Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa

This collection explores the dynamic place of Muslim visual and expressive culture in processes of decolonization across the African continent. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in the stories we tell about Islamic art, it likewise contributes to recent widespread efforts to “decolonize” the art historical canon. The contributors to this volume explore thedynamic place of Islamic art, architecture, andcreative expression in processes of decolonizationacross the African continent in the twentieth andtwenty-first centuries. Bringing together new workby leading specialists in the fields of African,Islamic, and modern arts and visual cultures, thebook directs unprecedented attention to theagency and contributions of African and Muslimartists in articulating modernities in local andinternational arenas. Interdisciplinary andtransregional in scope, it enriches the under-toldstory of Muslim experiences and expression on theAfrican continent, home to nearly half a millionMuslims, or a third of the global Muslim population. Furthermore, it elucidates the role of Islam and itsexpressive cultures in post-colonial articulations ofmodern identities and heritage, as expressed by adiverse range of actors and communities based inAfrica and its diaspora; as such, the book countersnotions of Islam as a retrograde or static societalphenomenon in Africa or elsewhere. Contributorspropose new methodologies for accentuatinghuman agency and experience over superficialdisciplinary boundaries in the stories we tell aboutart-making and visual expression, thus contributingto widespread efforts to decolonize scholarship onhistories of modern expression.