During a talk at Sharjah Biennial 7 in 2005, Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) proposed “thinking historically in the present” as a model for those in the cultural field to recover the emancipatory potential of postcoloniality—or “what the Third World meant in 1955,” at the time of the Bandung Conference of Asian and African nations. For the Nigerian-born poet-turned-critic and curator, the idealistic spirit of that era holds the potential to liberate us from Western modernity as a “machine of globalization” and its “unremittent program of violence.” In that same talk, he observed how in places of mixed cultures and religions like Nigeria and Sharjah, there are “multiple temporalities and multiple historicities” and cautioned the audience against making the West’s anxieties about “authenticity” central to how they interpret their sense of place.
