Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 by Sonal Khullar, and: Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria by Chika Okeke-Agulu

Abstract

Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015, 368 pp. Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, 376 pp. I. In this essay, I explore state of study of visual modernism in geographical areas outside of its ordained point of origin in Europe, using as a point of entry two volumes published in 2015, Chika Okeke-Agulu's Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria and Sonal Khullar's Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990. Okeke-Agulu and Khullar both contribute to a growing body of local and national histories that recast modern art's relationship to nation and nationalist discourse as a productive site of meaning-making in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Nonetheless, because of intimate relationship between modernism and narratives that define it on one hand, and colonialism on other, a number of assumptions continue to plague perception of non-Western modernism, all of which are connected to its relationship with [...] Western art traditions, its apparent inauthenticity and derivativeness, its supposed lack of comparative sophistication, [and] its troubling intimacy with cultural (Okeke-Agulu 6). In pages that follow, I explore how Okeke-Agulu and Khullar deal with these assumptions, situating their accounts of Nigerian and Indian modernism within context of art history's global turn. I argue that these authors offer avenues for expansion of art history's geographical reach without reducing disparate practices and discourses that define them to a single modernist temporality. Two common threads run through their books: on one hand, both authors emphasize local and national discursive parameters of contexts under investigation as constitutive of modern art; on other hand, both establish continuity between modern and contemporary, in Nigeria and India respectively, against a prevalent narrative of colonial rupture. In Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, Okeke-Agulu focuses on Nigerian art in decade of political independence, between 1957 and 1967, and in decades leading up to it. In particular, author pays close attention to terms in which visual modernism was imagined by artists themselves, and by contemporary Nigerian critics and writers, and uses these as a framework for understanding their practice. Against commonly held assumptions of abject dependency on nationalist ideology or on European models, author reframes relationship between art and nationalist ideology as discursively productive. Cultural nationalism was indeed central to ways in which artists conceived of their work, and the conjunction of art and nationalist ideology is an important characteristic of postcolonial modernism as an international mid-twentieth-century phenomenon (2). Furthermore, Okeke-Agulu reframes relationship of Nigerian modernism to European art in terms of idea of natural synthesis, deployed in Nigeria at time, which he defines as the selective use of artistic resources and forms from Nigerian/African and European traditions (1). In Worldly Affiliations, Khullar adopts a comparable approach, attending to terms of debates that surrounded art in India between 1930 and 1990. She takes binary between and West to be a central fact of Indian modernism, and argues that in India, as in Europe, this binary must be taken seriously, as East and West were marshaled as formal and social attributes in art history's most crucial debates on naturalism and abstraction, line and color, art and crafts, masculinity and femininity, nature and culture (12). …