Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers

Throwing objects, identities and ideas into flux, migration is a defining feature of modernity. "Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers" examines the life-changing journeys that transplanted artists and intellectuals from one cultural context to another, offering a thematic overview of the critical and creative role of estrangement and displacement in the story of 20th-century art. Revealing the traumatic conditions that shaped numerous variants of modernism - among indigenous artists in Australia and Canada as much as emigre art historians from Central Europe - the eight new studies in this book also highlight multidirectional patterns of cross-appropriation that trouble the settled boundaries of national belonging, whether manifested in 1920s Nigeria or in post-modern works by black British artists of the 1980s. While contemporary art criticism acknowledges the currency of cross-cultural migration in a new era of globalisation, "Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers" goes a step further by historicising these perspectives. It challenges established narratives of modernism and offers new analytical tools for thinking about cross-cultural interaction in the visual arts. "Annotating Art'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 Art'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.