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Reading Black and African Art History and Philosophy

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African and Black authors have extensively written about African and Black art. During the Harlem Renaissance, the philosopher Alain Locke was one of the first to write extensively on the history of African and African American art. His anthology The New N**** (1925) has recently received renewed scholarly attention. Among African authors, the poet (and later president of Senegal) Léopold Sédar Senghor, was the first to theorize African art from an African perspective. Apart from these philosophers, Black artists have often written about the challenges of working in racialised contexts. Two recently published anthologies make available texts authored by artists who were part of the American and British Black Arts Movements (in the 1960s and 1980s respectively). Clearly, the rise of contemporary African art and the recent call for decolonization of Eurocentric epistemologies have generated academic interest in African and Black theory of art. In this seminar, we will be reading select chapters from African, African American and Black British authors on the history and function of African/Black art. While these texts are intellectually accessible to BA and MA students, the terminology used in these historical sources is sometimes outdated (especially for the period of the Harlem Renaissance). Therefore, students need to bring a sensibility to historical terminologies that, although progressive at the time, can be conceived as offensive today. close