Kasfir Dialogue: A Response

Abstract

| 9 for the birth of the interest in the contemporary. Many of us had well before this battled the traditionist status quo for some presence to be granted the contemporary. The obvious reason was that not doing so froze Africa in the unchanging past that, as it turned out, Johannes Fabian had already critiqued in regard to anthropology. It is even more curious, as I and others have argued more recently in Nka, Critical Interventions, and earlier in Ijele, because the evidence will not support that memory’s representativeness. (Among many others are Okoye, in Nka 26, op. cit., 86–87, 128–29; Okoye, “Identity/Knowledge,” Critical Interventions 1 (2007); Nzegwu, “RIDING THE SPIRIT OF OGUN: The Art of Olu Amoda,” Nka Fall/Winter 1994 (1):15; Salami, “Towards “Radical Contemporaneity” in African Art History: The “Glocal” Facet of a Kinship-Based Artistic Genre, Critical Interventions 3/4, Spring 2009.) Nkiru Nzegwu had been arguing for the contemporary from her base in Canada. Salah Hassan and I, separately, had given papers at this same 1987 ACASA conference (I on Olu Oguibe and Greg Odo, and this was well before Americans would have heard of either of them). I am not sure what the basis is for granting Thompson leadership of the revolution, but certainly Samba was not more interesting, nor more representative of the real Africa than were Oguibe and Odo (especially if one recalls the post Biafra war decimation of the Nigerian middle class, and that access to post primary education right up to the university, was in Nigeria significantly meritocratic, and in art school especially not at all the ken of the economically privileged). Many who had struggled to assert the inclusion of the Contemporary should not know be being written out of the history by a reference back to those against whom we saw ourselves opposed, even if in hindsight our revolutionary zeal may have also clouded our reading of what and who stood in the way.