Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture: Detour to the Imaginary

The painter R. B. Kitaj, then living and exhibiting in London, wrote a Diasporist Manifesto in 1989 that articulated his own feelings of unique estrangement to his ethnicity as a Midwest-American-raised son of exiled eastern European Jews. For him, painting was “a refugee’s suitcase” of ideas, skills, and sensations, cosmopolitan yet warily expressing precarity. Kitaj acknowledges “other resounding Diasporists—Palestinians prominent and suffering among them,” and that “there is a Black African Diaspora as terrible and outstanding as any other, which has disturbed my thoughts since childhood.”In this century attention is rightly given to examining the African Diaspora, sometimes called the Black Atlantic: the massive kidnapping of Africans over three centuries to labor in North and South America (and some, in Europe), then the more voluntary later emigrations from colonies to the metropole.Stuart Hall (1932–2014) left the Caribbean for the U.K., a young Jamaican student ready to learn and grow. He taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open University, and in 1960 was the founding editor-in-chief of the still-publishing New Left Review. In Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, his lectures delivered at the University of Illinois, he affirms the lasting value of Gramsci, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson toward developing cultural studies towards political change. Elsewhere he pondered how Édouard Glissant’s assertion of a “creolization,” not just in the French Caribbean but globally, might apply to the U.K. and the entire Black Atlantic.Hall soon focused upon the West Indians and other ethnicities—African, South Asian, even East Asian—that the white Britishers considered “Black” since, after all, they were originally all Britain’s colonial subjects, right? The artists and intellectuals among them soon began to communicate, and most productively, collaborate in Autograph (Association of Black Photographers) and at INIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts) on art exhibitions and publications together. Hall delivered the keynote at Duke University’s “Shades of Black” conference in 2001, which examined artwork in the U.K. from the 1980s and from which another good book was assembled and reviewed in this publication [1]. Hall’s essay is reprinted in this new volume and remains germane.Gilane Tawadros, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery and chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation, is an attentive and appreciative reader who assembled these essays that date back decades yet are still relevant and readable, offering an understanding of a world of migrants seeking a better life. In the recent US Presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s rhetoric of an “invasion” of nonwhite immigrants echoes British politician Enoch Powell generations ago predicting “rivers of blood” if immigration wasn’t halted, and Norman Tebbit griping about Black Britons cheering for cricket teams other than the U.K.’s own. In 2024, top government officials in both nations are sons and daughters of such immigrants.And Stuart Hall had been watching; investigating their cultural expression around him. Many Diaspora artists, including Dennis Morris, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Franklyn Rodgers, and Dave Lewis, found photography as the means to document and comment upon the world they didn’t see being depicted in the mainstream. Mitra Tabrizian’s “contrived fictive spaces,” sometimes drawing upon cinema tropes, reflected urban suspicions and anomie. Notable Black British creatives in film included Martina Attile, John Akomfrah, Julian Henriques, and Hall’s longtime friend, the decades-prolific Isaac Julien. Don Letts documented his friends in the punk rock scene as he enjoyed Jamaican reggae music with them. Yet Hall was a filmmaker himself, and I was surprised to find an excerpt on YouTube from a documentary he produced on George Orwell, with Raymond Williams’s remarks framed by the younger intellectual Hall.Isaac Belisario, a nineteenthcentury Portuguese Jew who found success painting watercolors of colonial planters’ houses in Jamaica, also illustrated ornately costumed Black workers in carnival parades, and Hall’s contemplation of the artist’s in-between status then compares Belisario’s to that of several late-20th-century British artists from the Caribbean. Concerned at how easy it is to pigeonhole the art of “the other,” Hall saw signs of a “third way,” neither limitedly folkloric and traditional nor lost in the commodifying international art market, for Black British artists. As he attended to techniques in contemporary art globally, other artists Hall observed explored multimedia painting and gallery installation. In the “vernacular cosmopolitanism” of Michael McMillan’s affectionate installation “The West Indian Front Room,” constructed environments of characteristic home furnishings found in island emigré homes were exhibited. A decade ago, the US furniture company Ethan Allen, which had long promoted its traditional wood designs as founding-fathers Americana, presented them beside leafy tropical plants as West Indian classics, perhaps to better interest African American buyers. In 2024 the African American painter Mickalene Thomas exhibited a replica of the front room of the New Jersey home she grew up in at the Broad Museum of Art in Los Angeles.While every narrative of cultural studies acknowledges Stuart Hall’s importance, this is a good collection of his writing on visual art and a document of the urban creativity he witnessed in the last three decades of the twentieth century.A 1999 book, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews began with “foundational” articles by both Stuart Hall and R. B. Kitaj. Yet when a conference on “Diaspora Culture” was proposed at my own mid-American university, intended to be centered upon African people in the U.S., Latin America, and the U.K., a Jewish American art professor of Kitaj’s generation felt his own people’s story—so long synonymous with the word Diaspora—was being left out.