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.

Our latest issue, Heritage: Resistance, Memory and Generative Practice, seeks to open debate around the concept of ‘heritage’, and to interrogate its construction, contestation, and visual translations through the lens of contemporary art practice in Africa and the diaspora.

Recognising that heritage continually reproduces resistance, memory, and generative practice, this issue seeks to rejuvenate perspectives on the term by illustrating how heritage is not a neutral record of the past, but a dynamic and often contested arena of meaning-making. 

Overall, this issue aims to platform conversations that contribute to an ongoing definition of a reimagined heritage.

Heritage is approached here through three interrelated strands: 

• Resistance and resilience
• Preservation and memory
• Futurity and generative practice

Within these frames, essays consider: colonialism’s role in Moroccan art and architecture; Pan-African identity strengthened by Vodou in post-emancipatory Haiti; queer contemporary art in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region; seeking heritage in exile through Salih Basheer’s photography; transcultural and multi-temporal memory systems in the installations of Lina Iris Viktor; intersections of tradition and futurity in the work of Gani Odutokun; and decolonial heritage and artistic freedom in South Africa’s Triangle workshops, among others.