Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

In Senghor’s Shadow is a unique study of modern art in postindependence Senegal. Elizabeth Harney examines the art that flourished during the administration of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president, and in the decades since he stepped down in 1980. As a major philosopher and poet of Negritude, Senghor envisioned an active and revolutionary role for modern artists, and he created a well-funded system for nurturing their work. In questioning the canon of art produced under his aegis—known as the Ecole de Dakar—Harney reconsiders Senghor’s Negritude philosophy, his desire to express Senegal’s postcolonial national identity through art, and the system of art schools and exhibits he developed. She expands scholarship on global modernisms by highlighting the distinctive cultural history that shaped Senegalese modernism and the complex and often contradictory choices made by its early artists. Heavily illustrated with nearly one hundred images, including some in color, In Senghor’s Shadow surveys the work of a range of Senegalese artists, including painters, muralists, sculptors, and performance-based groups—from those who worked at the height of Senghor’s patronage system to those who graduated from art school in the early 1990s. Harney reveals how, in the 1970s, avant-gardists contested Negritude beliefs by breaking out of established artistic forms. During the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Moustapha Dimé, Germaine Anta Gaye, and Kan-Si engaged with avant-garde methods and local artistic forms to challenge both Senghor’s legacy and the broader art world’s understandings of cultural syncretism. Ultimately, Harney’s work illuminates the production and reception of modern Senegalese art within the global arena.

Winner of the 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award In The Dispersion, Stéphane Dufoix skillfully traces how the word “diaspora”, first coined in the third century BCE, has, over the past three decades, developed into a contemporary concept often considered to be ideally suited to grasping the complexities of our current world. Spanning two millennia, from the Septuagint to the emergence of Zionism, from early Christianity to the Moravians, from slavery to the defence of the Black cause, from its first scholarly uses to academic ubiquity, from the early negative connotations of the term to its contemporary apotheosis, Stéphane Dufoix explores the historical socio-semantics of a word that, perhaps paradoxically, has entered the vernacular while remaining poorly understood.

Doit-on considérer la Négritude comme un mouvement ancré dans la fin de la période coloniale et sur lequel il n’y a plus lieu de revenir ? C’est une des questions que le colloque qui s’est tenu à l’Université des West Indies à la Barbade en l’honneur du centenaire de la naissance de Senghor s’efforce d’explorer. Lylian Kesteloot nous rappelle encore récemment dans son étude Césaire et Senghor un pont sur l’Atlantique l’importance de ce mouvement qui entre les années trente et soixante a participé à la naissance de la littérature africaine. La question du particularisme que le mot Négritude implique et de son opposé l’universel sera largement débattue dans les pages de cet ouvrage. Les articles de cet essai discutent les défauts essentialistes de la Négritude senghorienne, mais également le fait que dans les termes de Senghor « la Négritude est un mythe », donc une construction identitaire, l’expression d’une invention. Il envisageait par exemple l’avènement d’un socialisme africain, dans une interprétation unique du marxisme. En tant que mouvement poétique, philosophique, littéraire, ou en tant que réponse idéologique à une oppression, les auteurs africains et antillais étudiés ici et qui traitent de thèmes très contemporains, démontrent la vivacité d’une Négritude toujours d’actualité dans sa présentation des cultures. Il faut bien entendu dépasser la notion raciale contenue dans le terme et insister sur le culturel, le philosophique et l’esthétique, pour accepter que la Négritude ait une pertinence actuelle. Notamment nous verrons que la Négritude s’est métamorphosée aux Antilles où au Brésil en d’originaux projets idéologiques et esthétiques. Should Negritude be seen as a movement that originated at the end of the colonial era and merits no further study in this contemporary world? This is one of the questions explored in the Colloquium held at the University of the West Indies, Barbados, to mark the centenary of the birth of Léopold Sedar Senghor. In a recent study, Césaire et Senghor: Un pont sur l’Atlantique, Lylian Kesteloot reminds her readers of the importance of Negritude which contributed to the emergence of African literature between 1930 and 1960. The idea of essentialism which the word Negritude implies, as well as the opposite idea of universalism, will be widely discussed in the pages of this work. This collection of essays acknowledges the essential shortcomings of Senghor’s Negritude, but, at the same time, underlines the fact that in Senghor’s words, “Negritude is a myth” and therefore has to do with the construction of (an) identity and is the expression of an imaginary creation. It envisaged, for example, the creation of an African form of socialism within a unique interpretation of Marxism. In this volume, African and Caribbean writers who are concerned with contemporary issues, demonstrate the vitality of Negritude as a poetic, philosophical and literary movement and as an ideological response to oppression that is still relevant in its presentation of cultures. Clearly, it is necessary to go beyond the notion of race implied in the term and to focus on the cultural, philosophical and aesthetic elements in order to appreciate the relevance of Negritude today. Most notably in the Caribbean or Brazil, Negritude has been transformed into original ideological and aesthetic projects.

Drawing on new research from the ERC project ‘Developing Theatre’, this collection presents innovative institutional approaches to the theatre historiography of the Global South since 1945. Covering perspectives from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America as well as Eastern Europe, the chapters explore how US philanthropy, international organisations and pan-African festivals all contributed to the globalisation and institutionalisation of the performing arts in the Global South. During the Cultural Cold War, the Global North intervened in and promoted forms of cultural infrastructure that were deemed adaptable to any environment. This form of technopolitics impacted the construction of national theatres, the introduction of new pedagogical tools and the invention of the workshop as a format. The networks of 'experts' responsible for this foreground seminal figures, both celebrated (Augusto Boal, Efua Sutherland) but also lesser known (Albert Botbol, Severino Montano, Metin And), who contributed to the worldwide theatrical epistemic community of the postwar years. Developing Theatre in the Global South investigates the institutional factors that led to the emergence of professional theatre in the postwar period throughout the decolonising world. The book’s institutional and transnational approach enables theatre studies to overcome its still strong national and local focus on plays and productions, and connect it to current discourses in transnational and global history.