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The Longest Journey

Black Diaspora Artists in Britain

Bibliographic Data

ID11161786
AuthorsKobena Mercer (corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume44
Issue3
Pages482-505
Publication date2021-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArt History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-6790 • E-ISSN: 1467-8365
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/1467-8365.12576
OpenAlexW3176305088
LanguageEN
Citations received2

This essay offers an account of the ways in which successive generations of Black artists in Britain engaged with modernism during the UK's transformation from a monocultural to a post‐imperial society. Whereas the first wave (including Frank Bowling and Anwar Shemza) sought to reconcile their late colonial backgrounds with the tenets of high modernism – the autonomy of the artwork, the disinterested beholder, and universalist claims of timeless aesthetic value – the second wave (including Rasheed Araeen and Gavin Jantjes) turned to minimalism, performance, and photo‐text to de‐centre modernism's core assumptions that relied on formalist discourse. Collage and montage practices among the UK‐born third wave (including Sonia Boyce, Maud Sulter, and Donald Rodney), which entailed the hyphenation of cross‐cultural elements, thus call for a deeper look at transculturation processes active since modernism's beginning, but which were not previously recognized on account of formalist hegemony

Art · Art history · Diaspora · Foregrounding · Hegemony · Literature · Minimalism (technical communication) · Modernism (music) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Transculturation · Anthropology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Gender Studies · Law · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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    Open Access•Marine Schütz•Angles•2025

  • How Turkish Artists Negotiate Non-Belonging Through a Visual Past Perfect - A Timely Artwork Analysis

    Open Access•Verena Niepel•Visual Anthropology•2024

Unique citing works2
Citations per year1
Citation span2024 - 2025 (2)
Citation velocityrecent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 2

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