Let me clarify what I meant by quality--since Ikem responded to my invoking quality in my leading comment/question--because I believe that the reason the work of our continental colleagues is not getting "air time," is not because we (and I mean people at the roundtable as well as our colleagues in the west) have no access to it, but because we don't see them as "sophisticated" enough, except in the case or scholars like Frank who lives in Nigeria (and I don't say this because he is on the panel; rather, it is because of the quality of his work that he is here).
I could be more direct to ask how many of us here teaching anything of contemporary Nigerian art/history, engage with or cite the works of Osa Egonwa, Ola Oloidi, and the late Adepegba (who are, and among the most influential art historians in Nigeria?), and, say, the Ghanaian Victor Asihene whose book was reviewed sometime ago in H-Afrarts? Or let me ask: I wonder which scholars working in Africa have we recently read in Nka, Third Text, African Arts, e-Ijele, Critical Interventions, and so on; and when was the last time any of us based in the west submitted articles to USO in Nigeria or any journal published on the continent? I don't think one needs to look too deep to find that there is embedded in this, the question of what constitutes qualitative--in terms of rigor, currency and depth of analysis--art historical scholarship. Yes, we have Yacouba Konate in Cote d'Ivoire, and Frank who publishes in Third Text, Camera Austria, and so forth, but are these and a few others like them not the exception?
Second, and related to the first, the emphasis in my leading comment/question was not on whether scholars of contemporary African art were resident in Africa or overseas, but rather that the scholarship is virtually in exile, meaning that the kind of possibility of exchange of ideas between say native European scholars working in the United States and their colleagues back in Europe, barely exists in the African context, and this is a problem that as Okwui put it is a result of "unfinished historical questions facing Africa", but especially the decimation of the African academy in the wake of Structural Adjustment, and by the military dictatorship that politicized the academy in Nigeria. As I see it, many who did (or had promise of producing) important work in Nigeria then are mostly overseas now, for various personal and political reasons. Consider this: the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka graduated only 4 first class honors students from 1960 to 1991. Of the four three are in the United States working as art historians today. And in 1996, while I was still teaching there, a professor appointed by the military regime to administer the university, once declared his disdain for talks about sustaining academic standards in the university; I was illegally dismissed soon after, for not signing a note of allegiance to that administration). In any case my question was meant for us to discuss the implications for our field of this disconnect between much of continental and Euro-American based scholarship, and hopefully to engage with the way forward. How to make possible or more effective connecting intellectual traffic, which in turn will benefit the scholarship whether produced in Accra or Atlanta? This is where my question leaned.
-Chika Okeke-Agulu, Princeton University
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