Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanism is an ideology and movement of racial and cultural solidarity among the peoples of Africa and its diaspora, which formed around the mid-nineteenth century and gained strength in the twentieth. Politically, Pan-Africanism sought the unity of African peoples, liberation from colonialism, and overcoming the legacy of the slave trade; culturally, it affirmed the dignity, heritage, and distinctiveness of African civilization. In art, Pan-African ideas nourished the search for an independent visual language free from European domination and a return to indigenous forms, symbols, and aesthetics. These sentiments echoed the Négritude movements in the French-speaking world and the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. Artists of the diaspora and the continent drew on African sculpture, textiles, ornament, and oral tradition as sources of inspiration. In the post-war era of decolonization, Pan-Africanism stimulated festivals of African art such as FESTAC and the development of modernist schools in independent states. It remains an influential foundation for the artistic self-definition of Black artists worldwide.