Postcolonial Modernism

<div>Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images <i>Postcolonial Modernism</i> chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960 before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic intellectual and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important because it was there at the Nigerian College of Arts Science and Technology that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and later by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive postcolonial modernism that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.<br></div>