What Is African Art?

"What do we have in mind when we talk about African art. This book examines the shifting answers to that question. Fluidly written, it is the first book to explore the full historical arc of the invention and development of the category of "African art" and the academic field of African art history. It is meant to be an accessible guide through the history of the field, showing us how it started and has changed from its contested beginnings until today. Peter Probst helps the reader understand how Africanists have continuously filled the notion of African art with new meanings and why these shifts manifest wider societal transformations. The book covers three key stages in the field's history, starting with the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century. Here Probst focuses on museums, processes of collecting, photography's role in disseminating visual culture, and how early anthropologists and art historians-and artists-imbued collected objects with values that spoke to scientific debates about the evolution and diffusion of culture prominent at the time. Probst then explores the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s, when African art history fell under the gaze of African American critique and saw an explosion of interest in contemporary African art. Finally, he examines the postcolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of heritage, reparation, and the "crisis of representation. " Probst believes that if the study of African art is to move in productive new directions, we must look to how the field is evolving in Africa for new models of inquiry"-