Modernism on three Continents: Recalcitrance, Canon, and Appropriation

Abstract

The cultural history of Euro-America has so influenced discussions in academic circles for the last one hundred years or so that we ignore how the cultural affinities which they bracket and disseminate carry a universal potency that cannot - or is not meant to - be challenged. This was true, and seems to remain so, as long as the pedagogy and diplomacy of mimicry maintained a stranglehold on especially the African nation- state. However, the revaluations which have been inspired through appropriations of the modernist allure and simultaneous romancing of postmodern ambiguities, have eased access into nativist cognition. If modernism subverted traditional aesthetics and provided amazing liberty to the imaginative output of Euro- American writers in particular, it was not the same for the emerging Afro-Oriental counterpart whose art was at the crossroads of a radical shift in political and intellectual cultures. I am therefore interested in the extent to which perceived limitations in Euro-American modernism motivated new perspectives in the western periphery, so that meaning was reaffirmed through seductive experimentation with bioethical data, the anticolonial synergy from “writing back" to postindependence dewriting, and the Africanaissance imaginary in Afrofutures.