#19 Africa: Beyond Borders (Spring 2025)
ARTICLES
Between Europe and Africa: A Gift of Prestige in the Era of the Trade in Enslaved Africans
Ana Lucia Araujo
From Harar to Diu: Circulation and Reception of a Qur’anic Manuscript across the Indian Ocean
Sana Mirza
The Indian Madras Cloth and Elite Self-Fashioning in the Bight of Biafra
Eguono Lucia Edafioka
SHORTER PIECES
Forging Swahili Muslim Style: Material Culture from Pate Island (ca. 1750-ca. 1850)
Zulfikar Hirji
The Ujumbe of Mutsamudu, an Eighteenth-Century Swahili Stone House in the Comoros
Stéphane Pradines and Olivier Onezime
Arts of the Maghreb: North African Textiles and Jewelry – Curatorial Reflections
Helina Gebremedhen
Issue Editors
Finbarr Barry Flood, New York University
Prita Meier, New York University
Hermann von Hesse, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
AFRICA: BEYOND BORDERS
In histories of art and material exchange, Africa is often framed as a point of origin, or omitted altogether. Although Africanist historians have long emphasized the continent’s regional and transregional networks prior to European colonialism, these perspectives remain peripheral in art historical accounts of transcontinental circulation and transoceanic contact. This absence is especially marked in studies of the eighteenth century, where African objects, artists, and networks are rarely brought into view—even in scholarship committed to cross-continental analysis. This issue of Journal18 places Africa at the center of these discussions. By focusing on African objects, makers, and systems of exchange, it examines how African histories of mobility, political authority, and material innovation shaped visual and cultural life across the continent and its diasporic spheres during the long eighteenth century. In doing so, the issue asks how art historical narratives of this period might shift when Africa is understood as the center of aesthetic and conceptual production.
The contributions to this issue examine the confluence of the global, interregional, and local in shaping African arts, material culture, and sartorial practices. It seeks to shift standard accounts of globalization by decentering European empire-building and the colonial archive. The long eighteenth century saw the expansion of African polities, and local networks of exchange flourished. Internal trade and migration were just as important as oceanic movements. Traders, merchants, and migrants constantly moved between different societies, actively facilitating the intermingling of diverse cultural forms across great distances. Artisans, both free and enslaved, were also highly mobile during this period. Archipelagic Africa, especially its port cities and mercantile polities, played a significant role in shaping the commodity networks of the entire world.
Among the questions that the contributions to this issue seeks to address are: Can the discussions of African trade objects help us historicize intra-and inter-continental trade and cultural exchanges? How did African royals, travelers, enslaved, and free individuals engage with the foreign and the faraway? What can African artifacts tell us about religious, aesthetic, and cultural transformations in Africa and its internal or transregional diasporas before the colonial period? What can pre-colonial African art collecting tell us about African identities and transcultural negotiations?
The essays cover a wide geography, from the Maghreb to West Africa, the Horn and the Swahili coast (see map below), while also engaging with the transregional and transcultural circulations that marked the production and consumption of materials in these regions. Those materials, ranging from jewelry and textiles to manuscripts and architectural ornamentation, highlight both transcontinental connections and linkages with a wider Atlantic and Indian Ocean world. Rather than celebratory narratives of connectivity, some of the contributions lay bare the ways in which the transregional circulation of certain kinds of objects, whether within commodity or gift economies, were central to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trade in enslaved humans through which more brutal transcontinental connections were forged.
The full-length research articles span West, East, and Central Africa, exploring the roles of African actors and material objects in shaping intercontinental economies and aesthetic vocabularies. Ana Lucia Araujo investigates the circulation of ceremonial swords of prestige (kimpaba) between West Central African and European contexts during the height of Atlantic world slavery, showing how such objects were not merely diplomatic gifts but carriers of symbolic, political, and economic significance. Sana Mirza traces the transoceanic trajectory of an eighteenth-century Qur’an from Harar to Gujarat, revealing how Harari calligraphic practices, manuscript formats, and marginal glossing traditions participated in broader Indian Ocean networks of Islamic knowledge and book-making. Lucia Eguono Edafioka centers Indian textiles—particularly madras cloth—in the elite sartorial cultures of the Bight of Biafra, demonstrating how African consumers shaped, repurposed, and imbued these imported goods with localized social and ritual meaning.
The shorter essays in this issue also foreground African centers of artistic innovation and intellectual production, rather than presenting Africa as a peripheral recipient of external forms. Zulfikar Hirji discusses how Qur’anic manuscripts produced on Pate Island (present-day Kenya) reflect a distinct aesthetic, one that is shared across media, including architecture. Stéphane Pradines and Olivier Onezime analyze the spatial logics and decorative programs of an eighteenth-century Comorian palace, revealing how Swahili visual cultures were shaped by—and helped shape—the wider Indian Ocean world. Helina Gebremedhen offers a curatorial perspective on North African textiles and jewelry, showing how Muslim and Jewish artisans forged shared traditions in Africa. Her reflection also highlights how public exhibitions can challenge colonialist binaries and open up new ways of seeing intercultural negotiations taking place within African societies. Together, the essays in this issue make the case for Africa as a central force in shaping the visual and material cultures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They highlight how African artists, patrons, and objects participated in far-reaching networks of trade, religion, and aesthetics—and how these connections were grounded in local histories of power, mobility, and meaning-making.
Finbarr Barry Flood, Prita Meier, and Hermann von Hesse
Cover image: Detail from Qur’an manuscript, copied by Hajji Saʿd ibn Adish ʿUmar Dīn al-marhūm, completed in Shawwāl 1162/September-October 1749, Harar, Ethiopia, 24.5 x 13.5 cm, QUR 706. Image courtesy of The Khalili Collections.