Events

Columbia University Seminar

Studies in Contemporary Africa 

invites you to our events & seminars for AY 2022-23.

Please contact [email protected] to RSVP

*** Spring 2023 ***

On Historiographies of Futurity

Tuesday, 7 Feb 2023, 5.30pm

Faculty House, Morningside Drive

An event with Ikem Stanley Okoye, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, University of Delaware

Followed by Cocktail Reception at 7.00pm

Assignments of modernism’s African space to epistemological weakness, or mere support, are often hidden even (or, especially) as we assert contemporaneity. The Contemporary can thus be a tricky proposition in, or for, Africa, based as this idea sometimes is on a refusal to understand precedent Modernism as itself a fictive account extended across multiple chronotopes whose contents bleed invisibly into the present. Emerging from flawed historiographies, both Modern and Contemporary thus tend, differentially, to undermine their liberative claims in relation to African knowledge, its bodies, and its practices. Historical plays with, and relations to, for instance, desire and style in a differentiated Africa are, in other words, often evaded or looked at skeptically. This persists even as the deterrence negotiated by ascribed non-modern foils to such historiographies, stare us down (or at least stare us in the face). Exploring this conundrum, the focus will turn specifically on questions raised within a few disparate readings of origin and authorship in West Africa especially—at least as we can access them in art, architecture and the (ir)landscape(s) for example, even in precarious contexts. In such practices, or their reading, have occurred deliberate erasures of the prompts that drove earlier imaginations at specific locales before, during, and after the colonial deluge. In formulating a response, one must, in other words, also indicate how we might reorient our studies and historiographies of futurity towards an adequate understanding that could produce the global equivalencies wished by the Contemporary. The presentation will claim that this must be launched from a position that sees spaces of African desire as, in a sense, now situated in repressed phenomena--memories even--, that we must figure how to uncover or pursue. Not merely a folly, the awareness this gives rise to continuously signals the things about which we should be unceasingly wary when now conducting historical, or other critical studies of the near present even within practices such as architecture or curation.

Ikem Stanley Okoye is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware, and is joint faculty in the Africana Department. He recently completed a Canadian Centre for Architecture/Mellon fellowship on the “Centring Africa” initiative where he was working on a recently proposed pan West African book project Where was Modernism. He has also held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Center for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin; and the Advanced Study Center at Michigan, among others. His essays on art, architecture and the landscape are published in journals including Interventions-- Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; Critical Interventions; RES Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics: and NKA; as well as in book anthologies including Radical Pedagogies (Beatriz Colomina and Anna-Marie Meister, eds.); Cultural Heritage Landscapes in Sub Saharan Africa (John Beardsley, ed.); Exiles and Strangers (Kobena Mercer, ed.); Anthropologies of Art (Mariet Westermann, ed.); and The Built Surface: Architecture and Pictures (Koehler and Anderson, eds.), among many others. His work sometimes focuses also on early colonial Nigeria, exclusively, as is so for a long-in-process book Hideous Architecture. Okoye occasionally enjoys a practice in architecture as “Ikem Okoye + Anubis Architecture”.

Mark your calendar for our upcoming seminar:

7 March 2023, 5.30pm: Dr. Safia Aidid

Please contact [email protected] for any queries.

Columbia University Seminar Studies in Contemporary Africa

Co-chairs: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Robyn d’Avignon 

Rapporteur: Anusha Sundar

Advisory and Steering Committee: Emanuel Admassu, Robyn d’Avignon, Nisrin Elamin, Laura Fair, Abosede George, Vivian Chenxue Lu, Daniel Magaziner, Nana Osei-Opare, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Rhiannon Stephens, Matthew Swagler, Adedoyin Teriba