Description
Book SynopsisWelcome to the Jungle brings a black British perspective to the critical reading of a wide range of cultural texts, events and experiences arising from volatile transformations in the politics of ethnicity, sexuality and race during the 1980s. The ten essays collected here examine new forms of cultural expression in black film, photography and visual art exerging with a new generation of black British artists, and interprets this prolific creativity within a sociological framework that reveals fresh perspectives on the bewildering complexity of identity and diversity in an era of postmodernity. Kobena Mercer documents a wealth of insights opened up by the overlapping of Asian, African and Caribbean cultures that constitute Black Britain as a unique domain of diaspora.
Trade Review"A passionate and detailed history of the New Black British Cultural Studies by one of the major players in its making. In its attention to "the formal and strategic aesthetics of hybridity," and to the differences and alliances between Black US and Black British, this book is indeed "intranational and outernational." -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1: Monster Metaphors; 2: Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination; 3: Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation; 4: Black Hair/Style Politics; 5: Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race; 6: Reading Racial Fetishism; 7: Dark & Lovely; 8: Black Art and the Burden of Representation; 9: Welcome to the Jungle; 10: “1968”
