Cosmopolitan modernisms

Mercer, Kobena (2005) Cosmopolitan modernisms. Institute for International Visual Art and MIT Press. ISBN 0262633213. [Book]

Abstract

This book is the first in a series of four collections of essays that I have been invited to commission and edit. The series, titled Annotating Art's Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, is published jointly by the Institute for International Visual Art and MIT Press. Three of the volumes have been published and these, with my contributions to them constitute the first three of my submissions. For this volume, I contributed both the Introduction (pp. 6-24) and the essay ‘Romare Bearden, 1964: Collage as Kunstwollen.' (pp. 124-146): which examines the problem-solving trajectory pursued by Romare Bearden and how his montage work from 1964 resolved issues in ‘The Negro Artist's Dilemma' that were theorised in 1946. This volume contains an essay by my colleague at Middlesex Paul Overy (White Walls, White Skins: Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism in Inter-war Modernist Architecture).

Together, these volumes represent a series of historical studies of 20th century art that foreground cross-cultural perspectives among established and emerging scholars in the field. The editorial framework for the series was designed to address the gaps arising from monocultural tendencies in traditional art historiography and theoreticist tendencies in the visual culture paradigm, both of which reinforce the de-historicised conception of ‘diversity' that tends to prevail in this field of study. The theoretical basis for this editorial platform was developed in two essays devoted published in 1) “Iconography After Identity” [2001] in Bailey, D. et al. eds, Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, 49-58, and “Diaspora Aesthetics and Visual Culture,” [1999] in Elam, H. et al. eds, Black Cultural Traffic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, 141-161.

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