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In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores African American art and representation from the height of the British colonial period to the present. She engages in the process of'rememory'—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered. In analyses of the work of artists ranging from Scipio Moorhead, Moses Williams, and Aaron Douglas to Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Deana Lawson, Shaw demonstrates that African American art and history may be remembered and understood anew through a process of intensive close looking, cultural and historical contextualization, and biographic recuperation or consideration. Shaw shows how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding an event or interpreting an object. In so doing, Shaw thinks beyond canonical interpretations of art and material and visual culture to imagine “what if,” asking what else did we once know that has been lost.

Tracing corporeality and materiality across Cuban texts and images of the twentieth century This volume looks at Cuban literature and art that challenge traditional assumptions about the body. Examining how writers and artists have depicted racial, gender, and species differences throughout the past century, Christina García identifies historical continuities in the way they have emphasized the shared materiality of bodies. García shows how these works interact with ecologies of the human and nonhuman across diverse media, time periods, and ideologies. García examines corporeality in a variety of works, including the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and experimental writings of Severo Sarduy; transspecies drawings, paintings, and sculptures by Roberto Fabelo; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's popular queer film Fresa y chocolate; and contemporary narrative fictions by Ena Lucía Portela, Antonio José Ponte, and Ahmel Echevarría. Using the lenses of new materialism, critical race studies, critical animal studies, queer studies, and poststructuralism, García engages with Cuban cultural production at the intersection of diverse social issues. In this book, García explores how certain artistic practices focus on portraying ecological relationships instead of recognizable subjects or shared identity. Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art demonstrates that through their attention to the connections that different kinds of bodies share, Cuban creators have long undermined rules of classification and unification, reimagining community as shared vulnerability and difference. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Poetics of race offers the readers a combined historical, political and aesthetic approach to the symbolic representation of race in Latin America in different periods and cultural regions. Chapters focus on issues of social conflict, identity politics and self-recognition by historically marginalized populations, such as indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and Asian immigrants. Literary texts, cultural practices and visual arts (painting, film) are analyzed as representative moments in the process of social and political recognition of subaltern subjectivities and non-dominant cultures, providing insightful studies of negritude, indigenous cultures and Japanese communities in Latin America. Through the exploration of different media and alternative critical categories, Poetics of Race proposes new avenues for the comparative and intersectional study of race, gender and class in postcolonial societies.

The works of African American authors and artists are too often interpreted through the lens of authenticity. They are scrutinized for “positive” or “negative” representations of Black people and Black culture or are assumed to communicate some truth about Black identity or the “Black experience.” However, many contemporary Black artists are creating works that cannot be slotted into such categories. Their art resists interpretation in terms of conventional racial discourse; instead, they embrace opacity, uncertainty, and illegibility.John Brooks examines a range of abstractionist, experimental, and genre-defying works by Black writers and artists that challenge how audiences perceive and imagine race. He argues that literature and visual art that exceed the confines of familiar conceptions of Black identity can upend received ideas about race and difference. Considering photography by Roy DeCarava, installation art by Kara Walker, novels by Percival Everett and Paul Beatty, drama by Suzan-Lori Parks, and poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, Brooks pinpoints a shared aesthetic sensibility. In their works, the devices that typically make race feel familiar are instead used to estrange cultural assumptions about race. Brooks contends that when artists confound expectations about racial representation, the resulting disorientation reveals the incoherence of racial ideologies. By showing how contemporary literature and art ask audiences to question what they think they know about race, The Racial Unfamiliar offers a new way to understand African American cultural production.

This book reinterprets Wifredo Lam's work with particular attention to its political implications, focusing on how these implications emerge from the artist's critical engagement with 20th-century anthropology. Field work conducted in Cuba, including the witnessing of actual Afro-Cuban religious ritual ceremonies and information collected from informants, enhances the interpretive background against which we can construe the meanings of Lam's art. In the process, Claude Cernuschi argues that Lam hoped to fashion a new hybrid style to foster pride and dignity in the Afro-Cuban community, as well as counteract the acute racism of Cuban culture.

How creative freedom, race, class, and gender shaped the rebellion of two visionary artistsPostwar America experienced an unprecedented flourishing of avant-garde and independent art. Across the arts, artists rebelled against traditional conventions, embracing a commitment to creative autonomy and personal vision never before witnessed in the United States. Paul Lopes calls this the Heroic Age of American Art, and identifies two artists—Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese—as two of its leading icons.In this compelling book, Lopes tells the story of how a pair of talented and outspoken art rebels defied prevailing conventions to elevate American jazz and film to unimagined critical heights. During the Heroic Age of American Art—where creative independence and the unrelenting pressures of success were constantly at odds—Davis and Scorsese became influential figures with such modern classics as Kind of Blue and Raging Bull. Their careers also reflected the conflicting ideals of, and contentious debates concerning, avant-garde and independent art during this period. In examining their art and public stories, Lopes also shows how their rebellions as artists were intimately linked to their racial and ethnic identities and how both artists adopted hypermasculine ideologies that exposed the problematic intersection of gender with their racial and ethnic identities as iconic art rebels.Art Rebels is the essential account of a new breed of artists who left an indelible mark on American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. It is an unforgettable portrait of two iconic artists who exemplified the complex interplay of the quest for artistic autonomy and the expression of social identity during the Heroic Age of American Art.

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award“Powered by masterful writing and storytelling, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled is an instant classic that grapples with the essential questions for artists and all societies that profess to be democratic.” —Sheryll Cashin, author of Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White SupremacyA meditation in the spirit of John Berger and bell hooks on art as protest, contemplation, and beauty in politically perilous timesAs people consider how to respond to a resurgence of racist, xenophobic populism, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled tells an extraordinary story of the ways art brings hope in perilous times. Weaving disparate topics from sugar and British colonialism to attacks on free speech and Facebook activism and traveling a jagged path across the Americas, Africa, India, and Europe, Natalie Hopkinson, former culture writer for the Washington Post and The Root, argues that art is where the future is negotiated. Part post-colonial manifesto, part history of British Caribbean, part exploration of art in the modern world, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled is a dazzling analysis of the insistent role of art in contemporary politics and life. In crafted, well-honed prose, Hopkinson knits narratives of culture warriors: painter Bernadette Persaud, poet Ruel Johnson, historian Walter Rodney, novelist John Berger, and provocative African American artist Kara Walker, whose homage to the sugar trade Sugar Sphinx electrified American audiences. A Mouth Is Always Muzzled is a moving meditation documenting the artistic legacy generated in response to white supremacy, brutality, domination, and oppression. In the tradition of Paul Gilroy, it is a cri de coeur for the significance of politically bold—even dangerous—art to all people and nations.

Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias's intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of colour – so called ‘Red'and ‘Black'Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race – made for colonial officials and plantocratic elites during the late-eighteenth century. Although Brunias's paintings have often been understood as straightforward documents of visual ethnography that functioned as field guides for reading race, this book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. The book offers provocative new insights about Brunias's work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time.

Over the years, Kobena Mercer has critically illuminated the visual innovations of African American and black British artists. In Travel & See he presents a diasporic model of criticism that gives close attention to aesthetic strategies while tracing the shifting political and cultural contexts in which black visual art circulates. In eighteen essays, which cover the period from 1992 to 2012 and discuss such leading artists as Isaac Julien, Renée Green, Kerry James Marshall, and Yinka Shonibare, Mercer provides nothing less than a counternarrative of global contemporary art that reveals how the “dialogical principle” of cross-cultural interaction not only has transformed commonplace perceptions of blackness today but challenges us to rethink the entangled history of modernism as well.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France's rhetoric of ‘internal otherness', asking her reader not to spot those deemed France's others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children's comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial ‘human zoos'invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made—and make themselves—visible in contemporary France. In addition to analyzing how literature and music depicting immigrants and their descendants in France make race and ethnicity visible, Knox also illustrates how the works she analyzes self-reflexively ask whether they, as commodities sold within wider cultural marketplaces, perpetuate the culture of exoticism they seek to contest. Finally, Knox contends that to take seriously the way the texts interrogate the relationship between power, privilege, and the gaze also requires reconsidering the visions of normalcy from which racial and ethnic minorities supposedly depart. She thus concludes by exposing a critical ‘blind spot'in French cultural studies—whiteness—before subjecting it to the same scrutiny France's ‘visible minorities'face.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, this collection—which gathers scholars in the fields of race, ethnicity, and humor—seems especially urgent. Inspired by Denmark's Muhammad cartoons controversy, the contributors inquire into the role that racial and ethnic stereotypes play in visual humor and the thin line that separates broad characterization as a source of humor from its power to shock or exploit. The authors investigate the ways in which humor is used to demean or give identity to racial, national, or ethnic groups and explore how humor works differently in different media, such as cartoons, photographs, film, video, television, and physical performance. This is a timely and necessary study that will appeal to scholars across disciplines.

Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Painting the Gospel offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about African American art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. Kymberly N. Pinder escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures dotting the city's African American churches and neighborhoods. Moving from Chicago's oldest black Christ figure to contemporary religious street art, Pinder explores ideas like blackness in public, art for black communities, and the relationship of Afrocentric art to Black Liberation Theology. She also focuses attention on art excluded from scholarship due to racial or religious particularity. Throughout, she reflects on the myriad ways private black identities assert public and political goals through imagery. Painting the Gospel includes maps and tour itineraries that allow readers to make conceptual, historical, and geographical connections among the works.

What is being passed on? The questions of heritage and inheritance are crucial to American minority literatures. Some inheritances are claimed; some are imposed and become stifling; others still are impossible, like the memories of oppression or alienation. Heritage is not only patrimony, however; it is also a process in a state of constant reconfiguration. The body – its semiotics, its genealogy, its pressure points – figures prominently as inevitable referent for the minority racial/ethnic subject, the performance, and the writing of difference.This collection of essays analyzes contemporary novels from major African American writers, such as Gayl Jones, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Percival Everett, John Edgar Wideman, and Colson Whitehead, and ethnic American novelists like Jeffrey Eugenides, Philip Roth, Gish Jen, and Sergio Troncoso. It also includes the study of a painting by African American artist Robert Colescott. The first section of the book examines the inscription of African American writers'relation to the nation's past: the trauma of slavery, the burden of foundational discourses, or the legacy of the classical philosophical canon. The second part of the text is an assessment of the postmodern aesthetics of contemporary black fiction in the construction of history, unveiling the modalities of the palimpsest, fragmentation, intermediality, mises en abyme, in a complex grammar of haunting and denial. Gathering essays on Greek-American, Jewish-American, Chinese-American and Mexican-American fiction, the final section delineates new conceptions of ethnicity based on fluidity, hybridity, and performativity. Cross-ethnic experimentations in “super-diversity,” according to which identities become optional, an array of choices rather than forced belonging, seem to be pointing the way to the next stage, that of a “post-racial,” “post-ethnic” society. Yet the conjugated strictures of “race” and class still limit these choices to a significant degree, and the works discussed in this volume often playfully or sarcastically question the validity of the “post.” They ultimately ask: who shall inherit America?

'In American Pietas, Ruby C. Tapia reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland BarthesÆs suturing of race, death, and the maternal in Camera Lucida, Tapia contends that the contradictory essence of the photograph is both as a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection. Tapia explores the implications of this argument for racialized productions of death and the maternal in the context of specific cultural moments: the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. magazines; the intertext of Toni MorrisonÆs and HollywoodÆs Beloved; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in CaliforniaÆs Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the ôWidows of 9/11ö in print and televisual journalism. Taken together, these various visual media texts function in American Pietas as cultural artifacts and as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized productions of maternal bodies in contexts of national death and remembering. To engage this network is to ask how and toward what end the racial project of the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for dead. In the spaces between these different maternities, says Tapia, U.S. citizen-subjects are bornùand reborn.'

In 1972 the artist Adrian Piper began periodically dressing as a persona called the Mythic Being, striding the streets of New York in a mustache, Afro wig, and mirrored sunglasses with a cigar in the corner of her mouth. Her Mythic Being performances critically engaged with popular representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class; they challenged viewers to accept personal responsibility for xenophobia and discrimination and the conditions that allowed them to persist. Piper's work confronts viewers and forces them to reconsider assumptions about the social construction of identity. Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment is an in-depth analysis of this pioneering artist's work, illustrated with more than ninety images, including twenty-one in color.Over the course of a decade, John P. Bowles and Piper conversed about her art and its meaning, reception, and relation to her scholarship on Kant's philosophy. Drawing on those conversations, Bowles locates Piper's work at the nexus of Conceptual and feminist art of the late 1960s and 1970s. Piper was the only African American woman associated with the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and one of only a few African Americans to participate in exhibitions of the nascent feminist art movement in the early 1970s. Bowles contends that Piper's work is ultimately about our responsibility for the world in which we live.

This book offers the first concentrated examination of the representation of the black female subject in Western art through the lenses of race/color and sex/gender. Charmaine A. Nelson poses critical questions about the contexts of production, the problems of representation, the pathways of circulation and the consequences of consumption. She analyzes not only how, where, why and by whom black female subjects have been represented, but also what the social and cultural impacts of the colonial legacy of racialized western representation have been. Nelson also explores and problematizes the issue of the historically privileged white artistic access to black female bodies and the limits of representation for these subjects. This book not only reshapes our understanding of the black female representation in Western Art, but also furthers our knowledge about race and how and why it is (re)defined and (re)mobilized at specific times and places throughout history.