Using Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War as a starting point, this thesis seeks to craft and engage in a larger dialogue about the complex global entanglements of art, trade, slavery, war, commemoration, and race that have existed since the first contacts between Europe and Africa. In September 2019 in New York’s Time Square, Wiley unveiled the monument to be permanently installed outside of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. This large work shows a black man in contemporary dress on a horse, created to counterbalance the ubiquitous Confederate equestrian monuments of the south. While this is an important step in the ongoing debate about public monuments of the United States, the equestrian depiction of rulers and warriors has not always been limited to white men. In the sixteenth century, the Edo peoples of Nigeria depicted their ruler, Oba Esigie, atop a horse in the bronze plaque Equestrian Oba and Attendants, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through material and iconographical analysis, I will show how the Benin plaque signifies peaceful relations and trade with the Portuguese. This interaction also marks the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, which informed the dehumanizing beliefs of the commissioners of Confederate monuments as well as the colonizers who ultimately removed the plaque from Africa altogether. In this way, the histories embedded within the plaque can serve to enhance the new monument’s meaning. This pairing shows the continued stakes of the history of exploration in the Early Modern period, as the encounters in Nigeria that made the plaque possible and placed it in the Met makes necessary the monument by the Nigerian-American artist in the former Confederate capital. / Art History

Mémoire de recherche-Double culture. / Ce mémoire examine les contacts, les relations établies entre l’art qualifié d’occidental et les arts actuels d’artistes d’origine africaine pour mettre en évidence l’émergence d’une dualité culturelle émanant de deux mondes différents donnant naissance à un genre artistique uniquement hybride. Il sera question de construire une étude se penchant sur le travail des artistes Omar Victor Diop, Kehinde Wiley et Yinka Shonibare. En ayant recours à un médium qui leur est propre, ces trois artistes réalisent un travail hybride associant cette double culture dont ils ont hérité par le phénomène de la mondialisation. Les origines et nationalités différentes auront leur importance dans cette analyse, Diop étant sénégalais, Wiley afroaméricain et Shonibare anglo-nigérian. C’est un moyen aussi d’analyser cette question de la double identité que la mondialisation a entrainée par le prisme de l’art et la manière dont cela se manifeste chez ces artistes. Nous assistons à une ouverture des frontières géographiques créant ainsi de nouveaux contacts entre les différents pays notamment d’un point de vue culturel. Ainsi, s’ajoute au phénomène de la mondialisation celui de la mouvance postcoloniale. Cette pensée post-coloniale nous pousse à nous questionner sur la manière dont les artistes contemporains, et dans notre cas les artistes contemporains africains, définissent leur identité et ce que la notion d’authenticité signifie pour eux. Il y a une remise en question des stéréotypes, une réflexion autour de la binarité Occident/Orient, blanc/noir et enfin une volonté de montrer l’importance de la place des Noirs dans l’histoire chez Wiley, Shonibare et Diop. C’est donc une conscience commune autour de l’identité noire chez ces trois artistes qui nous permet de les rattacher à la notion de panafricanisme. / This thesis investigates the relationships between Western art and the works of three artists of African descent, Omar Victor Diop, Kehinde Wiley, and Yinka Shonibare, to uncover a distinct artistic genre, called hybrid, through these artists’ respective media. The hybridity that their art embodies results from the type of cultural duality that globalization enables. Of particular interest are these artists’ nationalities and ethnic identities, Diop being Senegalese, Wiley African-American, and Shonibare Anglo-Nigerien. As such the analysis unpacks the phenomenon of cultural duality engendered by globalization through the prism of art and the way it manifests itself in these artists’ works through which we witness the opening of geographical borders, thus breaking down barriers between different countries, particularly from a cultural point of view. In addition to the phenomenon of globalization, the thesis also investigates whether these artists of hybridity find their place in the post-colonial movement. The focus on the post-colonial era prompts us to question how contemporary artists, in this case contemporary African artists, define their identities and reveal what authenticity means to them. Stereotypes are questioned, as are the Western vs. non-Western and white vs. black divides. Finally, the thesis investigates these artists’ desire to show the place that Black people occupy in history. In this way, the black consciousness that runs through these three artists’ works allows us to appreciate their contributions to Panafricanism.