Alien nation: contemporary art and black Britain

About the book: This fascinating text introduces readers to postcolonial theory using the context of British media culture in ethnic minority communities to explain key ideas and debates. Each chapter considers a specific media output and uses a wealth of examples to offer an absorbing insight into postcolonial media for all students of cultural and media studies

Arrested transmission: from periphery to center

The New York-based shows this summer focusing on the Caribbean have gestured to a region whose art is firmly part of an expanding interest in the African diaspora.' They follow a pattern over recent years of new blood coming to the United States from the Caribbean; a migration of sorts which artists from all over the region are scrambling to enjoin. The typical path of entry is for an individual artist, or more likely a freshly formed collective, to stake almost everything on the digital formats that are needed to float their work online. Of course it's a mode of promotion that's not unique to the Caribbean: self-marketing through the web is the contemporary default for creativity the world over

Americocentrism and art of the Caribbean: contours of a time-space logic

Art of the transnational Caribbean has come to be positioned by an understanding of the African diaspora that is oriented to an American “centre,” a situation to be explored for what it reveals about the hegemonic status of the United States in the discipline of contemporary art history. The predominant uses of the diaspora concept both in art-historical narratives and in curatorial spaces are those that connect to United States-based realities, with little pertinence to a strictly transnational theorization. This has implications for how modern art and contemporary art are thought about in relation to the Caribbean and its diaspora, in a way that this article demonstrates with attention to a number of artists at multiple sites, in Trinidad, Guyana, Britain and America

A moment to celebrate? Art of the Caribbean at the Venice Biennale

In recent years, the sporadic presence of various Caribbean national pavilions at the Venice Biennale (Jamaica, 2001; Haiti, 2011; Bahamas, 2013; Grenada, 2015, 2017 and 2019; Antigua and Barbuda, 2017 and 2019; Dominican Republic, 2019) has on each occasion been almost unanimously applauded as marking some sort of moment of ‘arrival’ or ‘becoming’ for artists of the Caribbean and the local institutional structures and professionals that surround them. This paper seeks to critically explore what the gains are of such a presence beyond the fleeting ‘Venice Effect’ – of mega-hyped exposure to international audiences, curators, gallerists and other market actors. The alleged benefits-for-all of contemporary cultural exchange, in an expanding globalizing field such as Venice, are by no means shared equally and such discourses gloss over layers of uneven privilege embedded within the institution

Art and Acceptability: Some Problems of Visualising Caribbean Slavery through Modernism

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Disturbing Pasts: Memories, Controversies and Creativity

This themed issue of the Open Arts Journal, ‘Disturbing pasts: Memories, controversies and creativity’, brings together a range of artists, curators, policy-makers and academics from around the world, who explore creative engagements with controversial and traumatic pasts in art practice, curating and museums. The material is presented in three parts: ‘Difficult Pasts and Public Space’ (writings on historical issues and museums), ‘Visual Investigations’ (artists’ statements and criticism), and ‘Collaborations’ (visual analysis and artist-scholar pairings of writings and original artworks). This collection was developed through a two-year international research project led by Leon Wainwright, which involved three consortia of researchers from universities throughout Europe, and focused on a major public event at the Museum of Ethnology Vienna/Weltmuseum, Wien (November 2011). The project is funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area, the European Science Foundation)

Arte e aceitabilidade: alguns problemas suscitados pela visualização da escravidão caribenha através do modernismo

Special issue assembling the proceedings of Anthropology and Contemporary Visual Arts from the Black Atlantic: Between the Art Museum and the Ethnological Museum in the Global North (Dakar, Senegal 2019) guest edited by Christoph Singler and Philippa Sissis