Aesthetics of Confrontation: Contemporary African Art, Glocal Crises, Global Politics, and Benevolent Colonialism

African nations continue to grapple with crises rooted in colonial legacies and perpetuated by the neocolonial machinery of the global North. Waste colonialism, characterized by the dumping of millions of tons of toxic waste from Europe, North America, and Australia, as well as the economic domination enforced by World Bank and International Monetary Fund austerity programs, political interference, and marginalization within the global liberal market economy, poses several challenges for the continent. Patriarchal domination, gender-based violence, and ethnic conflicts are additional woes fracturing African societies, further exacerbated by corrupt local governments backed by world powers.

In response, contemporary African artists confront these issues affecting their immediate communities, employing diverse vestiges of combative aesthetics. Their works articulate resistance, raise awareness, and provide critiques through conceptually charged installations, performances, sculptures, paintings, digital art, junk art, and community-based interventions. Many also address the growing phenomenon of “Chinafication,” wherein China’s ostensibly benevolent yet economically stifling presence in Africa provokes urgent questions around sovereignty, dependency, and willful submission to foreign subjugation.

This panel invites papers that explore the practices of artists who interrogate the impact of the global North’s waste dumping, economic exploitation, extractivism, political interference, gender-based violence, environmental injustice, degradation, corruption, unemployment epidemic, and broader neocolonial pressures on the continent. We welcome proposals from art historians, cultural theorists, artists, curators, critics, and African studies scholars whose research investigates contemporary African art as a critical site for confronting the continent’s social and political realities while highlighting artists' roles in catalyzing social, political, and environmental transformations.