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Okeke-Agulu Chika . Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham : Duke University Press , 2015. xix + 357 pp. Illustrations/Paintings. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.46. Paper. ISBN: 978-0822357469.
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LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND ARTS
In Postcolonial Modernism, Chika Okeke-Agulu discusses how ideologies of pan-Africanism, decolonization, and nationalism influenced the emergence of postcolonial Nigerian artistic modernism. Okeke-Agulu focuses on the Art Society, a group of young artists who studied at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria in the late 1950s. Okeke-Agulu demonstrates how the artistic works of the Art Society "show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication" (2) of twentieth-century modernist art, revealing how artists translated Nigeria's political independence from Britain into artistic modernism.
Okeke-Agulu analyzes not only the aesthetics of contemporary Nigerian visual art, but also the intellectual and institutional history of colonial art schools, particularly the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (NCAST), Zaria. The founding of the Arts Society by former students of NCAST, and particularly the works of Uche Okeke (b.1933), represented postcolonial Nigerian artistic modernism, which in many ways was an improvement over earlier versions...