Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization In Twentieth-Century Nigeria

From 3PM to 6PM on  Thursday, June  18, 2015 at Goethe-Institut Lagos, Chika Okeke-Agulu, eminent professor for African Art at Princeton University, US, will present his new book Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, published by Duke University Press. The book features an introduction by Frank Ugiomoh of the University of Port Harcourt. Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 colour 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. 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. Okeke-Agulu 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.