The Short Century : Postcolonial Africa and the Politics of Representation

The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

It is relatively rare for a significant metropolitan museum to organize an exhibition devoted to contemporary non-Western art. Major cities in the United States now each have museums of non-Western and indigenous art. While the establishment of such institutions clearly represents a form of progress, their existence also tends to hive off the expressive culture of non-Western peoples from the contemporary mainstream. This allows dominant institutions such as New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to carry on representing unmarked but nevertheless dominant social traditions and groups in a manner that helps perpetuate such hegemony. Any exceptions to this rule of representation tend to cast discomforting light on the forms of exclusion that are the norm in such institutions. Yet, if it ever was, representation can no longer be seen as innocent. Indeed, in the course of the so-called culture wars in the United States, the very institutions devoted to collecting, cataloguing, and displaying representations of the world have become sites of conflict. The parochialism of the West can no longer be taken for granted.

The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 provides an important challenge to such parochialism. Organized originally for display at Munich's Museum Villa Stuck, the show traveled to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art before finishing its run in the U.S. at MoMA in New York during the winter of 2002. The show offers an ambitious survey of the cultural awakening that accompanied Africa's independence movements during the last half-century. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, The Short Century foregrounds the politics of representing non-Western peoples and their traditions of cultural production. The exhibition stands as an explicit riposte to the colonial discourse that has framed Africa in dominant cultural institutions of the West such as the museum world. Celebrating the achievements of African liberation movements, The Short Century proposes a radical new framework within which to regard the history of Africa and its cultural production during the last half-century.

Despite the many strengths of the exhibition, it also proves indicative of the central contradictions in contemporary discourse concerning Africa and the non-Western world in general. Prominent among such contradictions is the question of how to celebrate the legacy of anticolonial movements while also adopting a critical eye toward their manifest failures. The Short Century highlights the difficulties inherent in attempts to construct a representative survey of non-Western cultural production during this moment in which heightened global exchanges of culture go hand in hand with dramatically increased inequality. In such a context, the role of indigenous cultural brokers such as Enwezor has become pivotal. Yet while the rise of such brokers has challenged traditions of colonial discourse in the West, the question of who has the right "nativist" credentials to affect the export of non-Western art has become increasingly vexed. ¹ A blockbuster exhibition like The Short Century therefore constitutes a particularly telling instance of the politically fraught mediatory role played by non-Western brokers who enter the mainstream cultural institutions of the West today. To what extent do such cultural brokers succeed in documenting cultural practices reflective of contemporary African reality while also satisfying the material and ideological demands of the international art market?

Alternative Modernities

The Short Century provides an index of the extent to which explicit colonial discourse concerning Africa in the art world has been challenged over the last decade. The tremendous creative energies unleashed during the course of Africa's struggle against colonialism constitute the center of the exhibition. Surveying works in traditional Western artistic media such as painting and sculpture as well as less orthodox genres like documentary film, portrait photography, textiles, popular music, and architecture, The Short Century places cultural production at the center of Africa's successful struggle against direct colonial subjugation...