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theses

This dissertation brings art history together with literary studies to show that African art has been an engine of—and not simply a passive inspiration for—modernist and contemporary literature. Although the relationship between African art and modernism has long been remarked, conventional histories often describe African craft as an inanimate source for the lively innovations of early twentieth-century Europeans. In the late twentieth century, this story continues: post-Independence African writing is often characterized as a belated inheritor of colonial modernism. This dissertation corrects both of these tendencies by expanding the debate across space, time, and media. It begins by considering the responses of British modernists Roger Fry and D.H. Lawrence to African art’s global circulation with that of their West African contemporary, J.E. Casely Hayford. The second chapter turns to the work of Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and Léopold Sédar Senghor to argue for the importance of an African-influenced sculptural aesthetic in both the African-American and francophone African worlds. The third chapter examines the work of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka to show that their engagements with African art challenge received ideas about a modernist-postcolonial divide in literature. This dissertation’s fourth chapter pairs two contemporary writers: the experimental, postmodern South African author Zoë Wicomb and the realist Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Both authors share investment in the artisanal that extends to a general concern with materiality—in particular the materiality of books, and writing itself—that recasts the conventional understanding of Wicomb as paradigmatically postmodern and of Adichie as paradigmatically realist. It is the concept of creativity—of making—that ultimately emerges as the unifying idea from both the artistic and literary works that this dissertation examines. This dissertation shows that African artists, in direct and indirect ways, helped to create modernism across several continents.

ETD_5764

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Mark Jared Digiacomo

doi:10.7282/T3G73C5S

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.