When Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica closed at the Barbican in London in September, it marked the penultimate stop in a journey that began at the Art Institute of Chicago in December 2024, travelled to Barcelona's MACBA, and will conclude next spring at KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels. Across its four iterations, the exhibition has brought together almost 500 works by around 100 artists, spanning the 1920s to the present and ranging across Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, North America and Western Europe.
Each iteration has introduced its own artists, local histories and emphases, raising the question: what does pan-Africanism mean today, and how do you represent it to a predominantly western audience encountering it primarily in a museum? Pan-Africanism has encompassed political movements, intellectual traditions and cultural identities, bringing together people with very different relationships to Africa and to one another. Its history contains tensions between continental and diasporic identities. The term first came into the parlance at the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London, organised by Henry Sylvester Williams to challenge racial discrimination and colonial rule.
Yet there was never just one version of the idea. Marcus Garvey's movement promoted black self-determination and a global sense of black identity, while the négritude of writers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor (the first president of Senegal) approached questions of black identity and African culture through literature. Later, Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah put greater emphasis on political unity between independent African states. The differences between these approaches matter because they point to a problem that pan-Africanism has never quite resolved. Are its strongest bonds political, cultural, geographical or something else entirely?
Originally published by African Business.