Art from the Archive

Mbembe (2010) have struggled to rethink African subjectivity and define a register that does not reduce the continent to eternal suffering or victimhood. The current interest in the archive is driven by a strong desire to examine the temporal and spatial mechanisms that have delivered us to a “posthistorical” moment of contemporaneity. In this context, contemporary artists have started to revisit the colonial archives (Demos 2013). Such returns are not gratuitous, but rather display serious engagements with the colonial past, present the possibility to inter vene in that history, and sate the desire to imagine an alternative future. Returns to the archive enable artists to tack backwards and forwards in time and to address perceived problems in the present. In this special issue, articles examine some of these questions in the work of individual African artists as they intervene in archival