Joshua I. Cohen | African Modernism Beyond the Nation-State: Decolonization, Pan-Africanism, and the Cold War

This lecture grapples with questions of how to situate and define modernism in African visual art. Existing projects in the field of modern African art history have tended to view transcontinental exchanges as mere facets of, or preludes to, the primacy of nationally based production. But many artists and critics worked extensively across political and geographic divides, making their modernism something other than a nation-building enterprise. Amid the decolonization struggles of the mid-20th century, pan-Africanist commitments drove Afro-modernist practices as artists and intellectuals elaborated (critical) responses to Negritude and other manifestations of black internationalism, even as race became a central Cold War preoccupation that prompted competing cultural investments from both the East and West. In this context, modernism stands to be conceptualized as a cross-media, cross-genre, globally oriented, and highly politicized phenomenon. Modern African art encompassed shifting engagements with local and popular forms of material culture, avant-garde legacies from Europe and elsewhere, and state-sponsored institutions, media, and diplomacy. 

About the Speaker

Joshua I. Cohen, an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford, is a historian of modern art specializing in African/diaspora, postcolonial, and global Cold War studies. His first book, The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (UC Press, 2020), received honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize as the first scholarly monograph to examine African sculpture and modernism on a transatlantic scale. With Foad Torshizi and Vazira Zamindar, he co-edited a special issue of ARTMargins devoted to Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn (2023). His current book project, tentatively titled Art of the Opaque: African Modernism, Decolonization, and the Global Cold War, has received generous support from the Dedalus Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before coming to Stanford, Cohen taught at The City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.
 

About the Series

In 1891, thirty-five scholars gathered to form a community in a new university. In that spirit, this series welcomes new humanities senior faculty to the Stanford community to present their work. 

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