking about international politics and the legacy of colonialism, I suggest that Senghor was successful in keeping open discursive closures and that from him we can learn how to prioritize the critical analysis that the development of critical questions entails.

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Interruptive discourses: Léopold Senghor, African Emotion and the poetry of politics

The only national school for the fine arts until 2004, the Institut National des Arts (INA), has been an urban nucleus for post-independence art education and artistic movements in Mali (Figure 1)....

Jeanne Garane

Papers

In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995 (review)