Art and Politics in Africa Journal

Art and Politics in Africa is a peer-reviewed journal that seeks to interrogate the intersections of visual art and politics.  

Written, designed and edited by MA students at the School of Arts, SOAS University of London, this annual, open access journal brings together critical writing on contemporary art and politics in Africa to foreground new perspectives on the potential, and limits, of art as an engine of social change.

Issue One, entitled ‘Embodied Identities’, proposes the body as a site of profound significance for African histories of gender, race, ecology, political emancipation, resistance and memory. It brings together a range of essays that consider how artists have used the corporeal to intervene in the typecasting of culture in Africa, to vivify pluralised conceptions of African and diasporic identities, and to reflect on, and shape, the political. 

Essays consider: J.D. Okhai Ojeikere’s photographic documentation of hairstyles as expressions of freedom; corporeal resistance in Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits; the gendered subject in Lawrence Lemaoana and Kawira Mwirichia’s Kangas; political and aesthetic shifts in Malangatana Ngwenya and João Craveirinha’s works; and the negotiation of women’s identities in the art of Houria Niati and Souad Abdelrasoul, among others.

Together, these essays open critical perspectives on works that have sought to challenge and reshape societal narratives of the human form, and to test the limits of the body as a medium for, and site of, political expression and artistic resistance in Africa  

Together, these essays open critical perspectives on works that have sought to challenge and reshape societal narratives of the human form, and to test the limits of the body as a medium for, and site of, political expression and artistic resistance in Africa.