New Provincialisms: Curating Art of the African Diaspora
La Fantasie Art Project (by caribbeanfreephoto via flickr)
New Provincialisms: Curating Art of the African Diaspora by Leon Wainwright is now available to read in full at the Black Atlantic Resource:
Over the past decade there have been various curatorial attempts to assemble and understand the art of the African diaspora and to offer a more global sense of the histories from which such works emerge. The diaspora concept once promised fresh possibilities for imagining community beyond the nation; however, its internationalist emphasis has given way to a provincializing attitude grounded in United States – centered experiences.
When art exhibitions are designed to mobilize the African diaspora and to reverse its traditional exclusion from art history and public memory, it is less clear whether such designs also prove capable of reversing the direction of this new provincialism. And yet, while the otherwise international relevance of the diaspora analytic has become susceptible to political and social priorities with a locus in the United States, much can be gained from interrogating the ways in which this locus generates new “margins” and “centers” in the world of art and blackness.
To view the full article at the Black Atlantic Resource now click here.
[First published in Radical History Review, Issue 103 (Winter 2009) pp. 203-213: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1215/01636545-2008-041]
ACRAH 