Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics by Akin Adesokan (review)

Akin Adesokan’s Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics is very much a book for postcolonial studies scholars to think with. Unlike scholars of decoloniality such as Walter Mignolo, who are engaged in a project of updating the oppositionality of decolonization by defining alternative, critical epistemologies located in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Adesokan provides a systematic way of thinking about the deep structural links that unite globalization and decolonization, as world-historical social formations, in the work of artists from what was once called the “Third World.” Borrowing from network theory, Adesokan demonstrates how we might create new cognitive maps of the postcolonial “Third World” based on links and ties across geographic space and in relationship to the metropoles, an approach that justifies his own pairing of African, Caribbean, and South Asian artists and thinkers.

For Adesokan it is precisely the tension between modernity and coloniality, in their globalized iteration, that characterizes the work of contemporary artists. This is a tension not easily collapsed into smooth neologisms such as the “glocal.” Rather, Postcolonial Artists rests on the idea that what is post-postmodern and post-postcolonial are artistic modes of production that are neither simply oppositional nor simply co-opted but are rather complexly intertwined with global capitalism. These are the aesthetic effects of a cultural and economic complex Adesokan describes as the “crossroads of capital,” that is, an idea of the marketplace as a socioeconomic formation where competing interests and forces of the local and the global not only meet but also intertwine and, at times, find an uneasy reconciliation. Adesokan affirms the indebtedness of such figures as C. L. R. James, Ousmane Sembene, and even to some extent Tunde Kelani to midcentury visions of pan-Africanism and tricontinentalism that allow these artists to maintain a separateness from “First World” values and understandings of the world, and an emphasis on more “local” beliefs, value systems, symbolic orders, and ways of understanding the local in the global. In the work of Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Caryl Phillips, and Arundhati Roy, by contrast, metropolitan locations and funding sources complicate these artists‘ efforts, and intent, to articulate an oppositional aesthetic politics.

As much as Adesokan’s argument is exciting in its ambition and reach, offering systematic typologies of a very contemporary postcolonial order, it is in the details that one finds intriguing, even controversial formulations that provoke our thinking beyond the truisms of older frameworks of postcolonial critique. One crucial insight rests in Adesokan’s use of the notion of asymmetry to describe the postcolony as the meeting point of the world of lateral fluidity, of motion and capital, encouraged by globalization and its proponents, and the rougher terrain of uneven geographic development as understood through the political and economic lens provided by decolonization. The fitful colonial character of postcolonial artistic production, the realities of asymmetrical global relations between different territories, and the inescapability of metropolitan prestige and influence as institutional contexts within which postcolonial artists work are the new social realities that overlay and lie in the interstices between some artists’ older, racialized, class-based analyses derived from tricontinentalism and the ease of choice and individual movement that characterizes other artists’ cosmopolitanism.

Another overarching insight concerning genre allows Postcolonial Artists to move across both time and space, offering African filmmaking and the prose writing of the nonfiction essay as key nodes in which these intersecting asymmetries are felt and recorded in artists’ generic transformations and innovations. In an analysis that depends on an understanding of the historicity of form as its own kind of content, Adesokan carefully reads signature works by two triads of artists, the African filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Tunde Kelani and Jean-Pierre Bekolo, and the writers C. L. R. James, Caryl Phillips, and Arundhati Roy. Regardless of the stylistic stance or tone taken by these artists in their material—Phillips’s and Bekolo’s cosmopolitanism, Roy’s sarcasm, Kelani’s aesthetics of exhortation—it is in the formal...