Travel & See

Kobena Mercer is Professor of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. He is author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, editor of Cosmopolitan Modernisms, among other titles, and an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.

• List of Illustrations  ixAcknowledgments  xiiiIntroduction  1Part I. Art's Critique of Representation  371. The Fragile Inheritors  392. Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia  50Part II. Differential Proliferations  873. Marronage of the Wandering Eye: Keith Piper  894. Mortal Coil: Eros and Diaspora in the Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode  975. Avid Iconographies: Isaac Julien  1296. Art That Is Ethnic is Inverted Commas: Yinka Shonibare  147Part III. Global Modernities  1557. Home from Home: Portraits from Places in Between  1578. African Photography in Contemporary Visual Culture  1709. Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diaspora-Based Blackness  18610. Documenta  11  207Part IV. Detours and Returns  21511. A Sociography of Diaspora  21712. Diaspora Aesthetics and Visual Culture  22713. Art History after Globalization: Formations of the Colonial Modern  24814. The Cross-Cultural and the Contemporary  262Part V. Journeying  27715. Postcolonial Trauerspiel: Black Audio Film Collective  27916. Archive and DÉpaysement in the Art of RenÉe Green  29417. Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life  31018. Hew Locke's Postcolonial Baroque  321Bibliography  347Index  357

"Travel & See benefits from a retrospective gaze; Mercer’s 30-year career gives him a judicious distance on some highly charged aesthetic movements and issues.... Mercer’s volume ... does not simply collect his past writings; it forces us to see international modernism in a way that has implications for future scholarship both within and beyond the field of black diasporic art. Travel & See posits Mercer as a chronicler not only of the field of contemporary art of the Afro-modern world, but of the inextricable ties of black diasporic and modernism itself." - Sarah Lewis (Art in America) "Travel & See is an essential addition to any art historian’s library.... With Travel & See, Mercer further establishes himself as a leading figure in the field while also modeling the type of work that still needs to be done. The volume shows how Mercer’s writing redefined contemporary art history just as much as it shows how black diaspora artists changed contemporary art." - Uchenna Itam (Shift) "Mercer's optimistic spirit encourages the reader to dare to travel in space and time in order to see better." - Maureen Murphy (Critique d'art) "Subtleties of thought and elegance of expression are characteristic of Mercer's writings, read avidly by those art historians who have sought insight into Black British Cultural Studies, increasingly influential over the last thirty years. Mercer's essays offer a welcome contrast to art‐historical scholarship aimed at the specialist, and also to criticism on the contemporary arts of the African and Asian diasporas." - Amna Malik (Art History)