From the Editor

Nka•7 From the Editor Salah M. Hassan Several highly successful exhibitions and artistic forums have launched the careers of a younger generation of African and African diaspora artists into the global art arena and marketplace. Many of these artists are featured in essays included in this issue of Nka. These exhibitions and platforms not only illustrate the individuality and complexity of the works produced by this younger generation of artists, but also challenge the art world to think critically and examine its assumptions about contemporary African and African diaspora art. A number of these are artists from Africa who move in and out of the continent and reside mostly in Western metropolises. Their success, especially in the international arena, is a call for critical reflection. In response to a similar call, I contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue Flow, to accompany the exhibition that was held at the Studio Museum in Harlem in Spring 2008.1 In this editorial, I share a summary of and excerpts from the essay in the hope that the thrust of its argument reaches a wider audience who otherwise might not have been able to access the catalogue. The artists in the exhibition were all under the age of forty, and were born during the independence movements and the postliberation era, so they are acutely aware of and responsive to the postcolonial condition— from the legacy of apartheid to the extreme acute marginalization of Africa in an increasingly globalized market economy . Remarkable for their energy and for the richness of their work, they are creatively engaged with the materials and virtual effects of the transnational movement of goods, cultures, and peoples. The variety of media with which they engage includes fantastic and utopian architecture, photography, video, large-scale sculpture, figurative painting, and site-specific installation. As a first step, it is important to understand the discourses and theories that inform the work of these artists, and to investigate the techniques, media, genres, and visual vocabularies they deploy. All these artists are well versed in contemporary visual culture, specifically postmodernism, as well as the languages and techniques of contemporary global art, as is evident in their emphasis on conceptualism, documentary and the archive, and fashion photography. Their work must be understood within the parameters of such global discourses and practices. However, the intersections of these discourses with race, gender, and other existential experiences are perhaps among the most striking aspects of the art created by contemporary artists throughout Africa and the diaspora. It is also important to interrogate their art as transnational products that can be best understood with reference to theorizations of the African diaspora. The voluntary and involuntary dispersion of Africans started centuries before the transatlantic slave trade. This movement is likely to continue in the twenty-first century, as economic and political circumstances force large-scale migrations of people, including artists and intellectuals, from African nations to the West and to other regions. Hence, it is important to locate the practice of this new generation of artists within this historical continuum , without neglecting individuality or the particular circumstances and experiences that shape the artists’ work. Here, it is also helpful to deploy a comparative perspective of modernities, to reread modernism—and by extension postmodernism —outside the West as performative acts translated and staged through “difference.”2 Moreover, recent interrogations of immigrant literary and artistic production in the context of contemporary Western culture further critique the sense of discrete and self-contained cultural boundaries. Rather than locating the production of the artists in a space of “in-between-ness,” as argued by Leslie Adelson in her study of Turkish-German literature, we must argue for a new understanding of contemporary African diasporic art and cultural labor, and a serious rethinking of its spatial configurations.3 In gesturing toward a theoretical framework with which to comprehend the breadth and depth of the work of this generation of African diaspora artists, several art critics have referred to them as “Afropolitans,” which could serve to embody a sense of cosmopolitanism in regard to their existential experience. I find the term Afropolitan to be intriguing , and see a need to interrogate it in an effort toward...