An Image of Europe: Yinka Shonibare's Postcolonial Decadence

Abstract

In 1891 Oscar Wilde argued that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.” A hundred years later, the Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE takes up where Wilde left off, arguing that “[t]o be an artist you have to be a good liar.” This essay explores how Shonibare reinvents Wilde's antirealism for a globalized, postcolonial world. Building on Leela Gandhi's notion of “interested autonomy,” I argue that in works such as his 2001 photo series Dorian Gray, Shonibare turns to Wilde's aestheticism as a means of upending the relation between realism and politics found in Chinua Achebe's critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, rediscovering the disparate racial and sexual geographies at stake in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and in Albert Lewin's 1945 film version of it. Shonibare's post-colonial decadence, I argue, demonstrates how decadent aestheticism may become central to postcolonial imaginings of the real.