Description
Book SynopsisIn this set of essays that cover the period from 1992 to 2012, Kobena Mercer uses a diasporic model of criticism to analyze the cross-cultural aesthetic practice of African American and black British artists and to show how their refiguring of visual representations of blackness transform perceptions of race.
Trade Review"
Travel & See benefits from a retrospective gaze; Mercer’s 30-year career gives him a judicious distance on some highly charged aesthetic movements and issues.... Mercer’s volume ... does not simply collect his past writings; it forces us to see international modernism in a way that has implications for future scholarship both within and beyond the field of black diasporic art.
Travel & See posits Mercer as a chronicler not only of the field of contemporary art of the Afro-modern world, but of the inextricable ties of black diasporic and modernism itself." -- Sarah Lewis * Art in America *
"
Travel & See is an essential addition to any art historian’s library.... With
Travel & See, Mercer further establishes himself as a leading figure in the field while also modeling the type of work that still needs to be done. The volume shows how Mercer’s writing redefined contemporary art history just as much as it shows how black diaspora artists changed contemporary art." -- Uchenna Itam * Shift *
"Mercer's optimistic spirit encourages the reader to dare to travel in space and time in order to see better." -- Maureen Murphy * Critique d'art *
"Subtleties of thought and elegance of expression are characteristic of Mercer's writings, read avidly by those art historians who have sought insight into Black British Cultural Studies, increasingly influential over the last thirty years. Mercer's essays offer a welcome contrast to art‐historical scholarship aimed at the specialist, and also to criticism on the contemporary arts of the African and Asian diasporas." -- Amna Malik * Art History *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
Part I. Art's Critique of Representation 37
1. The Fragile Inheritors 39
2. Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia 50
Part II. Differential Proliferations 87
3.
Marronage of the Wandering Eye: Keith Piper 89
4. Mortal Coil: Eros and Diaspora in the Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode 97
5. Avid Iconographies: Isaac Julien 129
6. Art That Is Ethnic is Inverted Commas: Yinka Shonibare 147
Part III. Global Modernities 155
7. Home from Home: Portraits from Places in Between 157
8. African Photography in Contemporary Visual Culture 170
9. Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diaspora-Based Blackness 186
10. Documenta 11 207
Part IV. Detours and Returns 215
11. A Sociography of Diaspora 217
12. Diaspora Aesthetics and Visual Culture 227
13. Art History after Globalization: Formations of the Colonial Modern 248
14. The Cross-Cultural and the Contemporary 262
Part V. Journeying 277
15. Postcolonial
Trauerspiel: Black Audio Film Collective 279
16. Archive and
Dépaysement in the Art of Renée Green 294
17. Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life 310
18. Hew Locke's Postcolonial Baroque 321
Bibliography 347
Index 357
