“Given the current political conditions, these lectures on race, ethnicity, and nation, delivered by Stuart Hall almost a quarter of a century ago, may be even more timely today.” —Angela Y. Davis In this defining statement one of the founding figures of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, often deadly consequences of our contemporary politics of race and identity. As he untangles the power relations that permeate categories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood, Stuart Hall shows how old hierarchies of human identity were forcefully broken apart when oppressed groups introduced new meanings to the representation of difference. Hall challenges us to find more sustainable ways of living with difference, redefining nation, race, and identity. “Stuart Hall bracingly confronts the persistence of race—and its confounding liberal surrogates, ethnicity and nation…This is a profoundly humane work that…finds room for hope and change.” —Orlando Patterson “Stuart Hall’s written words were ardent, discerning, recondite, and provocative, his spoken voice lyrical, euphonious, passionate, at times rhapsodic and he changed the way an entire generation of critics and commentators debated issues of race and cultural difference.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Essential reading for those seeking to understand Hall’s tremendous impact on scholars, artists, and filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.” —Artforum

In the 1960s, art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. Highlights from the image archive, accompanied by essays written by major scholars, appeared in three large-format volumes, consisting of one or more books, that quickly became collector's items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to have republished five of the original books and to present five completely new ones, extending the series into the twentieth century. The Impact of Africa, the first of two books on the twentieth century, looks at changes in the Western perspective on African art and the representation of Africans, and the paradox of their interpretation as simultaneously "primitive" and "modern." The essays include topics such as the new medium of photography, African influences on Picasso and on Josephine Baker's impression of 1920s Paris, and the influential contribution of artists from the Caribbean and Latin American diasporas.

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Welcome to the Jungle brings a black British perspective to the critical reading of a wide range of cultural texts, events and experiences arising from volatile transformations in the politics of ethnicity, sexuality and "race" during the 1980s. The ten essays collected here examine new forms of cultural expression in black film, photography and visual art exerging with a new generation of black British artists, and interprets this prolific creativity within a sociological framework that reveals fresh perspectives on the bewildering complexity of identity and diversity in an era of postmodernity. Kobena Mercer documents a wealth of insights opened up by the overlapping of Asian, African and Caribbean cultures that constitute Black Britain as a unique domain of diaspora.

In the 1960s, art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. Highlights from the image archive, accompanied by essays written by major scholars, appeared in three large format volumes, consisting of one or more books, that quickly became collector s items. A half century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to have republished five of the original books and five completely new ones, extending the series into the twentieth century.

"The Rise of Black Artists," the second of two books on the twentieth century and the final volume in The Image of the Black in Western Art," marks an essential shift in the series and focuses on representation of blacks by black artists in the West. This volume takes on important topics ranging from urban migration within the United States to globalization, to Negritude and cultural hybridity, to the modern black artist s relationship with European aesthetic traditions and experimentation with new technologies and media. Concentrating on the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean, essays in this volume shed light on topics such as photography, jazz, the importance of political activism to the shaping of black identities, as well as the post-black art world."

A fresh perspective on the influential critic, offering new ways of understanding the art of the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke (1885-1954), leading theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, maintained a lifelong commitment to the visual arts. Offering an in-depth study of Locke's writings and art world interventions, Kobena Mercer focuses on the importance of cross-cultural entanglement. This distinctive approach reveals Locke's vision of modern art as a dynamic space where images and ideas generate new forms under the fluid conditions of diaspora. Positioning the philosopher as an advocate for an Afromodern aesthetic that drew from both formal experiments in Europe and the iconic legacy of the African past, Mercer shows how Aaron Douglas, Lois Mailou Jones, and other New Negro artists acknowledged the diaspora's rupture with the ancestral past as a prelude to the rebirth of identity. In his 1940 picture book, The Negro in Art, Locke also explored the different ways black and white artists approached the black image. Mercer's reading highlights the global mobility of black images as they travel across national and ethnic frontiers. Finally, Mercer examines how Locke's investment in art was shaped by gay male aestheticism. Black male nudes, including works by Richmond Barthe and Carl Van Vechten, thus reveal the significance of queer practices in modernism's cross-cultural genesis. Published in association with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University

This is the first comprehensive monograph devoted to New York and San Francisco-based artist Renee Green. Over the past 20 years, through film, video, sound art, photographs, prints, banners, texts, websites and ephemera, Green's work has comprised complex, multi-layered archive-like installations, employing a vast array of sources, which always urge viewers to become active participants. Included in this superbly illustrated volume are newly commissioned essays by a host of esteemed media scholars, art historians, critics and curators--Nora Alter, Diedrich Diederichsen, Kobena Mercer, Catherine Queloz, Gloria Sutton and Elvan Zabunyan--who engage issues central to Green's oeuvre, such as genealogy, archives and their reworkings, movements and displacements, site specificity and location.

Over the years, Kobena Mercer has critically illuminated the visual innovations of African American and black British artists. In Travel & See he presents a diasporic model of criticism that gives close attention to aesthetic strategies while tracing the shifting political and cultural contexts in which black visual art circulates. In eighteen essays, which cover the period from 1992 to 2012 and discuss such leading artists as Isaac Julien, Renee Green, Kerry James Marshall, and Yinka Shonibare, Mercer provides nothing less than a counternarrative of global contemporary art that reveals how the "dialogical principle" of cross-cultural interaction not only has transformed commonplace perceptions of blackness today but challenges us to rethink the entangled history of modernism as well.

"Cosmopolitan Modernisms" explores various moments in 20th-century art where the encounter between different cultures has produced something distinctive and revealing about the lived experience of modernity. Exploring different geographical regions and time periods, the nine essays in this anthology return to our contemporary moment expanding the available knowledge about modernism's cross-cultural past. Travelling from colonial India and pre-war Germany, to post-1945 Brazil, and the Caribbean and African American spaces of the black Atlantic diaspora, this unique collection re-defines the cosmopolitan as a critical aspect of the questioning attitude that artists adopted throughout the world. In this book art historians from around the globe are brought together by a critical dialogue that pushes beyond separate areas of study to arrive at a more connective approach to the history of art. Annotating Arta??s Histories series: Art history has been transformed over the past 20 years by fresh questions about the creative dynamics of cultural difference in the visual arts. The four books in the Annotating Arta??s Histories series move beyond identity-based discourse to explore key topics in modern art history from the 1890s to the 1980s as a shared narrative of art and culture now told from many different points of view. Drawing together new research by 30 internationally respected writers, the series builds upon the insights of visual culture and post-colonial studies and is essential reading for anyone interested in global perspectives on art and modernism.

In The Fateful Triangle-drawn from lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1994-one of the founding figures of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, often deadly consequences of our contemporary politics of identification. As he untangles the power relations that permeate categories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood, Stuart Hall shows how old hierarchies of human identity in Western culture were forcefully broken apart when oppressed groups introduced new meanings to the representation of difference. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the concept of race stressed distinctions of color as fixed and unchangeable. But for Hall, twentieth-century redefinitions of blackness reveal how identities and attitudes can be transformed through the medium of language itself. Like the "badge of color" W. E. B. Du Bois evoked in the anticolonial era, "black" became a sign of solidarity for Caribbean and South Asian migrants who fought discrimination in 1980s Britain. Hall sees such manifestations of "new ethnicities" as grounds for optimism in the face of worldwide fundamentalisms that respond with fear to social change. Migration was at the heart of Hall's diagnosis of the global predicaments taking shape around him. Explaining more than two decades ago why migrants are the target of new nationalisms, Hall's prescient vision helps us to understand today's crisis of liberal democracy. As he challenges us to find sustainable ways of living with difference, Hall gives us the concept of diaspora as a metaphor with which to enact fresh possibilities for redefining nation, race, and identity in the twenty-first century.

Over the years, Kobena Mercer has critically illuminated the visual innovations of African American and black British artists. In Travel & See he presents a diasporic model of criticism that gives close attention to aesthetic strategies while tracing the shifting political and cultural contexts in which black visual art circulates. In eighteen essays, which cover the period from 1992 to 2012 and discuss such leading artists as Isaac Julien, Renee Green, Kerry James Marshall, and Yinka Shonibare, Mercer provides nothing less than a counternarrative of global contemporary art that reveals how the "dialogical principle" of cross-cultural interaction not only has transformed commonplace perceptions of blackness today but challenges us to rethink the entangled history of modernism as well.