This essay is a review of art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu's Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015). The book offers a chronicle of artistic theories, practices, and institutions during Nigeria's independence years (1957–67) amid the historical frames of Third World liberation, African decolonization, and Cold War realpolitik. The essay explores in particular how Postcolonial Modernism revisits and explores the thematic of “national culture”—the concept presented by Frantz Fanon in 1959, with long-lasting impact on theories of postcolonial arts—in the (decentralized) Nigerian art world, with a focus on the synthetic studio practices of members of the Zaria Art Society. Fanon's “two-fold becoming” model of national culture, which implies catalyzing links to international liberation movements, impacts not only Okeke-Agulu's narrative of a generational opposition to the preceding cultural paradigms of Negritude, but also—the essay argues—the writing of global modernist history at-large.

This introductory essay by members of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey provides a quick overview of the significance of the 1967 defeat of Arab military forces by the Israeli army for the historiography of modern and contemporary Arab art. It then details a recent turn to more critical engagement with that historiographic framework, as exemplified by the 2012 conference The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories , and introduces the four articles published in ARTMargins that came out of the conference.

This article examines Syrian art discourse on either side of the Naksa , the defeat of the Arab forces by Israel in June 1967, particularly transformations in the social value Syrian artists accorded to the irreducibly formal elements of the artistic craft. It analyzes these values by focusing on a reform program in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus, 1964–67, as well arts coverage in al-Ba c th newspaper, exhibition texts, and the reception of artworks by Nazir Nabaa, Guido La Regina, Mahmoud Hammad, and Ahmed Nawash. It also explores the connotations of the term “plasticity,” a description of a union between formal malleability and formational human labor, in Syria and its functionality in the post-1967 period in negotiating the antinomies of form/content and abstraction/humanism.