Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the collage paintings of Nigerian-born Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby as an exemplar of how contemporary African artists address the urban and rural in their work.

Paper long abstract:

In the last few years, the Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili Crosby has increasingly gained international attention for her richly layered (juxtapositions of photo transfers and painted forms) and affective work. A self-described "Afropolitan", Akunyili Crosby's transnational and transcultural artistic practice is often considered within the discourses of globalization and identity politics particularly in the context of the United States where she presently resides. She connects the routine of everyday life to key chapters of her life: her formative years in Nigeria and the present in Los Angeles, inventing a world that collapses space and time. Yet for all her Afropolitan arguments, Akunyili Crosby's work is deeply embedded in the national space of her birth country. Her collaged paintings are a palimpsest of Nigerian politics and postcolonial history, social struggles, popular culture, as well as the ethnography of family life and relationships. But more importantly, as I argue, they mirror her seamless combination of her respective urban and rural experiences in Enugu (where she grew up in eastern Nigeria) and Lagos (where she attended secondary school), and Agulu (her ancestral home, she would visit periodically as a child and adult). Ultimately, the paper argues that urban and rural is not to be understood as a dichotomy of temporalities as it is often presented in African art historical scholarship. Instead, as Akunyili Crosby's work shows, the two temporalities are co-constitutive of sociocultural identities and postcolonial subjectivities in contemporary Africa.