Africa as Muse: The Visualization of Diaspora in African American Art, 1950--1980

This dissertation explores the ways in which discourses about Africa influenced African American art, analyzing the way in which artists mediate emerging discursive and political movements throughout the middle part of the twentieth century which supplied new ways of giving form to their diasporic identities. It focuses on the artistic exchanges between African Americans and their African contemporaries made possible by the increasing globalization that characterized these decades. With the spreading African independence movements during the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, political and cultural discourses emerged in which connections between African Americans and Africa were considered and debated. Forums such as the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal, and the 1977 follow-up exhibition, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC '77) in Lagos, Nigeria, worked in conjunction with an efflorescence of contemporary African art exhibitions in the United States to provide new networks for the exchange of ideas and the creation of communities. Artists such as Hale Woodruff (1900-1980), Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004) and Faith Ringgold (1930-) all participated in these global arts festivals that connected the diaspora to Africa, yet they all made works that reference Africa through very different artistic strategies. The dissertation explores their work, as well as the work of contemporary African artists Alexander "Skunder" Boghossian (1937-2003) and Amir Nour (1939- ) who lived and worked in the United States, in order to better understand the many factors that impacted the visual language of Africa in African American art during the 1960s and 1970s.;This study adopts theories of diaspora as posited by writers such as Stuart Hall and Brent Hayes Edwards who understand diaspora as a productive discursive tradition. It explores how the aesthetic variations in which Africa is invoked suggest differing conceptions of a diasporic homeland and thus reflect an unstable quality innate within diaspora. In doing so, this dissertation seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the routes through which a diaspora understands it roots and creates its histories.