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This course surveys modern African arts in the contexts of colonialism, decolonization, and the global Cold War. Modernism developed in Sub-Saharan Africa as early as the 1920s and '30s among scattered independent practitioners, and in workshops run by colonial educators. Following World War II, a new generation of artists and critics rose to prominence in conjunction with the transnational Negritude movement. By the 1960s and '70s, modernism flourished in some parts of the continent with support from new national governments, and African socialist regimes often sought to intensively modernize local art practices, even as alarms sounded over new patterns of authoritarianism, corruption, and foreign intervention. Because classificatory orders in Africa were never so commanding as they tend to be in the West, modern African art can be productively studied through a cross-genre and multi-media lens. Such a lens examines drawing, painting, and sculpture alongside performance, photography, and film, and it registers how "high" and "popular" cultural forms frequently merged or became blurred.