Black artists have been making major contributions to the British art scene for decades, since at least the mid-twentieth century. Sometimes these artists were regarded and embraced as practitioners of note. At other times they faced challenges of visibility - and in response they collaborated and made their own exhibitions and gallery spaces. In this book, Eddie Chambers tells the story of these artists from the 1950s onwards, including recent developments and successes. Black Artists in ...

How did a distinct and powerful Black British identity emerge? In the 1950s, when many Caribbean migrants came to Britain, there was no such recognised entity as “Black Britain.” Yet by the 1980s, the cultural landscape had radically changed, and a remarkable array of creative practices such as theatre, poetry, literature,South Sudan in War and Peace music and the visual arts gave voice to striking new articulations of Black-British identity.

Longlisted for the Historians of British Art (HBA) Book Prize 2023World is Africa brings together more than 30 important texts by Eddie Chambers, who for several decades has been an original and a critical voice within the field of African diaspora art history. The texts range from book chapters and catalogue essays, to shorter texts. Chambers focuses on contemporary artists and their practices, from a range of international locations, who for the most par...

21st October 1940 - A day that forever changed a little boy's life. This was the night during the Blitz of London when the bomb dropped. It landed on the very spot where the boy on the cover is standing just two years later.This book chronicles the first 18 years of his life, recounted through collected memories, conversations with family and extensive research that are detailed in these pages.From the injuries received on that night, through a turbulent childhood amidst the greatest war t...

This is an authoritative companion that is global in scope, recognizing the presence of African Diaspora artists across the world. It is a bold and broad reframing of this neglected branch of art history, challenging dominant presumptions about the field.Diaspora pertains to the global scattering or dispersal of, in this instance, African peoples, as well as their patterns of movement from the mid twentieth century onwards. Chapters in this book emphasize the importance of cross-fe...

This Companion authoritatively points to the main areas of enquiry within the subject of African American art history.The first section examines how African American art has been constructed over the course of a century of published scholarship. The second section studies how African American art is and has been taught and researched in academia. The third part focuses on how African American art has been reflected in art galleries and museums. The final section opens up understand...

Scholars of the African Americas are sometimes segregated from one another by region or period, by language, or by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, words, and thoughts as part of a much greater whole.Diaspora describes dispersion, but also the seeding, sowing, or...

A bold and provocative book about Australia's national identity and a plea to keep Australia's famed open-mindedness, Cater tracks the seismic changes in Australian culture and outlook since Donald Horne published THE LUCKY COUNTRY in 1964. 'A great book.' Rupert MurdochA bold and provocative book about Australia's national identity and how it is threatened by the rise of a ruling class. Nick Cater, senior editor at the Australian, tracks the seismic changes in Australian culture an...

From its obscure beginnings in Jamaica in the early 1930s, Rastafari has grown into an international socio-religious movement. It is estimated that 700,000 to 1 million people worldwide have embraced Rastafari, and adherents of the movement can be found in most of the major population centres and many outposts of the world. Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction provides an account of this widespread but often poorly understood movement. Ennis B. Edmonds looks at the essential history of Ras...

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics look set to make 2012 as successful as the royal weddings of 2011 when it comes to creating a surge of patriotism across our once self-assured land. But despite the latest wave of nostalgic British pride, Britain is in the midst of an identity crisis, with British values and identity the butt of scorn and sneers. Motivated by the sense that the notion of Britishness has been hijacked, and intrigued by the ever-vexed question of British identity ...

George Lamming is one of the best known, certainly one of the most highly regarded contemporary writers from the Caribbean. Spanning nearly 60 years and encompassing fiction, poetry and critical essays, Lamming’s writing covers the length and breadth of Caribbean intellectual, cultural, political and literary life. Credited as a part of that group of Caribbean activists who awoke the Caribbean to its identity and more specifically to its cultural identity, his works have focused on finding...

Nadia Ellis attends to African diasporic belonging as it comes into being through black expressive culture. Living in the diaspora, Ellis asserts, means existing between claims to land and imaginative flights unmoored from the earth—that is, to live within the territories of the soul. Drawing on the work of Jose Muñoz, Ellis connects queerness' utopian potential with diasporic aesthetics. Occupying the territory of the soul, being neither here nor there, creates in diasporic subjects feeli...