After the secessionist state of Biafra declared its independence from Nigeria in May 1967, a thirty-month civil war began, during which millions of Nigerians and Biafrans died or became refugees. Artists within Biafra supported its independence, and they helped define the new nation and disseminated its principles at home and abroad. Since the conflict’s end in 1970, art has intersected with wartime violence and its aftermath in ways that Nigerians still feel. Yet, public discussion of the war remains repressed. My dissertation positions the civil war as a critical moment in Nigerian art history and one that has had a profound impact on Nigerian art. I focus on art produced during the war, and I also contend with the conflict’s aftermath through a consideration of work created into the 1970s. I examine posters, international exhibitions, painting, sculpture, drawing, and sketches to explore the relationship between art and propaganda, how Nigerian and Biafran artists registered wartime experiences through their work, and the war’s effect on subsequent art. Drawing from extensive artist interviews, archival research, and an interdisciplinary theoretical approach, I center my analysis on questions of how artists act as witnesses, and how trauma and memory shape artistic practices. I chart how artists respond to wartime atrocities and create post-war works that serve as visual recollections of a conflict with an unsettled and contentious history. Through a consideration of art surrounding the Nigerian Civil War, a more nuanced understanding of how Nigerian artists engage with the postcolonial state and the conditions of postcoloniality can begin to emerge.

As a member of the black artists' collective Africobra, Barbara Jones-Hogu created screen prints that promoted the values of black power movements through vivid textual and iconographical content. This essay examines representations of men, women and family in the artist's prints, to evaluate and explain the role of gender in her artistic project for social change. This essay argues that Jones-Hogu's prints espouse conservative gender politics as part of a project of strategic essentialism, deployed to displace the pathologized image of black society perpetuated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965). While her works utilize representations of women as instruments in this project, they also depict female subjects as empowered participants in its enactment. The negotiations of female agency and conservative gender politics in Jones-Hogu's work thus underscore the importance of women to Africobra's project for black unification and uplift - and, by extension, Black Nationalist ideology.

This dissertation examines the displays of the visual arts that appeared in the 1966 Premier Festival Mondial des Arts N�gres (First World Festival of Negro Arts) with respect to mid-century international politics. In addition to performances of dance and music, film screenings, poetry readings, and a scholarly colloquium, the state-sponsored Festival, held in Dakar, Senegal, included two major art exhibitions. The first, titled l’Art N�gre: Sources, �volution, Expansion (Negro Art: Sources, Evolution, Expansion), brought together more than 500 works of African art loaned from collections in nineteen countries. The other, called Tendances et Confrontations (Tendencies and Confrontations), was composed of contemporary art by African and African-descended artists working on the continent and throughout the diaspora. Drawing upon archival documents and photography from collections in Senegal, France, Switzerland, and the United States, my project examines the various diplomatic roles played by the visual arts at the event.

On one hand, the arts reinforced symbolic or spiritual ties posited to be shared by all humankind. For example, both Senegalese President L�opold S�dar Senghor and UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), a major financial and intellectual contributor to the Festival, considered intercultural exchange to be essential to achieving peace after the Second World War and decolonization. On the other hand, the arts acted as useful bartering chips; they were offered, withheld, rejected or praised in efforts to manipulate international politics amid the Cold War and alongside burgeoning nationalist movements accompanying African independence. By considering the relationship of the arts to international conceptualizations of black identity, continental African diplomacy, post-colonial Senegalese relations with France, and Cold War rivalries, my project unsettles an art-historical tendency to portray the artistic programming accompanying African independence as only reflective of nationalist, domestic politics.

This dissertation examines the photography of Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) and her exploration issues of power within race, class, and gender. It focuses on the period of 1978-1991, from her first major series, Family Pictures and Stories (1978-1984), to And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People (1991). In these early years of her career, Weems explores junctures of identity while levying a critique of American culture and its structures of dominance and marginalization. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and Second Wave Feminism of the 1970s, scholars—particularly women of color—began looking seriously at the intersectional nature of identity and how it manifests in culture and lived experience. These issues are the central themes Weems’s career, and by looking at her early explorations this study provides critical context for her body of work.

Chapter One examines Weems’s first major series, Family Pictures and Stories (1978-1984). In this work, Weems uses autobiography as ethnography along with American and photographic history to question the cultural invisibility of black people. In her manipulation of personal images and history, Weems questions the process of representation, its consequences, and the constructed nature of power. Chapter Two juxtaposes her late-1980s series Ain’t Jokin’ (1987-88) and Colored People (1989-90) to explore the black tradition of signifyin’ found throughout literature and art, a framework that shows how art and culture create layers of meaning. When Weems signifies in these two series, she plays with literal and metaphorical meanings of jokes and mental associations about or applied to black people. The final chapter evaluates the role of vernacular culture in three bodies of work, namely American Icons (1988-89), Then What? Photographs and Folklore (1990), and And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People (1991). Each of these works use folklore—including oral traditions and utilitarian objects—to connect the dots between culture, race, and power. By transforming these objects into tools of political activism, Weems positions her work within a larger radical tradition.

The Grassfields region of Cameroon is home to many museums. In a region that is known for its prolific, well studied, vibrant arts and cultures, museums have been a part of the cultural landscape for nearly one hundred years. This dissertation seeks to address questions about constructing heritage and how that heritage transforms objects, is understood by different communities, and is used by people in power through the lens of four recently constructed museums in the region: the Mankon Museum, Baham Museum, Babungo Museum, and Bafut Palace Museum. First, this dissertation will address how these museums are used to construct heritage and, keeping in mind that heritage is the utilization of the past for the needs of the present, specific examples will be examined to understand how heritage fulfills the agendas of those involved in the funding, organization, and ownership of the museums. An understanding of how the museums are utilized with regard to heritage leads into a discussion of how the museums are consequently perceived by a variety of constituencies. With an emphasis on local visitors, this dissertation attempts to delve into the range of perceptions expressed by Cameroonian residents of the regions where museums exist, and some of the driving factors behind these opinions. As the act of utilizing cultural objects to create heritage narratives has a clear impact on the way that locals view their own material culture, this dissertation also examines the effects that this process has on the objects themselves. Finally, as institutions that have the ability to mold heritage and history, impacting the ways in which locals understand their own culture and the way that objects take on entirely new roles in the museum, Grassfields palaces have come to understand that museums have great potential to act as arbiters of change. Consequently, this dissertation also addresses the ways in which museums are being used towards political ends in the region; sometimes they function as tools to further the political aspirations of local kingdoms, at other times they become weapons in regional power struggles. Museums in the Grassfields are powerful objects in and of themselves - they have the ability to shape history and influence local politics. By examining their places within their local communities we can start to garner a better understanding of the place of monarchy, modernity, and memory in the lives of local Grassfields populations.

During the first centuries of French colonial expansion, the imperial towns of Saint-Louis (Senegal), New Orleans (Louisiana), and Port Louis (on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius) witnessed the emergence of buildings that combined European floor plans with patterns of design and site usage that were commonplace throughout the European and the non-European world. These components included wrap-around porches, detached kitchens, and a lack of interior hallways. Architectural historians describe buildings with these features as creole dwellings. These structures often existed within creole towns, which consisted of hundreds of such domiciles. Previous scholars have claimed these structures and their urban surroundings developed as West African and European building traditions coalesced in Atlantic societies. Yet, as Port Louis demonstrates, towns in the Indian Ocean harbored stylistically identical dwellings despite different population dynamics. This historical reality provokes two pertinent questions: Why did creole buildings and towns in the early West African, American, and Indian Ocean colonies of France exhibit profound non-European stylistic similarities? Who and what were responsible for these architectural and urban continuities?

This dissertation is the first comparative study to answer both of these questions. It contends that Saint-Louis, Port Louis, and New Orleans each hold the potential to transform our understanding of creole architecture and urbanism, in particular, and of creole cultures, at large. In engaging the interconnections between the built environments of these places, I demonstrate that worldwide systems of social control and economic exchange—rather than West African and European mixture—facilitated architectural creolization. The three chapters of my dissertation trace the history of creole architecture and urbanism from 1659, when France founded Saint-Louis, to the end of French rule of Mauritius in 1810. This project elucidates the social mechanisms that rendered creole architecture and urbanism some of the most economically relevant building traditions of the modern colonial world.

This dissertation traces the life and work of the artist Kitawaki Noboru (1901-1951), utilizing his story as a case study to explore issues related to surrealism in Japan, the pressures on avant-garde expression during wartime, and the general shift from authoritarianism toward a postwar artistic subjectivity and discovery of individual autonomy. While Kitawaki’s work is often dense and idiosyncratic, bringing together obscure references from science, philosophy, and Chinese divination, his search for meaning in the underlying order and structure of the natural world was part of a more universal pursuit of knowledge and a fundamental understanding of the world in which he lived. Like some of his contemporaries, Kitawaki saw surrealism through the lens of Japanese nativism, often locating foreign surrealist concepts and terms within an indigenous Japanese-specific context. This impulse was not simply a means to make sense of surrealism in Japan, but more specifically, a means of making sense of surrealism within the unique context of wartime Japan and its immediate aftermath.

Kitawaki was first and foremost a realist who believed that surrealism could provide the means and methods for unlocking hidden meaning in the world as it exists—not its imagined alternative. He viewed the world through the lenses of natural science, color theory, morphology, and physics—all of which have concrete, measurable results based in reality—but when trying to synthesize this worldview into an all-encompassing theory that could explain the meaning, order, and interconnectedness of such phenomena, he turned to irrational practices such as numerology and Chinese divination to fill in the gaps. Kitawaki’s surrealism, or transcendence of reality, then, is most compelling when the artist attempts to articulate the structure and order of a world that is so inherently complex and multi-faceted so as to render such attempts fundamentally impossible. It is this intellectual paradox, and its surrealistic pursuit that defines Kitawaki and his work.

This study attempts to articulate Kitawaki’s unique position within the history of Japanese art, providing needed context to the life and work of an artist who was synonymous with surrealism in Japan, but ultimately transcended this categorization.