It has now been more than 60 years since the political decolonization of much of Africa, and more than 50 years since the Bandung Conference, but many scholars believe that 20th-century struggles against colonialism speak once again in instructive and unexpected ways. Indeed, with increasing calls for decolonizing art world institutions, these aspirations from an earlier era appear as timely, even urgent, statements. In the last few decades, artists and curators have increasingly sought to reinvigorate the intellectual positions, utopian visions, and collective histories of the modernist era of liberation. These efforts vary in genre, scope, and voice, but all seem to ask how “a past that the present has not yet caught up with [might] be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative.”

During my residency at the Center, I worked to complete several chapters of my current book project, “The Retromodern, Africa, and the Time of the Contemporary,” which investigates the stakes of recent and widespread artistic, art-historical and curatorial efforts to reread the residues of the modernist, anti-colonial archive in Africa. Art-historical scholarship has long focused on stylistic and material revivalisms. But until the mid-2000s, most of the literature on archival impulses, history writing, and archaeological or even ethnographic methodologies focused primarily on practices in Europe and North America (Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh, for example). If theorists did address Africa and parts of the Global South at all, they spoke of belated and derivative practices, “debts” or “contamination” resulting from the flows of modernist capital. To be sure, in some ways the retro is simply an overarching term that describes returns of many kinds: considerations of repair, reenactment, restitution, redemption, forms of melancholy, pessimism, considerations of failure, and processes of ruination. By contrast, I treat the retro (a critical, performative, often radical return to the forms and intellectual premises of the recent past) as a shared, critical attitude that activates artistic and curatorial labor, as it leans into and attenuates the potentialities of Walter Benjamin’s theses on history. It reads the past in order to press it into the service of the present, knowing full well that to articulate the past does not mean to see it as it really was.

Many of the contemporary artists I consider engage with the materiality of the archive, but others return to the synergies of ethnography and vanguardism or aim to scramble temporalities and art world categories. Still others reanimate postwar framings of transnational Blackness or re-center Pan-Africanist, pan-Arab, or nonaligned movement legacies in the form of Afropolitanist, retrofuturist, and cognate forms of anti-colonial resistance and sociality. These expressions work together with radical forms of curatorial bricolage and translation to do important cultural and political work. By definition, a project that thinks about processes of return is also deeply concerned with historiography. I want to understand how recent scholarship and curation have shaped our understandings of the refractions and/or resonances between African modernist histories and prevalent discourses of “global contemporary” arts. These retro art practices, bolstered by the art world’s increasing penchant for curatorial reboots, belong to a zeitgeist characterized by resurgent discourse across a number of fields—philosophy, history, and anthropology—aimed at rethinking utopias and even reinvesting in the possibilities of postwar humanisms. These conversations can no longer be dismissed as mere nostalgia or leftist melancholy, wrought by failures of anti-colonial modernist or postwar humanist projects, but rather constitute a renewed and burgeoning vision of radical art and social practice (often speculative in nature) that anticipates possibilities even in the face of pervasive “end of history” narratives (whether that be reckoning with the all-pervasive hold and suffocating logics of neoliberalism, the climate crisis, or continuing settler-colonial violence).

While at the Center, I finished a chapter on the allure of retro-formalism, questioning why artists choose the austere possibilities of minimalist aesthetics (the monochrome, the grid, the void, or the mirrored surface) to redirect our attentions to colonial labor and its infrastructural legacies, across largely understudied modernist geographies and histories—the Black Mediterranean and imperial follies, or recurring continental internal migrations and their stories of forced exile. These kinds of practices demand nuanced analysis, particularly in the face of both canonical abstraction and the resurgence of research on African American historical practices. I also drafted an outline for another chapter that traces the discernable return of ethnographic leitmotifs in contemporary exhibition platforms, performances, and installation projects by artists such as Yto Barrada and Kapwani Kiwanga.

University of Toronto
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, September–October 2024

Elizabeth Harney returned to her position at the University of Toronto to complete her manuscript on “The Retromodern, Africa, and the Time of the Contemporary” and begin research on her next project, about the visual archive of third-world solidarities evident at Expo 67, a project supported by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant.