Intersecting Histories and Post-Colonial Realities: Stylistic and Thematic Dialogue Between African American and African Visual Arts in the Cold War Era

The period (1960–1977) witnessed the influx of African American Artists to Africa in search of the “authentic” African identity and to locate their iconography within the lived experience of the continent. This migration resulted in a two-way dialogue that significantly contributed to the art and nationalistic ideology that characterized post-colonial modernism, especially in Anglophone West Africa. My research explores the transnational link, with questions of migration, identity, indigeneity, and nationalism, among the African-American and African artists in the early years of African independence and how these exchange channel a thematic and stylistic course in visual representation and preoccupations on the two continents.