Paper long abstract:

Demands for the decolonization of contemporary African scholarship has intensified in recent years, particularly with the proliferation of postcolonial discourse. From an African perspective, this constitutes noble academic advocacy, but in practice, it remains largely wishful thinking. This is because the call for decolonizing African art scholarship is engulfed in varying ambiguities that manifest twofold - on the one hand, African scholars rely heavily on western terminologies and language structures, hence grapple with modalities of how to fully decolonize western text about African art without Afrocentric invented text that will reflect such decolonization. On the other hand, the attempt to problematize western scholarship about African art as the rationale for decolonization has resulted in the debasement of valuable literature needed to foreground new trajectories for contemporary African art studies. Thus, this paper contends that for a practical approach to decolonizing African art scholarship three theoretical frameworks are required - 1) Afrocentric reading of contemporary art by African scholars, 2) Western retheorization of African art devoid of Eurocentric philosophies, and finally, 3) collaborative research between Northern and African scholars which will provide rich perspectives based interdisciplinary studies. This proposal will not only decolonize but enrich African art scholarship from a plethora of theoretical and conceptual perspectives as opposed to propagating a narrow sense of Africaness for the sake of decolonization.