In the early twentieth century, expatriate teachers opened fine arts schools in a number of African cities, introducing new techniques and aesthetics. Those who study contemporary African arts define modernisms both discrepant from and overlapping with European models. Similar dynamics are found on a global scale in the early twenty-first century. African styles were adapted to meet changing economic and political circumstances, with a most compelling case among the Mangbetu people of the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zaire, whose aesthetics shifted to a European “naturalism” to meet foreign expectations. This has been noticeable since the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century but earlier as well in Portuguese influence upon the late-fifteenth-century kingdoms of Benin in Nigeria and Kongo in Angola and the impact of Christianity in Ethiopia from the fourth century c.e. Encounters and entanglements fostered by the colonial experience in Africa have produced complex issues of appropriation and commodification: compelling research reveals close association between aesthetic norms and capitalist incentives (Phillips and Steiner). One cannot discuss African aesthetics without addressing the effects of colonialism and postcolonialism and modernist and postmodernist expressive trends of the last century. Much research, in particular that of Robert Farris Thompson, has shown that some of the most powerful aesthetic carryovers from west Africa to the black Atlantic are based on deeply embedded linguistic concepts such as an “aesthetic of the cool.” Thompson illuminates the origins of slang, gestures, and attitudes by demonstrating how certain aesthetic categories in the African Americas merge moral philosophy, right living, and artistic quality. Similar dynamism can be witnessed in Africa’s diasporic traditions. The hybridized forms of Africa’s dynamic popular urban arts reflect not only constant absorption of ideas from the outside but also long-standing adaptive processes through which Africans have always been innovative players in world forums. As Karin Barber notes, African popular arts fall between the cracks of “traditional” and “elite” or “modern” art. Ghanaian urban arts reflect a vibrant immediacy stemming from subjects of daily life-from soccer to hairstyles to music and film-whereas arts of urban Senegal conform to the aesthetics of a very particular mystical Islam realized through mass-produced images and inspired by photography.
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