Disalienations: Art in and out of Africa at Midcentury

Focusing on a distinct network of diasporic artists and critics in the 1940s and the 1960s, this book explores how African-descended mid-century artists not only appropriated but intervened into raced aesthetic concepts and colonial infrastructures to argue their resonances in the global arts world.

The book presents a novel engagement with the underexposed modern, late colonial-to-decolonized period, accordingly alternating between milieus and environments: Douala, Dakar, Léopoldville (Kinshasa), Ibadan, Nairobi, Harare to Rio, Paris, London and New York City, and across artistic media encompassing painting, sculpture, installation, performance to art criticism and experimental writing. To this end, the book draws on primary sources related to artworks, film stills, historical and contextual settings such as exhibitions and festival locations, several of which are explored and illustrated for the first time. In tracking artists’ itineraries and scenes, the book highlights the multi-directional flow of colonially informed vernaculars and artistic influences without which, the book argues, any art historical conception of transcontinental modernisms developing in “postwar” France and beyond remains homogenous and one-sided.

The author re-centers conventional conceptions of Afro-diasporic artistic movement and intellectual history, by delineating how these radiated outward from the African continent, subsequently translocating to and informing artistic Western centers. This is an ideal text for those interested in African Art History, African Modernism, Postcolonial Art, and European Modernism.