‘To recross the Atlantic’: Diasporic Art History and the Dialogic Imagination

Drawing on fresh analytical approaches to diaspora studies, Kobena Mercer, the British theorist and historian, proposes a model that identifies cross-culturality as one of the basic conditions of modernity. Discussing the nineteenth-century landscapes of Robert Scott Duncanson, this inquiry into ‘race,’ representation and visuality foregrounds unexplored aspects of the hermeneutics of the Black Atlantic.

Kobena Mercer teaches and writes of the black diaspora. He is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. He was a Reader in Art history and Diaspora Studies at Middlesex University, London, and has taught at New York University and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has received fellowships from Cornell University and the New School for Social Research. He is the series editor of Annotating Art’s Histories, co-published by MIT and inIVA, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernism (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007), and Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (2008).

Reception to follow.