Tribe and Art History

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The "Post-Ethnic" ... is the moment or the topos that dramatizes, I could almost say, allegorizes its own doubleness.-R. Radhakrishnan1

The Minority terrain, alone, tends to be seen as marked by ethnicity. How, then, might one characterize the art historian's response to the following claim: "The idea of modern sculpture as such was as likely invented in Africa (southeastern Nigeria) as in Western Europe (France)"? Such a claim is likely to meet with disbelief, especially if the statement is not meant to invoke the readings inscribed on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West African ancestral figures and masks by such early modern European artists and theorists as Pablo Picasso, …