African Arts & Literatures Today aims to address the underexamining of African cultural production by providing lectures, readings and discussions by academics and artists active in the field of African culture and literature.
In this presentation, Chika Okeke-Agulu will explore the making of postcolonial modernism in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s. He will examine the impact of the ideologies of decolonization on artistic modernism, as well as the intellectual and critical networks that enabled and sustained this work in the years after political independence.
Chika Okeke-Agulu is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora art history in the Department of Art & Archaeology and Department for African American Studies, Princeton University, and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. His latest book, Postcolonial Modernism: Art & Decolonization in 20th-Century Nigeria (2015) received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association.
