Selected Writings, Volume 1

Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) was an internationally recognized and pathbreaking art curator, former director of Haus der Kunst, founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and coauthor of numerous books and exhibition catalogs.Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor at Large, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, Sharjah.

“This selection of Okwui Enwezor’s writing offers an intimate look into the beliefs which fueled his practice: those of plurality, fluidity, and openness. It is through these writings that we are able to stay the course of Enwezor’s incomparable vision and insist, as he did, on an expansive understanding of the world and all those who inhabit it.” - Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem “In 1997, Okwui Enwezor reflected on the difference between the Johannesburg Biennale, the first major international exhibition of his career, and Documenta, pointedly remarking we have ‘other priorities.’ This comment came to characterize not only that foray into the world of global curation but became the through line for all of his endeavors. As this volume attests, the stakes of Enwezor’s exhibitions were elucidated in their context and through his writing, which is inextricable from and yet also independent of them. He had a distinct historical, political, worldly, theoretical, and poetic rigor and love for the jostling of ideas, stories, and positions that would set the various fields in which he engaged in new directions through his singular momentum. These assembled texts reflect a lifetime committed to developing one’s voice, changing the worlds of art, and creating a new language with the intellectual heft, complexity, and dynamism to make a case for his presence and those he championed.” - Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, Whitney Museum of American Art

• List of Illustrations  ixForeword / Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director, Sharjah Art Foundation xvAdvisory Editors’ Preface / Salah M. Hassan and Chika Okeke-Agulu  xixAcknowledgments  xxiiiIntroduction to Okwui Enwezor’s Diasporic Imagination / Terry Smith  11. Redrawing Boundaries: Toward a New African Art Discourse (1994)  152. The Ruined City: Desolation, Rapture, and Georges AdÉagbo (1996)  303. The Body in Question. Whose Body? Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (1995)  384. Ellen Gallagher (1996)  455. Colonial Imaginary, Tropes of Disruption: History, Culture, and Representation in the Works of African Photographers (1996) / Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya  506. Travel Notes: Living, Working, and Traveling in a Restless World (1997)  997. A Question of Place: Revisions, Reassessments, Diaspora (1997)  1178. Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes of “African” Conceptualism (1999)  1309. Between Worlds: Postmodernism and African Artists in the Western Metropolis (1995–96)  14910. The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (2001)  18011. The Black Box (2002)  20212. The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition (2003)  23613. Mega-exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (2003–4)  26914. Repetition and Differentiation: Lorna Simpson’s Iconography of the Racial Sublime (2006)  29915. Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006)  339Bibliography of Published Works by Okwui Enwezor / Compiled by Ilhan Ozan  403Index  425