Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments' in Post-war History
Stuart Hall was born in Jamaica and has lived in the UK since 1951. He was Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Birmingham and is now Emeritus Professor at the Open University and Chair of the Boards of the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) and Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers. His most recent relevant publication is Different: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity, with Mark Sealy, Phaidon Press, 2001.
Correspondence: Smhall{at}dircon.co.uk
The article offers a conjunctural analysis of three ‘moments’ in the post-war black visual arts in the UK. The main contrast identified is between the ‘problem space’ of the artists–the last ‘colonials’–who came to London after World War Two to join the modern avant-garde and who were anti-colonial, cosmopolitan and modernist in outlook, and that of the second generation–the first ‘post-colonials’–who were born in Britain, pioneered the Black Art Movement and the creative explosion of the 1980s, and who were anti-racist, culturally relativist and identity-driven. In the work of the former, abstraction predominated; the work of the latter was politically polemical and collage-based, subsequently embracing the figural and the more subjective strategy of ‘putting the self in the frame’. This generational shift is mapped here in relation to wider socio-political and cultural developments, including the growth of indigenous racism, the new social movements, especially anti-racist, feminist and identity politics, and the theoretical ‘revolutions’ associated with them. The contemporary moment–less politicized, and artistically neo-conceptual, multi-media and installation-based–is discussed more briefly.
Editorial Introduction
In November 2004 Stuart Hall delivered the Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture to a packed audience at London's Conway Hall. The lecture was the culmination of a day devoted to ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain, Past and Present’, organized by the Raphael Samuel History Centre at the University of East London, which had also featured multimedia presentations by three artists based at the University of East London – Roshini Kempadoo, Keith Piper and Faisal Abdu’allah – and a showing of Horace Ove's film, A Dream to Change the World. We here publish an edited transcript of Stuart Hall's lecture, accompanied by reproductions of some of the major artworks to which he refers.
The ‘Black Diaspora Artists’ event was co-sponsored by the Institute of International Visual Arts, which has recently published an important collection of essays, Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, reviewed below by Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery and a participant in the 2001 conference on which the volume is based.