AFRC283 - Modern Art

The history of modern art is closely tied to and largely unfolds from the history of Western Imperialism. While the technologies made possible by colonial resource extraction produced new ways of looking, modern conceptions of the self and how to represent it developed in dialogue with racialized notions of the other. This course focuses on encounters between the cultures of Africa and Europe, from 1880 to 1960, and on the visual practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the birth of photography, colonial masquerade, impressionism, symbols of power in royal arts, cubism, mass marketing and colonial self-fashioning, West African studio photography, world's fairs and the Musee de l'Homme, Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, anti-aesthetics, colonial arts education, National art schools in the age of African independence, humanism and South African photography under Apartheid.