CALL FOR PAPERS

Dates: May 4 —5, 2007
Venue: University of California Santa Barbara
Convener: Dr. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie

The Interrogating African Modernity conference examines 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 and 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 investigating how modern African art has intersected 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, 2006. 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 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 gift 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.