book notes, selections of good writing, and other thoughts

This looks too good to miss.

Taking inspiration not only from the statement made by Kobena Mercer that, “The art history of the black diaspora is still an ‘undiscovered’ country,” but also by African American artist, Betye Saar, that the “slave ship imprint is on all of us,” this two-day symposium will adopt an international perspective to examine the sculpture, paintings, photography, digital art, mixed-media installations, and performance art produced by artists of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic as they come to grips with visualizing slavery both within America and across the black diaspora. Tracing key transatlantic developments emerging in the late nineteenth century and across the decades of the twentieth century, the purpose of this symposium will be to examine the ways in which black artists engage in an aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics via experimental, self-reflexive practices as they reject the widespread “whitewashing” (Eddie Chambers) of a black diasporic visual arts tradition. Creating extensive bodies of work which exist in powerful and complex relation to an array of social, political, and historical no less than aesthetic contexts, they debate forceful issues related to transatlantic slavery and its legacies. These include: debates surrounding memorialization and representation; multifaceted reimaginings of otherwise distorted black histories and narratives; black bodies as loci not only of objectification and commodification but of agency and authority; and, cross- cultural examinations of slippery and unfixed identities as characterized by dislocation and displacement in a diasporic imaginary. Working with a range of forms and media, black artists within America and across the diaspora repeatedly transgress formal boundaries in order to visualize slavery and its legacies as they interrogate the politics and poetics of official sites and sights of black memorialization and representation. Challenging the “problem of visuality” (Michele Wallace), theirs is a search for a new visual language as they interrogate diverse ways of “speaking the unspeakable” and “seeing the unseeable.” Committed to challenging dominant modes of representation, therefore, black United States and diasporic artists repeatedly engage in the revisionist recovery of a “multiplicity of histories” (Lubaina Himid). Equally intent upon deconstructing and destabilizing skewed power hierarchies and problematic sexual politics, these artists resist reductive monolithic constructions of racial identities. Instead, they explore the signifying possibilities of multifaceted reimaginings of psychologically complex, mytho-poetic, autobiographical and politicized recreations of selfhood. In compelling ways, an array of black artists reject the widespread dominance of a “filter of a web of white racist images” (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) as they interrogate white strategies of black stereotyping and caricature.

More at link above.