Okeke-Agulu, Chika. Postcolonial and Colonial Studies, African Studies, Art and Visual Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015.

Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early-and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.

[Source: Duke University Press].

Newbury, Darren, Lorena Rizzo, and Kylie Thomas, eds. Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges. Milton: Taylor and Francis, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003087410

This collection explores women’s multifaceted historical and contemporary involvement in photography in Africa. The book offers new ways of thinking about the history of photography, exploring through case studies the complex and historically specific articulations of gender and photography on the continent, and attending to the challenge and potential of contemporary feminist and postcolonial engagements with the medium. The volume is organised in thematic sections that present the lives and work of historically significant yet overlooked women photographers, as well as the work of acclaimed contemporary African women photographers such as Héla Ammar, Fatoumata Diabaté, Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi. The book offers critical reflections on the politics of gendered knowledge production and the production of racialised and gendered identities and alternative and subalterns objectivities. Several chapters illuminate how contemporary African women photographers, collectors and curators are engaging with colonial photographic archives to contest stereotypical forms of representation and produce powerful counter-histories. Raising critical questions about race, gender and the history of photography, the collection provides a model for interdisciplinary feminist approaches for scholars and students of art history, visual studies and African history.

[Source: Routledge]

Moore, Allison. Embodying Relation: Art Photography in Mali. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2020.

In Embodying Relation, Allison Moore examines the tensions between the local and the global in the art photography movement in Bamako, Mali, which blossomed in the 1990s after Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé became internationally famous and the Bamako Photography Biennale was founded. Moore traces the trajectory of Malian photography from the 1880s —when photography first arrived as an apparatus of French colonialism — to the first African studio practitioners of the 1930s and the establishment in 1994of the Bamako Biennale, Africa’s most important continent-wide photographic exhibition. In her detailed discussion of Bamako is artistic aesthetics and institutions, Moore examines the post-fame careers of Keïta and Sidibé, the biennale’s structure, the rise of women photographers, cultural preservation through photography, and how Mali’s shift to democracy in the early 1990senabled Bamako’s art scene to flourish. Moore shows how Malian photographers’ focus on cultural exchange, affective connections with different publics, and merging of traditional cultural precepts with modern notions of art embody Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s notion of “relation” in ways that spark new artistic forms, practices, and communities.

[Source: Duke University Press].

Meyer, Laure. Art and Craft in Africa: Everyday Life, Ritual, Court Art. Paris: Editions Terrail, 1995.

The beautiful African objects presented in this book bear witness to the diverse esthetic and technical accomplishments of more than 100 African tribes, revealing the innate beauty of simple objects such as bowls, baskets, and masks, plus elaborate examples of weaponry, textiles, beadwork, and jewelry.

[Source: Google Books].

Leyten, Harrie. From Idol to Art. African ‘Objects-With-Power’. Leiden: African Studies Centre, Leiden University, 2015.

Objects with power, so common in Africa, are neither beautiful nor easy to understand, and as such were a challenge for missionaries, anthropologists and curators of ethnographic museums from the moment they got involved with Africa, in the middle of the 19th century. Each group of professionals tried to come to grips with these objects, reacting –over time – quite differently on them. The three professions are shown to appropriate the meanings of these strange objects to suit their own objectives, dependent on historical era and type of field exposure. Missionaries tended to see them as expressions of heathenism, while anthropologists started to look for ‘master symbols’ and gradually discovered their emic meanings. Africa curators were usually not in a position to research these objects in depth in their museums. This book takes three of these objects as its starting point -ikenga, minkisi and asuman, and analyses the processes of professional appropriation. The aim is to glean how these professions learned from each other or not, to sketch processes of attribution of meaning, and to contribute to a better understanding of the role of objects of power in their culture.

[Source: Leiden University].

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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield. Contemporary African Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

Contemporary African art has grown out of the diverse histories and cultural heritage of the African continent and its diaspora. It is not characterized by one particular style, technique, or theme, but by a bricolage-like attitude toward art making, incorporating and building upon the structures from which older, pre- colonial and colonial genres were made. In this revised and updated edition of Contemporary African Art, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir examines the major themes, developments, and accomplishments in African art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Organized thematically, the book includes new chapters on the history of African photography and the growth of the global art market, alongside significant discussions of patronage, mediation, artistic training, and national and diaspora identities. Generously illustrated throughout, including work by artists such as El Anatsui, Yinka Shonibare, William Kentridge, and Ibrahim El-Salahi, the book draws on interviews with many contemporary artists and artworld professionals. Contemporary African Art is a fascinating, comprehensive survey of art from the African continent and its global diaspora.

[Source: Amazon]