Cosmopolitan Repair: Reclaiming and Restoring Cultural Heritage in Postcolonial Nigeria

Abstract

The retention of sacred artifacts against the will of source countries, particularly ex-colonies, represents a form of social and cultural control that facilitates and exacerbates political and economic inequities between nations. Since independence, generations of Nigerian artists have engaged in various forms of recuperation of pre-colonial aesthetics through the adoption of postcolonial modernist visual tactics to negotiate a sense of self-determination and to recover an autonomous postcolonial national identity. Contemporary artists in Nigeria, particularly in Benin and throughout the diaspora have employed a range of aesthetic political practices to disrupt the legacies of colonialism still pervasive within their industries and communities. Through the creation of subversive artwork which attempts to think beyond the framework of western benevolence embedded in the project of restitution, some have made efforts to resist hegemonic influences within the global contemporary art world. The tactics of decolonial resistance that some Nigerian and diasporic artists have employed suggest a strategic redeployment of an aesthetic tradition that simultaneously advocates for the reclaiming of a black radical indigenous history and full realization of Nigerian cultural autonomous potentialities, while also envisioning a future situated within a global cosmopolitan framework – what I refer to as cosmopolitan repair. Such forms of cultural production constitute a critical component of the recent resurgence of decolonial activism that has swept the global art world which, at its core, poses a resistance to extractive capitalism in the Global South.