The Politics of the Plane: On Fatimah Tuggar's Working Woman

In her digital photomontage Working Woman (1997), U.S.-based Nigerian artist Fatimah Tuggar stages a disjunctive encounter between the aesthetic procedures of the historical avant-garde and a postcolonial feminist critique of the visual imagery of the “Afro-optimism” that became prominent in the late 1990s. Treating the “modern African woman” as a mediatic phantom rather than a taken-for-granted subject-position, Tuggar's work evokes the universal “right to communicate” increasingly claimed by anti-neo-liberal activists in the Global South over the past decade.