An overview

The exhibition was organized around ten core, serialized concepts, three of which are discrete Pan-Africanist movements: Flags Without Territories; Garveyism; Negritude; Quilombismo; Blackness; Interiors; Circulation; Agitation; Revenants; and Interdependence. Each concept was organized spatially and thematically to contain a set of representative artworks. Within the context of the overall experience, each quasi-demarcated “concept-space” was contiguous, sequenced so that it opened up to the next. Therefore, the architecture choreographed the audience’s movement in a way that encouraged them to linger in a space and take in a set of artifacts related to, say, Négritude, while catching glimpses of the artworks in the adjoining spaces. In this way, the viewer was likely to experience a measured accretion of Pan-Africanism’s creative abundance as they moved through the exhibition. The Garveyism, Négritude, and Quilombismo galleries bled into one another as if to propose a ribbed connection, individual pebbles in a string of beaded ideas.

There were three distinct and complementary video installations, each of which was satirical, ethnographic, or conceptual in nature. The first was the quirky, sardonic Reparation Hardware by American sculptor and installation artist Ilana Harris-Babou. The video featured an artist casting herself as “Reparator” and “Reconstructor.” Against the backdrop of a rural landscape and a rustic carpenter’s shed, Harris-Babou’s narration mimicked the solemnity of liberal discourses of penitence and reparation for slavery, a tone contrasted by a flat, non sequitur narration about enslaved ancestors. The irony of the piece was driven home by the solemn piano against the artist’s deadbeat vocal delivery of well-said nonsense. The second video was an episodic, pastiche, home video style rendering of the textures of quotidian Black life of African and African diasporic communities in South London. Titled Untitled, Liz Johnson Artur’s video presented an immersive combination of film, photographs, oral testimony, and “recordings from pirate radio stations to offer an unvarnished and intergenerational glimpse of everyday realities.” This installation captured most poignantly a site of small-p “pan-Africanism.” Tsitsi Jaji reminds us—drawing on George Shepperson’s 1962 definition—that the term designates an eclectic set of ephemeral, nonelite cultural encounters and currents throughout the twentieth century. Energetic, improvisational encounters that run parallel or in contradistinction to more formal assemblages like festivals or congresses that constitute capital “P” Pan-Africanism (Jaji Reference Jaji2014, 3; see also, Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2016, 33–34). While one encountered instantiations of “pan-Africanism” throughout Project a Black Planet—notably in some of the archival texts in the Circulation and Interior gallery spaces—Artur’s video yielded a stark reminder of the force of these subterranean sites of encounter and exchange, which, I’d argue, might be where nimbler if also fleeting expressions of solidarity and recognition are forged. Small “p” pan-Africanism offers a more expansive, albeit elusive arena, where global blackness is made, remade, and kept alive, even as congresses end, as state ideological outlooks shift, and as centers lose funding. Encountering this video, 19 minutes 35 seconds of quotidian Black urban life, struggle, and solidarity in London—around issues of police violence, gender and sexual liberation, fashion, food, antiblackness, neighborhood life, faith, and joy—made for a refreshing take on the continued currency of the concept. Taken together, the first two installation videos were not simply alternative media for representing Pan-Africanism—for instance, film instead of painting. The darkened cubicula viewing space in which they occurred allowed space for solitude, rest, and introspection. These performative spaces afforded whomever lingered in them an intersubjective experience with the characters, communities, sites, and issues under discussion, and, crucially, with the overall exhibition. The third video Notations on a New Pan-Africanism (2013) by Dawit L. Petros was less a treatise on Pan-Africanism than a walk-by conceptual video art piece inhabiting the space of an abstract rendition on Black labor and movement against an urban landscape. Its indeterminacy on the theme invites the viewer to reflect on new routes and itineraries for Pan-Africanism against an evolving cityscape, complete with buildings under construction and streets undergoing repair. Throughout the exhibition, no one artist mapped too neatly onto a concept, nor did one genre or artwork jolt the viewer into illumination. It was instead the nugget of ideas, and their accretion, that encouraged curiosity about and appreciation for the art, artists, and visionaries featured in the collection.

Moving through the concept-spaces

Literal and epistemic turns punctuated the viewing experience. The exhibition began with a landing space featuring paintings from Hale A. Woodruff’s Art of the Negro series. The paintings depicted zones of artistic interaction and cultural interchange between African and other ancient civilizations, including Greek, Roman, Aztecan, and Mayan. Audience milling around the 12×12 foot panels would take a right turn to the adjoining space Flags Without Territories. Here, we were introduced to the “stark rectangle of red, black, and green stripes” of the Pan-African flag as a symbol of solidarity that transcends national boundaries. The red stands for the blood of Africans, black for African Ancestry, and green for the lands of Africa. This space marked the defining historical moment and temporal origin for the Pan-African movement “around 1920 by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).” It also marked Toussaint L’Ouverture in a life-size cutout by the British artist Lubaina Himid as a galvanizing figure in the Pan-Africanist imagination. Notable works here included a framed vinyl cover of Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s Red, Black and Green album. Chris Ofili’s Union Black (2003) and Davd Hammons’s African American Flag (1990) superimpose the Pan-African colors to reimagine the national flags in Britain and the United States, placing pressure on the question of national belonging. The two opening rooms were therefore landing spaces—the former an unlikely introduction, for some, to Pan-Africanism, and the latter a deceptively spartan take, a portal into a labyrinth. From here, we entered the Garveyism space which is abutted by Negritude. Garveyism, we learn, sought to forge a Black Planet that paralleled the Western world. The curation of this space looped back to the opening reference to classical civilizations in Woodruff’s paintings. Marcus Garvey was named as a progenitor of the intellectual ideas of a movement that reckoned with the effects of colonialism and enslavement. A plaque explained it so: Garveyites viewed “Africa as a place to build a parallel black world based on self-determination, civic and political equality, and mobility. Garveyites thought concretely about appropriating the symbols of imperial states, such as passports and paramilitary units, and sometimes mirrored the colonialist visions of the planet, including outer space, as ripe for the Pan-African imaginary.”

The exhibition appeared to negotiate a balance between nuanced historical and theoretical knowledge on the one hand and, on the other, unpacking, in an accessible fashion, the cultural dimensions of an expansive concept. The scope of the exhibition, both what it named and suggested within its orbit, is a microcosm of the ambitions of Pan-Africanism as an idea and a movement that seeks to unite people of African descent globally. Négritude is one of three keywords named for actual historical movements within the Pan-African world. The audience would learn that Négritude, French for Blackness, developed in the 1930s out of debates among African and Caribbean students in Paris who questioned the nature of freedom and heritage, alongside contemporaneous manifestations of imperial racism, imperial racism evident in France’s mistreatment of Black soldiers during World War I. Pioneers of the movement advocated for a global history that included African perspectives as well as Black cultural heritage. The audience might not leave with a robust sense of dissidents within the movement, nor of the Cesaire-Senghor polarity that still dominates discourses on Négritude. Neither might they leave knowing that the Négritude movement was perhaps just as contentious as the Anglophone strain of Pan-Africanism, nor that “négritude continues to engender and animate debates on the continent and throughout the diaspora with the same stubborn difficulty as pan-Africanism” (Jaji et al. Reference Jaji, Munro and Murphy2019, xi).Footnote ² Senghor would himself name this fissure in the foreword of the catalogue for FESTAC 77, a historical precursor to this exhibition in terms of pedestaling Black cultural achievements. According to Senghor, “Black people are engaged in discussion and often disagreeing about negritude or the African personality” (Senghor Reference Senghor1977, 13).

Négritude was a form of “Pan-Negro feeling and awareness, and as a movement, to represent the equivalent of the French-speaking side of what has come to be known as ‘Pan-Africanism’” (Irele Reference Irele1990, 68). The relationships between Negritude and Pan-Africanism, or between Negritude and Blackness, were offered not as discrete and overlapping historical and theoretical facts, but as “a global archipelago of localized resistance” under the umbrella of Pan-Africanism (“Quilombismo” plaque). A key pedagogical accomplishment of the exhibition, therefore, was that it offered a portal into key figures and intellectual currents that have come to define Pan-Africanism, as well as the art that mobilized the concept. Further reading might reveal the place of poetry in the Négritude movement as a particular intellectual and ideological strand within Francophone circuits, the historical significance of Leopold Senghor’s becoming Senegal’s first president, or Dakar 66 as a flashpoint in the trajectory of Pan-Africanism and Négritude.

There was no missing the proponents (read: male) of various strands of Pan-Africanist thought and aesthetics. Indeed, a plaque or an artwork close to the entrance to each new space typically named men who were the figureheads of different strands of the Pan-African movement. While the curators could very easily have organized the space around key thinkers—that is, so that the audience would pass from the Garvey space to the Senghor space and to the Nascimento space—they instead curated each space to suggest that, while often male-dominated, Pan-African ideas exceeded the biographies of its major figures, and frequently levied challenges to these men, both in and beyond their times, through alternative propositions on art and Black life.

In Black theatre traditions, such as theatrical jazz, artists invoke ideas of blackness not overtly but through “the presence of Black references or experiences that are just enough off-center to make one’s head cock to the side.” Omi Osun Joni L. Jones describes this as the “blue note,” the queered note in a jazz routine that appears just half-step away off the obvious (Jones Reference Jones2015, 8–9). Enter Quilombismo. This was the break, the exhibition’s blue note, the first concept that cracked open the conventional boundaries of Pan-African thought even though it highlighted one of its key thinkers, Abdias do Nascimento. Here the curators staged a bold proposition in their juxtaposition of artists as well as in what relationship they propose between Quilombismo and Pan-Africanism. With Central African etymology, Quilombismo named self-governing rebel territories established by fugitives of enslavement. Nascimento, who expounded on the concept, was a pioneering Brazilian theater director and founder of the Negro Experimental Theatre of Brazil (Teatro Experimental do Negro). A pivotal moment in Nascimento’s career was his witnessing of a live performance of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in Lima, Peru, in which the lead character had previously been played to critical acclaim by iconic Black actors such as Paul Robeson. To Nascimento’s dismay, the lead actor in the Lima production was played by a white actor in blackface. The same was true of Brazilian theatre, where black characters were either changed to white in production or were played by white actors in earlier stagings. This was the violence of representation that the Negro Experimental Theatre sought to address. Nascimento’s theater sought to correct misrepresentations of Black life in Brazil (Fernández Reference Fernández1977, 7–9). As Soraya Martins Patrocínio puts it, “Brazilian black theatres have always aimed to erase biased representations of black bodies, (re-)choreographing our existence inside and outside the stage” (Reference Patrocínio2021, 383). The point here is—like Nascimento’s work onstage—Pan-Africanist ideas and political propositions were worked out through the live arts, in theater, dance, and live music, in rehearsals and onstage. Indeed, the live arts offered a particularly potent medium for moving Pan-Africanism across space, time, and between disparate bodies and geographies (see Redmond Reference Redmond2014; Jaji Reference Jaji2014; Jones Reference Jones2015). In short, theater and performance were a site of active, embodied imagination that moved concepts like Quilombismo from the domain of abstract theory to a space of lived experience and praxis. The Quilombismo section mostly clarified an underappreciation of live performance in the elaboration and circulation of Pan-Africanism. That Nascimento’s painting African Symbiosis No. 3 (1973) stood in for the artist’s vision in place of his work in theater exemplified the synaptic, mental braiding that the viewer must perform as they moved through the exhibition.

While some of the exhibition’s concept-spaces cohered around their featured artifacts, some items interrupted a sense of coherence. This was especially true of the Quilombismo space. Foregrounding a queer erotic, this space is where the Pan-African concept was decomposed and reassembled. Audre Lorde’s rendition of her 1978 poem “A Litany for Survival” (2 mins 25 sec) greeted you as you stepped into the Quilombismo gallery. Lorde’s vocal rendition is shaped by her “technique of breath control and projection which convey confidence and authority.” Her voice filled the space louder than Garvey’s in the Garveyism gallery. Hers was an ode to the oppressed: intimate, lucid, tender, and edgy all at once. The sound of her voice seemed to be presented to envelop the listener differently than Garvey’s vexed, denunciatory speech, whose intent appeared to be to engineer mass political action. Lorde’s words were a drape— simultaneously soothing and priming— the audio of which was cleverly located proximate to Survivalist Blanket (2013), a circular crocheted piece made from metalized polyethylene by British artist Daniel Baker. The Garvey and Lorde speeches required the audience to linger beneath overhead speakers. The audio choreographed an occasional stasis as did the seating in the video booths. This made for a neat juxtaposition of an aural, haptic, proprioceptive, and visual sensing of the concept.

It might surprise readers to learn, though, that the most striking piece of art in this gallery was neither Lorde’s soothing oration nor Nascimento’s African Symbiosis No. 3, an ouroboros depicting a snake looped in a circle on its own tail against a background of red, black, and green. Instead, the most striking art here was a black arse, literally. Just when the faint notes of Lorde’s reading greeted the ears, a stitched, glistening, leathery arse greeted the eyes. I beheld this black butt, halved by sagged jeans, before I could locate and read the Quilombismo plaque. The figure is human from the waist down but is a hefty leathery blob for the rest of the body. Doubled over by the weight of the upper body, the figure perches on the ball of his feet, arse up, as if caught in orgasmic tension, as if sending carnal hints to the audience. Is this individual being consumed by the blob or being born out of it, the South African artist Nicholas Hlobo asked in the piece. If Quilombismo named “islands of self-sufficiency in a sea of oppression,” Ndiyafuna (2006), sitting smack in the middle of the gallery, suggests the erotic as Quilombismo— as an island space and instantiation of Pan-African freedom. This was a gallery of fruitful disturbance, a blue note. It unburdened Pan-Africanism from some of its masculinist and nationalist imperative. Here, too, lay one of the exhibition’s core arguments. Quilombismo dislocated the ideas that animate Panafrica across spatial and temporal geographies—it moved conceptually from Central Africa, to Brazil, to the United States, and to South Africa, in nonlinear, unpredictable, unruly fashion, acquiring both explanatory and political force in said translocation. The queer erotic offered yet another vital juxtaposition with Lorde’s ruminations on the power of the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings” (Lorde Reference Lorde1984, 54). That sense of a generative chaos was most poignantly articulated here.

The Blackness gallery, hard left from Quilombismo, posed a provocative question: What does it mean to be black? This inquiry named the constructedness and instability of Blackness as a sonic and visual marker, while also affirming it as a phenomenological truth—as lived, embodied, and therefore real. The problem of the boundaries of Blackness evoked Pan-African festivals like Dakar ’66 and Algiers ’69, convenings where what it meant to be Black was often taken up at the level of curation and discourse. This exhibition space shifted the modality of engagement: rather than debates around the contested boundaries of Blackness, it foregrounded “interviews, ethnographic surveys, and visual abstraction” to take on the deceptively simple question: “who is Black?” Several artworks elaborated on the contours of the question. Bessie Harvey’s Wash Woman (1982) invokes stereotypical Blackness in the form of a miniature Rasta figure. Lois Marilou Jones’s Jeanne, Martiniquaise (1938) explores chromatic subtlety and shades of Blackness, while Marlene Dumas’s Albino (1986) problematizes visibility and the biological gaze, pushing the limits of racial legibility. Azikiwe Mohammed’s oral testimony around developing a racialized self-concept in My First Time (2016–ongoing) occasioned a shift to exploring aural Blackness. The elaborate setup of stereo players and speakers, complete with a listening bench, was the most visible aspect of this concept-space. The materiality of the setup made for a visceral reminder of media technologies as conduits for racial sense-making. The Blackness space was modest in the number of artworks it deployed to explicate a rather complex social, moral, and epistemic problem. The contradiction in scale provided, in rather ironic fashion, a quite effective take on an inexhaustible concept.

The Circulation space traced a timeline of Pan-Africanism through the technologies of print and popular media. Print, travel, and emerging technologies of dissemination played a vital role in the rise of the movement. This section was densely packed with print artifacts and texts that many might intuitively associate with Pan-Africanism. It was perhaps within the stretch of glass cases that the viewer most vividly encountered the abundant print archive that Pan-Africanism generated. Rather than rendering any single event or instantiation of Pan-African encounter as dominant, this section presented a dense, kaleidoscopic view of p/Pan-Africanism as reliant on twentieth-century print culture as a critical technology for its global reach. The display cases contained everything from ephemera derived from major Pan-African festivals of the twentieth century—books, novels, albums, zines, photographs— to hymnal cards and newspapers.

The next section, Interiors, enacted yet another turn in the exhibition, though it initially seemed an odd inclusion for a movement often associated with publicness, audacious sacrifice, and masculinist heroism. The gallery was right after you walked past an installation of a drawing of book covers that included Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia and Lisa Lowe’s Intimacies of Four Continents. This space looked inwards, a turn predicated on the idea that “strengthening our inner spirit may, in turn, inspire public organizing and collective action.” In a manner reminiscent of Kevin Quashie’s work, the interior foregrounded by these pieces marked a space of strategic retreat and personal healing, of dreams and recalibration—a quieter but no less radical thesis on liberation (Quarshie Reference Kevin2012). The “interior” foregrounds the psyche as a space of turbulence and contemplation and encompasses the transformation of domestic spaces into sites of autonomy and self-expression. This gallery space held Precious Okoyomon’s video and sound installation Reading to Plants; William H. Johnson’s Little Girl in Green and Zanele Muholi’s photograph of Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta. This was also the space where Miriam Makeba, South African singer and activist, was shown posing by herself in an unattributed photograph. Makeba appeared to accumulate significance in the exhibition as she appeared initially (in the Circulation section) on the album jacket for the Grammy award-winning 1965 album, An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. She made a return later in Meleko Mokgosi’s painting of a photograph of Makeba singing, solo, into a microphone. Makeba’s episodic appearance across different media left me wondering what it might look and feel like to foreground music as an infrastructure for the circulation of Pan-Africanist ideas (Jaji Reference Jaji2014). Listening of this kind would be no less vital—and certainly evocative—than the recorded speeches already integrated into the aural experience. Other notable works in the Interiors gallery include Samuel Fosso’s famous The Chief: He Who Sold Africa to the Colonists (1997); Martin Puryear’s Sanctuary (1982), a miniature treehouse atop a maple stem, balanced on a single wooden wheel; Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s “Adebiyi” (1989); and Sabelo Mlangeni’s “Uche: All Dressed Up” (2019) from The Royal House of Allure, a series on queer life in Lagos. By contrast, the artworks in the Agitation gallery space addressed public manifestations of resistance, from individual disquiet to collective mobilization. This section felt contained in its curatorial execution.

Let’s linger a bit on the penultimate gallery space: Revenants. To speak of Pan-Africanism is to speak of a communing with the dead, with ancestors who, although stricken by the ravages of antiblackness, agitated for livable futures for the African-descended. The question of how to move through this space of mourning without reinscribing the sting of loss must have been central to the curation of the Revenants gallery. Here, we were greeted by the twenty-five ornate and imposing coffins in Ebony G. Patterson’s Invisible Presence: Bling Memories (2014). Each coffin towered above eye level, perched on individual stakes. Imposing but not threatening, the coffins evoked a charged presence that likely cited their original vocation as performance sculptures from a carnival tradition in Kingston, Jamaica. The Chicago-based artist notes that the coffins derived from the “funerary practices of working-class Jamaica” that are embellished to celebrate the deceased. El Anatsui’s seemingly motile figures in The Ancestors Converged Again (1995) look back at the audience through asymmetrical wooden eyes and contorted suggestions of a body. Dumile Feni’s bronze portrait (1968) of South African politician and activist, Chief Albert Luthuli depicted an elongated face. The piece was a somber, solitary, and hefty memorial object that conveyed “the weight Luthuli bore as part of his activism.” In the same way, Sudan-born Ibrahim El-Salahi paid tribute to slain Congolese anticolonial leader Patrice Lumumba in Funeral and the Crescent (1963). In the piece, long-face mourners bear the weight of carrying the body of a deceased person. These pieces occupied the same wall and a parallel melancholic register as Iba N’Diaye’s The Woman Who Cries (La femme qui pleure) and The Woman Who Screams (La femme qui hurle). The paired paintings captured the fluctuations between catharsis and perennial anguish. It was at the Revenants space that the museum’s public service announcement reminded visitors that we had fifteen minutes before closing. I do not recall the exact artwork at which the museum announcement met me. I suspect I was standing in front of either Eshu (The Trickster) by Los Angeles-born artist Betye Saar. Or taking in the presence conjured up in Keep It Real (Memorial to a Youth) (1997) by Nigerian-American artist, Olu Oguibe. In Oguibe’s artwork, a pair of grey and black sneakers was suspended on the wall over a bouquet of flowers and candles on the floor, holding a young life in tender memory. This piece and Saar’s abstraction of Eshu flanked the entrance to the final gallery, Interdependence.

At once modest and monumental, the ultimate gallery affirmed shared humanity and multiple ways of being. The highlight here was not just Zanele Muholi’s striking monochrome portrait Somnyama III (Paris 2014), set aside on its own wall panel, nor Luanda-born Kiluanji Kia Henda’s The Merchant of Venice (from series, Self-Portrait As a White Man, 2010). The showcase here was the sprawling kanga cloth honoring LGBTQI activists. The final plaque before the exit was the “Queer African Manifesto/Declaration,” simultaneously a critique and an injunction. The manifesto stated that true freedom is not obtained simply by the dismantling of static, neo/colonial categories of identity but by defending sexual, gender, erotic, racial, ethnic and environmental justice for all. The manifesto is the product of a historic gathering of LGBTI activists, in April 2010 in Nairobi, where they proposed a critical reenvisioning of the heralded Pan-African congresses of the twentieth century. This “minor” pan-African gathering—more a roundtable than a congress and more likely self-sponsored than bankrolled by African states—offered a striking reminder about the planetary ambitions of the Pan-African movement. Put simply: “As long as African LGBTQI people are oppressed, the whole of Africa is oppressed.” I could hardly read the prophetic and sobering tone of the manifesto outside the surging anti-trans sentiments that increasingly became official policy in the US, mirroring similar sentiments on the African continent.

Project a Black Planet showcased “Panafrica as an imagined territory where art and culture transgress national boundaries, reckon with long histories of subjugation and resistance, and envision an equitable future.” It accomplished far more than its stated ambitions. Like many others, I saw the exhibition at the same time as anti-DEI policies and rhetoric swept through the country, and as critical race theory/studies and higher education faced antagonism of historic proportions from the federal government. Moving through the exhibition therefore felt like wafting through a space sustained by the force of its own will, a fugitive space, an island of “self-sufficiency in a sea of oppression.” A few hours after the exhibition closed, news broke that the US president had signed another Executive Order (EO) that would set in motion the dissolution of the Department of Education. The EO came on the heels of weeks of assault on initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and, later, scrutiny of Smithsonian institutions’ curation of US history. Institutions of higher education announced or quietly enacted rollbacks on DEI initiatives, closing Black and ethnic studies departments and emptying related offices that they had only recently celebrated with pageantry. Project a Black Planet inhabited the liminal space between what was and what is to come. Without this being the exhibition’s goal, it underlined why Pan-Africanism became a necessity for successive generations of artists, activists, and thinkers. That one could see such an exhibition at AIC testified to what their struggle (and the curators’ monumental effort) spurred. We, the audience, bore witness to multiple templates and scales for resistive action. Mounting an exhibition—at this scale and complexity—will be infinitely more challenging for the foreseeable future. Project a Black Planet was a revenant. It was Quilombismo.