The De-Africanization of African Art (Routledge African Studies)

This book argues for a radical new approach to thinking about art and creativity in Africa, challenging outdated normative discourses about Africa’s creative heritage.

Africanism, which is driven by a traumatic response to colonialism in Africa, has an almost unshakable stranglehold on the content, stylistics, and meaning of art in Africa. Post-African aesthetics insists on the need to move beyond this counter-colonial self-consciousness and considerably change, re-work and enlarge the ground, principles and mission of artistic imagination and creativity in Africa. This book critiques and dismantles the tropes of Africanism and Afrocentrism, providing the criteria and methodology for a Post-African art theory or Post-African aesthetics. Grounded initially in essays by Denis Ekpo, the father of Post-Africanism, the book then explores a range of applications and interpretations of Post-African theory to the art forms and creative practices in Africa.

With particular reference to South Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers across the disciplines of Art, Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and African Studies.

Denis Ekpo is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of multidisciplinary Comparative Literature Programme, at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He is originator of the concept of Post-Africanism and author of Neither Anti-Imperialist Anger nor the Tears of the Good White man (2004) and Philosophie et Litterature africaine (2004). He has published extensively in journals such as Textual Practice, Neohelicon, The Literary Griot, Social Semiotics, and Third Text. He is a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa. His current book project is titled 'Forget Fanon: Post-Africanism and the Closing of the Colonial Story in Africa.'

Pfunzo Sidogi is a lecturer in the Department of Fine and Studio Arts, Faculty of Arts and Design at the Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa.