Hess, Janet Berry. Art and Architecture in Postcolonial Africa. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Company, 2006.

This work examines the complexity of popular artistic culture in the era of African nationalism, with a special focus on the influential independence era in Ghana. Discussed are architecture, museum exhibitions, political displays, nationalist ideologies, artistic practices, and the intangible forms of art.

[Source: Toronto Public Library].

Harney, Elizabeth, and Ruth B. Phillips, eds. Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2018.

Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history’s traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world.

[Source: Duke University Press].

Harney, Elizabeth. Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora. London: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2003.

Ethiopian Passages tells of the importance of the arts in the African diaspora and explores the important histories of migration and the myriad negotiations of artistic groups among African artists in the diaspora. The book discusses Ethiopia’s history: the word ‘Ethiopia’ means ‘land of the sun-burned, or black-skinned people’, representing a sense of place for Africans who became land-lost, renamed and denied the use of their native tongues. It tells of the reign of Menelik II-which marked the beginning of Ethiopia’s modern history-and of life under the Marxist military regime. The book describes the tumultuous political environment of the late 20th century and shows how these unstable times have shaped the Ethiopia of today. The book also questions stereotype misconceptions about African peoples and cultures and explains why the concept of ‘ethiopianism’ came to be associated with pride, independence, self-motivation and reliance… thoroughly competent to chart their own course of development and to manage their own affairs’. Above all it revolutionizes our understanding of the culture and identity of African peoples.

[Source: Google Books].

Garlake, Peter S. Early Art and Architecture of Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

This new history of over 5,000 years of African art reveals its true diversity for the first time. Challenging centuries of misconceptions that have obscured the sophisticated nature of African art, Garlake focuses on seven key regions – southern Africa, Nubia, Aksum, the Niger River, West Africa, Great Zimbabwe, and the East African coast – treating each in detail and setting them in their social and historical context. Garlake is long familiar with and has extensive practical experience of both the archaeology and the art history of Africa. Using the latest research and archaeological findings, he offers exciting new insights into the works native to these areas, and he also puts forth new interpretations of several key cultures and monuments. Acknowledging the universal allure of the African art object, this book helps to understand more about the ways in which this art was produced, used, and received.

[Source: Barnes and Nobles]

Harney, Elizabeth. In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw712.

In Senghor’s Shadow is a unique study of modern art in post-independence Senegal. Elizabeth Harney examines the art that flourished during the administration of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president, and in the decades since he stepped down in1980. As a major philosopher and poet of Negritude, Senghor envisioned an active and revolutionary role for modern artists, and he created a well-funded system for nurturing their work. In questioning the canon of art produced under his aegis—known as the Ecole de Dakar—Harney reconsiders Senghor’s Negritude philosophy, his desire to express Senegal’s postcolonial national identity through art, and the system of art schools and exhibits he developed. She expands scholarship on global modernisms by highlighting the distinctive cultural history that shaped Senegalese modernism and the complex and often contradictory choices made by its early artists.

[Source: Duke University Press].

Eliard, Stéphane. L’art contemporain au Burkina Faso [Contemporary Art in Burkina Faso]. Paris: Harmattan, 2002.

African art has seen renewed interest in the West in recent years. However, African countries don’t benefit equally from it. In Burkina Faso, which remained on the fringes of these developments, we are currently seeing the emergence of a real art world. This book analyzes the conditions of its evolutions and gives an overview of contemporary art in this country.

[Source: L’Harmattan, adapted and translated from French].