Roundtable II: Contemporary African Art History and the Scholarship

This panel, convened from September 4 to October 10, 2009, is the second of a three-part series on issues in contemporary African art. The first panel, which appeared in issue 22/23 of Nka, focused on large-scale exhibitions, which have been instrumental in bringing the work of African artists to global attention, and the third will examine the politics of contemporary African art and the art museum. What concerns the panel here is the scholarship of contemporary African art: the teaching, research, and publishing in the field. The discussion considers such questions as the place of contemporary African art in art history programs and its relationship with contemporary Western art as a subfield within art history, as well as the challenges involved in training graduate students. The panel also walks on such gritty grounds as the relationship between contemporary and traditional or classical African art history.