Decolonizing Modernism/s: Transversal Histories and the Slade School of Fine Art

This chapter takes the Slade School of Fine Art, in London, which accepted students regardless of race, gender, and religion from its inception in 1871, as a site of global microhistory in the former British Empire. Through an analysis that connects the histories of artists from several decolonizing contexts at their points of intersection with the Slade, this chapter argues for an understanding of decolonial modernism as a transversal phenomenon rather than as separate disconnected “multiple modernisms.” In doing so, this analysis traces the emergence of two generations of nation-builders Ben Enwonwu (Nigeria) and Zainul Abedin (Bangladesh), and of artists seeking to articulate decolonial modernist vocabularies such as Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (Pakistan). As such, the chapter begins to trace a longer history of decolonial modernism and argues for its foundational importance to history of the Black Arts Movement in Britain.