Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the "material turn" in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.

Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the "material turn" in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.

'Timed out' is a pioneering study of modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire. It addresses the current 'global turn' in the study of art by way of the transnational Caribbean, offering an in-depth account of the Atlantic world in relation to the mainstream history of art. It looks at why art of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora have been placed not only 'outside' but 'behind' the dominant art canons, and how the politics of space and time can be used to rethink the global geography of art. This is an essential addition to the growing field of 'world art studies', bringing concerns around temporality together with cross-cultural issues and debates. It shows how art and artists of the Caribbean have encountered and challenged the charges of belatedness, anachronism, provincialism and marginalisation that are fundamental to the time-space logic of art history. -- .

Phenomenal Difference grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception. Featuring attention to works by the following artists: Said Adrus, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Vanley Burke, Chila Burman, Mona Hatoum, Bhajan Hunjan, Permindar Kaur, Sonia Khurana, Juginder Lamba, Manjeet Lamba, Hew Locke, Yeu-Lai Mo, Henna Nadeem, Kori Newkirk, Johannes Phokela, Keith Piper, Shanti Thomas, Aubrey Williams, Mario Ybarra Jr. Much before scholars in the arts and humanities took their recent 'ontological turn' toward the new materialism, black British art had begun to expose cultural criticism's overreliance on the concepts of textuality, representation, identity and difference. Illuminating that original field of aesthetics and creativity, this book shows how black British artworks themselves can become the basis for an engaged and widely-reaching philosophy. Numerous extended descriptive studies of artworks spell out the affective and critical relations that pertain between individual works, their viewers and the world at hand: intimate, physically-involving and visceral relations that are brought into being through a wide range of phenomena including performance, photography, installation, photomontage and digital practice. Whether they subsist through movement, or in time, through gesture, or illusion, black British art is always an arresting nexus of making, feeling and thought. It celebrates particular philosophical interest in: - the use of art as a place for remembering the personal or collective past; - the fundamental 'equivalence' of texture and colour, and their instances of 'rupture'; - figural presence, perceptual reversibility and the agency of objects; - the grounded materialities of mediation; - and the interconnections between art, politics and emancipation. Drawing first hand on the founding, historical texts of early and mid-twentieth century phenomenology (Heidegger; Merleau-Ponty), and current advances in art history, curating and visual anthropology, the author transposes black British art into a freshly expanded and diversified intellectual field. What emerges is a vivid understanding of phenomenal difference: the profoundly material processes of interworking philosophical knowledge and political strategy at the site of black British art.

This collection explores the creative responses of artists to the legacies of war, colonialism, genocide and oppression. Based on a major project of international collaboration supported by the European Science Foundation, it brings together professional art practices, art history and visual culture studies, social anthropology, literary studies, history, museology and cultural policy studies. Case studies are drawn from diverse contexts, including South Africa, Germany, Namibia, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Australia. The results reveal a courageous and carefully examined global picture, with a variety of new approaches to confronting dominant historical narratives and shaping alternative interpretations. -- .