Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, by Akin Adesokan

Scholars of African visual culture will be well served by Akin Adesokan’s recent book Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, which offers a model for interpreting artworks within the many cultural and economic contexts in which they function. The book is structured as a collection of case studies of writers and filmmakers, and while each chapter focuses on a specific cultural producer, Adesokan builds connections between his figures of analysis across time and space. Adesokan offers a successful, rigorous example of a project that demonstrates the political urgency and conceptual depth of African artists, as well as artists’ investment in mercurial global political networks that stretch across generations and continents.