Critical interventions, a new journal of African art history

The Goldwater Library has just received issue no. 1 of the newly published Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. [Click here for library holdings]

Founding editor Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie and co-editor John Peffer offer up an introductory essay that puts the new journal in context. As they describe it in their "About the Journal" entry on the web site,

Critical Interventions, is a peer-reviewed journal of advanced research and writing on African art history and visual culture. Our mission is to provide a forum for cutting-edge scholarship in African art history and for sustained analysis of issues of urgent concern for the discipline that foregrounds both the history of Africa’s modernity and the historiography of African Art History. The journal proposes a critical intervention at a moment of great contradiction, when there are diminishing opportunities for new and in-depth scholarly research on African arts but also a parallel rise in interest in Africa’s modernity among scholars and students. We believe that studies grounded in research in Africa and based on deep knowledge of historical and contemporary experiences of African art and visual culture can illuminate the fields of modern and contemporary art history in ways that are otherwise invisible to specialists in contemporary art in general.

Subscriptions provides two issues per year, access to the full online version of the journal, and a newsletter. [Contact info] At this writing it is unclear whether, how and to what extent the journal will be available electronically. The web site suggests it can be made available by email. Only the introductory essay in number 1 is available on the web, and this at no charge.