Nkiru Nzegwu

Biography

In 1989 the University of Ottawa awarded Nkiru Nzegwu a doctorate in philosophy. Her dissertation, written under the supervision of Andrew Lugg, examined contested theories of aesthetic appreciation, and the question of who judges art, and by what measure, remained central to everything she did afterwards.

She was born on 22 March 1954 in the Nigerian city of Onitsha. She took her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University. In 1981–1983 she took part in the Voices of Nigeria project, which marked the beginning of her work as an artist.

At Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York system, she started out in two departments at once, philosophy and art history, and was granted tenure there in 1996. Later she moved her philosophy appointment to Africana Studies and her art history line to the graduate programme in Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture, where she became coordinator. For more than twenty-five years Nzegwu taught African philosophy, feminist theory and African women’s studies, and the art of the African diaspora. Her courses “Philosophy of Orisha Worship”, “African Women and Feminism” and “Philosophy of Colonialism” are described as the first university courses on these subjects in the United States. She now holds the title of Distinguished Professor. She founded and edits the journals “Ijele: Art Journal of the African World” and the “Journal on African Philosophy”. She was also among the founders of “JENdA”, a journal of culture and African women’s struggles, and now sits on the advisory board of “The Black Scholar”.

Her principal book, “Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture” (2006), examines the structure of the Igbo family. Nzegwu argues that British anthropologists of the colonial era described the precolonial family through their own patriarchal assumptions and so distorted it. Drawing on northwestern Igboland, she writes of a “dual-sex system” in which men and women each had their own political associations and women enjoyed considerable autonomy, later undermined by colonial laws. Her essay “The Epistemological Challenge of Motherhood to Patriliny” (2004) is concerned with how a child’s moral sense takes shape through the bond with the mother, and her article on omummu (2020) with the women’s associations of Onitsha and the role of the omo, the queen mother.

With art historians she argued over the very notion of African art. In the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Nzegwu took issue with Susan Vogel and Arthur Danto, whose view of the African conception of art she considered Eurocentric; in 2018, in the Journal of Art Historiography, she examined the Yoruba praise poetry oríkì, drawing on the work of Rowland Abiodun, and argued that African art must be judged within the culture from which it came. In the late 1990s she edited two collections, “Issues in Contemporary African Art” (1998) and “Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art” (1999). She was associate producer of the Smithsonian documentary “Nigerian Art: Kindred Spirits” (1996), which also deals with the sculptor Ben Enwonwu. In 2010 she founded the Africa Knowledge Project, which gathers research on Africa and the African diaspora. Much less is known about her own painting than about her books. The exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Nigeria attributed to her I have not been able to verify from reliable information.

In 2020 the University of South Africa appointed her Professor Extraordinarius of its school of transdisciplinary research, and in 2023–2024 she was Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor at Rhodes University.