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  • From the EditorAmerican Art, Africa, and the Diaspora
  • Chika Okeke-Agulu

Most of the articles featured in this issue of Nka were originally presented at the American Art in Dialogue with Africa and Its Diaspora symposium, organized by Amelia Goerlitz for the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC (October 4–5, 2013). That symposium was itself part of a series, The Terra Symposia on American Art in a Global Context, sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art. We are grateful to Ms. Goerlitz, the Terra Foundation, and the Smithsonian for including Africa as an important component in the making of and discourse on American art, and for giving us the opportunity to consider some of the papers from that symposium in this special issue of Nka.

Africa's relationship with the world is inevitably tied to the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and in both moments the continent lost out, sapped of its human capital and culturally degraded in real and symbolic ways. It was and still is a place of expropriatory and affirmative possibilities. But I am not so much interested in the former as in the latter, in its real and metaphoric modes. Many of the texts included in the present issue of Nka examine longstanding engagements with African art and culture by artists and intellectuals in the United States and Europe—a diverse group with different artistic, philosophical, and ideological motivations—noting how this encounter informed aspects of their work and in some cases contributed in shaping knowledge about the continent and its peoples. A few essays deal with the equally important part played by Africans born on the continent but whose careers flourish(ed) in Europe and the United States, such as Amir Nour and Skunder Boghossian. Their work not only impacted views of Africa and its diaspora, but also contributed to new imaginaries of modern and contemporary culture.

The African diaspora began to pay significant attention to the continent's history, cultures, and peoples in the early twentieth century, most importantly during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Alain Locke's 1925 essay "The Legacy of Ancestral Arts," in which he called on African American artists to look to African sculptural and decorative arts for inspiration, as did their European modernist counterparts, was an important moment in diasporic symbolic engagement with Africa. The extent to which artists heeded his call remains a matter of debate. It is, however, beyond argument that for the few who traveled to the continent—John Biggers, Jacob Lawrence, Melvin Edwards, for example—for firsthand encounters with its peoples, cultures, and arts, the experience yielded compelling images of Africa, shorn of the romantic or primitivistic imaginaries developed by blacks in the New World as part of their tactical resistance to slavery and racism's pernicious onslaught against their humanity.

To be sure, slavery, colonialism, and racism have not only perpetuated socioeconomic disenfranchisement of diasporic Africans, they also catalyzed their alienation from their ancestral continent. Sadly, Africa's modern nations and societies have not demonstrated a commitment to forge better relations with the black diaspora. The absence of policies that encourage the black diaspora to resettle, invest, or simply reconnect with Africa, beyond the occasional touristic encounters, is remarkable and unfortunate. As the experience of the Jewish diaspora and the State of Israel shows, in spite of its colonialist oppression of Palestinians and appropriation of their land, robust symbolic and pragmatic relationships between homeland and its diaspora can, for the most part, be beneficial; the dispersed communities reaffirm their sense of being by deepening their attachment to a place of ancestral origins. A vigorously connected diaspora guarantees, through concerted commitment, the homeland's survival and participation in world affairs.

There have been moments in history when the black diaspora took strong interest in the continent. Consider, for example, the colonial imaginaries of early trends in the Ethiopianist movement of the nineteenth century and, later, Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa enterprise; the cultural and humanistic yearnings of Pan-Africanism in the age of W. E. B. Du Bois; and the radical reclamation of Africa and support of its decolonizing nations during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and...

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