Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century

Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996. 256 pp., 31 color ills, 145 b/w. $29.95, $14.95 paper.

With the attention given to postcolonial studies during the past decade, Frantz Fanon's politically charged, revolutionary writing of the fifties and sixties has enjoyed a contemporary resurgence because of the complex ways in which he so successfully attached theory to lived experience. He did this by not only addressing the effects of colonialism on the psyches of colonized and colonizer but also by demanding in his writing both literal and psychic decolonization.

This return to this icon of radicalism also shows how contemporary black subjects of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora must wrestle with the same issues as Fanon did nearly a half-century ago. This engagement with black subjectivities in the aftermath of colonialism has, in part, led artists and scholars, who are working in the wake of reductivist nationalist movements, to de-essentialize blackness. They do so not only vis-a-vis Fanon but also with respect to a new recognition of diasporal experience. Understanding the hybrid nature of black cultures, both books considered here look critically at black diasporal presences as a way to shift from a unitary black subjectivity to one that highlights black heterogeneity. In that sense, both books exist within a framework that does not take terms such as "race," "the black community," or "the black experience" as givens, but rather sees them as complex social constructions.(1) From this point, the books attempt to open up possibilities for showing the complexities of black representation in art as well as culture-at-large. Powell's book examines these in the past and the present, while Read's anthology investigates the ways in which this complexity can allow for a reformulation of black subjectivities.

Richard J. Powell's Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century functions both as a survey suitable for the general reader as well as an introductory text that could be assigned in courses on the arts of the African Diaspora. Powell's account considers social history and the analysis of objects as a means to expand and reformulate interpretive paradigms of black art. Powell, who is associate professor of African American art history at Duke University, has organized his book both thematically and chronologically, with six chapters, entitled "Art, Culture, and 'the Souls of Black Folk,'" "Enter and Exit the 'New Negro,'" "The Cult of the People," "Pride, Assimilation, and Dreams," "Black Is a Color," and "Culture as Currency." He frames these chapters with an introduction and a conclusion that respectively set up the conceptual structure of the text and question the very definitions of a diasporally-based "black art." This is indeed an ambitious undertaking that attempts concisely to complicate and reposition the study of the arts of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora. It shares with its predecessors, works such as Samella Lewis's 1978 African American Art and Artists, as well as A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present, which Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson published in 1993, the desire to underscore the ways in which visual culture contributed to the construction of African American identities and subjectivities. However, unlike those earlier works, Powell attempts to show these processes through the cultural forces that have shaped twentieth-century diasporal concerns. Absent is the biographical celebration of the artist who has weathered despair and racism to achieve "greatness" (an almost obsessive concern with many earlier surveys on black art), yielding a more detached narrative that reveals how "black" imagery engages with larger issues to achieve its symbolic force. Another important difference between Powell's book and those of his predecessors is his coverage of a wide range of media - including film, performance, graphic arts, and computer generated imagery.

Using the work of Fanon and the sociologist Stuart Hall, Powell views "black diasporal culture" as "the things that significant numbers of black people do" (15). This definition is social as well as aesthetic. For Powell, a "black aesthetic" is "grounded in the idea of a new, post-Emancipation, post-colonial, black identity which . . . thrives in black communities where artistic creativity and performance are the basic cultural currencies" (15). Here Powell falls into a morass which is not uncommon in the field of black studies. While much work exists that attempts to de-essentialize blackness (and this is not the same issue as showing the complexities of representation), much of the field still maintains a desire to lay claim to a unitary black aesthetic as a way to tie together disparate issues from a myriad of places and influences. Given the survey format, this uneasy relationship between the one and the many will, for someone unfamiliar with the field, come across as the history of a singular black aesthetic. In fact, a large number of my own students have the idea of a singular black essence ingrained in their minds, and this book did not manage to change that for many of them.