Okechukwu Nwafor, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Art History. His research focuses on African Art history, African Visual Culture, Visual History, Museum Studies and Curatorship. Please enjoy this interview to learn more about Dr. Nwafor's research and the unanswered questions awaiting future scholars.

What question are you trying to answer with your research?

In my research, I attempt to answer questions revolving around the visual and political economies of material things. How do everyday objects circulate among humans, and what meanings do they generate in the process? How do their meanings change as they move across space and time? For example, I looked at the rise of what is known as Aso ebi fashion practices in Nigeria and how this occasioned a unique visual culture that shaped cosmopolitan urban experience in Lagos, Nigeria. Secondly, I have investigated the meanings of commemorative photographs and the transformative socio-cultural and political changes they engendered in southern Nigeria since the nineteenth century. I have researched how commemorative photographs defined colonial relations in nineteenth-century Lagos. I showed how commemorating the dead in Southern Nigeria from the 1880s to the present was coterminous with the evolving modernity that came with photography and the reconstitution of the public sphere. My second book project is a story of how the dead emerged from ordinary humans to controversial heroic subjects impacted by a radical visual culture in southern Nigeria. The book examines how commemorative photography produced new meanings of the heroic persona and enunciated new attitudes to the fashioning of power, prestige, and subjectivity from the nineteenth century to the present in southern Nigeria.

Why that question? What prompted your interest?

 I thought about what we need to investigate when we think of research that borders on material culture or visual history. I felt that an interesting aspect of visual and material culture is left behind in our scholarship, something that goes beyond the typical, limited objects in art history. I focus on these seemingly insignificant aspects of our mundane lives, such as everyday visual images known as snapshots (Geoffrey Batchen), the clothes we wear, commemorative photographs, popular photographs, and funeral billboards, among others. These ordinary things have agencies, and we need to examine how they participate in the social, political, and economic networks that shape human lives. So, I choose aspects of scholarship that we constantly overlook and highlight their overarching significance in the complex web of interdisciplinary scholarship. So, my research is essentially interdisciplinary but anchored on the fundamental theoretical premise that informs visual culture. 

What was your first research experience?

My first research experience was the one that led to my first book titled: Aso ebi: Dress, Fashion, Visual Culture, and Urban Cosmopolitanism in West Africa. It was conducted in Lagos, Nigeria, and involved an interdisciplinary approach. It involved a challenging methodology that allowed me to express the freedom associated with navigating disciplinary boundaries. I attempted to answer anthropological, sociological, art-historical, literary, and even philosophical questions. I saw that as the true essence of completeness in academic scholarship. And that worked well and enabled me to write my first book successfully.   

Tell us about the research that laid the foundation for your work; whose work are you building upon?

The research that laid the foundations of my work is Hudita Nura Mustafa’s works on fashion and photography, Arjun Appadurai’s “The Social Life of Things,” and Christopher Pinney’s “The social life of Indian Photographs.” These scholars articulated the meanings that people attribute to material things and how these meanings are impacted by the political and social economies of global cultures.

What questions will remain for the next generation of researchers?

The next generation of researchers will have multiple questions to answer as the world is increasingly becoming constituted by an avalanche of material objects. For example, the new research promises that inheres in technological devices of social media is largely unexplored in Africa. And this is part of what I have been doing in the past years with my investigation into the complexities that destabilize normative relations between the living and dead through social media. 

What is your favorite library database or book?

My favorite library database of books is books on Art History, Visual History, and Popular Culture. 

How can someone learn more about your work?

I advise any interested individual to read my first book published by the University of Michigan Press and then read a few articles I have published on my other research interests.