‘In the vicinity of dandyhood’: Yinka Shonibare, the Grand Tour and the criminal gallantry of modern sex tourism

In Gallantry and Criminal Conversation (2002) Yinka Shonibare (b.1962) stages headless mannequins in historically evocative European dress made from ‘African’ fabric, propelling his audience back to the hedonism of the Grand Tour. A similar whiff of scandal infuses Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), which incorporates overt sexuality into the artist’s calculated subversions of culture and decorum. By reimagining uneasy juxtapositions of Europeanness and Africanness, Shonibare links the Tour’s performative excess and sexual transgression to the extractive entitlement that fuelled nineteenth-century Britain’s colonisation of West Africa. As a self-fashioned Victorian dandy making art about privileged vacationing, Shonibare exposes the nationally exploitative foundations of the Grand Tour and how it lives on in twenty-first-century sex tourism, stultifying the Tourists’ mannered behaviours and criticising the enduring impact of their indulgent posturing and licentiousness on the postcolonial world.