Over the past decade, scholars of the arts and visual cultures of Africa have made important strides in challenging long-standing Eurocentric and colonial frameworks that have isolated historical and contemporary African cultural production from global phenomena and presented Africa as the passive recipient of foreign innovations. Recent studies of postcolonial cultural identities and national arts movements across the continent have begun to place African actors and institutions at the center of global negotiations over the location and stakes of artistic modernism. Other scholars have turned their attention to Africa's historical role within far-reaching networks of material, artistic, and intellectual exchange—such as medieval trans-Saharan trade and commercial networks in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans—to elucidate the impact of diverse histories of global engagement on African cultural forms and identities. And yet, despite these developments, the architecture of Africa remains an underrepresented area of inquiry in architectural history. As Michelle Apotsos reminds...

You do not currently have access to this content.