CONFERENCE: Interrogating
African Modernity:
Art, Cultural Politics, and Global Identities.
Dates:
May 4 — May 5, 2007
Venue: University of California Santa Barbara
Convener: Dr. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
The Interdisciplinary
Humanities Center, Department of History of Art and Architecture,
and the African Studies Research Focus Group, of the
University of California Santa Barbara are pleased to
announce the 2007 Mbanefo Foundation Conference on Modern
and Contemporary African Art.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Interrogating African Modernity conference interrogates
the history and critical reception of modern African
art in art history and cultural studies. 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 (modern African
art included). 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 (Provincializing
Europe, 2000) calls this the historicist model and notes
that when this model is imposed on non-Western societies
through European colonial conquest, it displaces alternative
narratives of history or modernity in these contexts
by subordinating their visual and cultural practices/discourses
to those of Europe. This historicist model has unduly
victimized modern African art. Obviously, if our perception
of modernity is circumscribed by the ‘first in
Europe, then elsewhere' paradigm, then it becomes practically
impossible for African artists to emerge as active subjects/agents
of modernity in art history; their endeavors will always
be considered superfluous in relation to the hegemonic
narratives of the West.
The Interrogating African Modernity conference counters
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? We seek papers that subject 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. Papers
that analyze the invention of specific visual languages
of African modernist expressions are welcome as long
as they evaluate how African artists engaged principal
questions about the meanings of African culture within
the matrix of modern art, and the meanings of their location
as Africans/modern artists within nationalist and internationalist
discourses. Through this focus, the conference hopes
to examine changing conditions of modernist practice
in African art and the ideologies of formal and conceptual
representations that underpinned such changes.
Papers are invited from scholars in art history, cultural
studies, visual culture, literary theory and other related
disciplines, from different geographical locations. The
deadline for submitting paper proposal/abstracts is December
20, 2007. Invited speakers will be required to submit
a draft of their papers by April 4, 2007, for discussion
by conference members and for potential inclusion in
a published anthology. Speakers will receive some assistance
with travel costs and be paid a small honorarium.
Proposals should include a 300-word abstract with the
following clearly delineated: author’s name, email
address, title of paper, telephone number, and institutional
affiliation.
Please submit all abstracts to:
Dr. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie (ogbechie@arthistory.ucsb.edu)
History of Art and Architecture
1234 Arts Building
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93030
U.S.A.
The conference is funded by a generous donation from
the Mbanefo Charitable Foundation and jointly sponsored
by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the African
Studies Research Focus Group, and Department of History
of Art and Architecture of the University of California
Santa Barbara.
