Decolonizing the Modern? Art and Postcolonial Modernism in Twentieth-Century Nigeria

Despite attempts by scholars to investigate modernism's multi-farious manifestations within academic discourse, it is still impossible to reach any definitive set of ontological or strategic pointers that define the term "modernism." More tenable in the face of these numerous positions is the stance that consistently reverts to the "modern" as a condition of the human experience in a contemporary and rapidly changing world. In his review of the history of Western Modernism, Pinkney (3) notes that the term "modernism" is "the most frustratingly unspecific, the most recalcitrantly unperiodizing, of all the major art-historical 'isms' or concepts." This is precisely what sits at the back of one's mind when considering any text on modernism. Chika Okeke-Agulu's Postcolonial Modernism, Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, however, takes another line. Okeke-Agulu situates modernism as a specific (artistic) condition of the anticolonial nationalism and decolonization struggles that took place in Nigeria prior to independence. Published in 2015 by Duke University Press, the 357-page book with 129 color images has been declared the winner of 2016 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism and the 2017 African Studies Association (ASA) Joost Fontein award. Okeke-Agulu, a leading scholar of African art, as well as a curator, artist, and associate professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, becomes the third Black scholar to win the Frank Jewett Mather Award since its establishment in 1963.¹

Okeke-Agulu's aims are significantly more ambitious than what Pinkney proposes in his critique of modernism. These are to present new discursive categories through which to locate and understand postcolonial modernism in art and to map a clear intersection of the conditions of art and politics under the rubric of cultural nationalism in the years preceding Nigeria's independence. Okeke-Agulu's greatest contribution to global postcolonial discourse lies in recasting the established theoretical, formalistic, and thematic concerns of Nigerian art formally entrenched by the colonialists: that modern Nigerian, and African, art of the mid-twentieth century were weak copies of the work of Europeanists and that Africans are incapable of naturalistic representation. He also highlights how Nigeria played a key role in the intellectual movement that heralded the postcolonial and modernist ethos in the African continent during the mid- and late twentieth centuries. Finally, Okeke-Agulu effects a re-reading of the methods, techniques, and conventions of Nigerian art history, redrawing its conclusions and extrapolating the less-researched work of the early twentieth-century Nigerian pictorialist Aina Onabolu to postcolonial modernism.

It is possible to argue that part of this book's mission is to acknowledge an "irreducible plurality in our own experiences of historicity" (Chakrabarty, 108). The book suggests that postcolonial art forms are products of "colonial histories of disruption, migration, engagements" and reinforces the view that the "post" in "postcolonial" ultimately specifies a "co-articulation of colonial and postcolonial histories, not a self-serving separatism and isolationism" (McCarthy and Dimitriadis, 233). As the author argues, the book's methodology is advisedly chosen to expose not just the "visual intelligence but also how they [the works of art] relate to the world of the artist and his society" (Okeke-Agulu, 15). By recognizing certain vestiges of intertextual dialogue in areas of art history, anticolonial nationalism, colonial history, and African political economy, the book remarkably situates modern Nigerian art within a global and broader intellectual context.

In chapter 1, Okeke-Agulu astutely pinpoints one of the crucial problematics of colonialism that eludes most colonial literature on Africa: the suspicion with which colonial administrators viewed the literary education of the natives. Colonialists, as Okeke-Agulu argues, were skeptical of literary education because they believed that the rise of pervasive literary education would ultimately breed intellectual dissidents among colonized subjects, who would oppose constituted colonial authorities. This point is a timely reminder of how paradigmatic colonial disdain for Africa's intellectual development could be and how important it is actually to reinsert such discourses in postcolonial debates.

Okeke-Agulu thus...