TEXTS

Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge—and After

This paper tries to frame a provisional answer to the question How might we begin to "assemble" the 1980s as an object of critical knowledge? It does not aspire to a definitive interpretation of the period. Other contributors address this question with far greater authority. Not being a practicing artist, art critic, historian, or curator, mine is a strictly amateur view. What I try to do, instead, is to "map" the black arts in Britain in the 1980s as part of a wider cultural/political moment, tracking some of the impulses that went into its making and suggesting some interconnections between them. I "assemble" these elements, not as a unity, but in all their contradictory dispersion. In adopting this genealogical approach, the artwork itself appears, not in its fullness as an aesthetic object, but as a constitutive element in the fabric of the wider world of ideas, movements, and events, while at the same time offering us a privileged vantage point on that world.

In Different: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity, Mark Sealy and I make the argument that contemporary black photography continues, in many ways, to operate on a problematic first defined by the practitioners who emerged in the 1980s. We may think of this as the first, genuinely "postcolonial" moment in black artistic practice. It witnessed an explosion of creative work by artists from places historically marginalized from the centers of power and authority. It opened up certain possibilities in art practice and defined an "economy" of themes and images with which contemporary practitioners are still reckoning. Though not a unified, coherent, or organized phenomenon, this "movement" (if something so loose can be called such) must be tracked, not only in the visual arts, film, and photography, but across music, literature, and the performing arts, popular culture and fashion. Broadly speaking, it is driven by the struggles of peoples, marginalized in relation to the world system, to resist exclusion, reverse the historical gaze, come into visibility, and open up a "third space" (between the weight of an unreconstructed tradition and the impetus of a mindless modernism) in cultural representation. It therefore belongs to that uneven, contradictory, and bitterly contested transformation of cultural life now in progress across the globe, which attempts to de-center Western models and open a broader, more transcultural and "translative" perspective on cultural practice and production. It challenges the institutional spaces, established circuits, and validated canons of critical achievement of the metropolitan mainstream.

This "movement" has global significance. It refuses to be constrained by national boundaries, emphasizing instead a lateral, diasporic, transnational perspective. The project persists, despite being confronted on all sides by deepening inequalities of power and material resources and marked by a persistent racism. Unable as yet to stem frontally the tide of Western-driven, neoliberal globalization and its cultural agendas, this is globalization's Other, transnational face—its subversive reverse side. As we argued, "Refusing, simultaneously, either to disappear into the global bazaar of the international art market or to be holed up forever in some 'local' ethnic ghetto, this movement is 'located' in, without being rendered motionless by, places of origin, skin colour, so-called racial group, ethnic tradition or national belongingness and is part of a new, emergent kind of 'vernacular cosmopolitanism.'"

The 1980s, then, saw the onset of a "deluge" of creative activity. However, the "Shades of Black" conference also constituted the 1980s as a puzzle, an enigma. In the history of the postwar black visual arts in Britain, the 1980s remain a vigorously contested space. This may be because they have become an object of desire, weighed down by the projection of powerful but unrequited psychic and political investments. Thus, some see the 1980s as the moment when the dream that artists from the former colonial empires could enter the mainstream of modern art and claim their rightful place there was abandoned. Some see the 1980s as the moment when art as an essential weapon in the armory of antiracist politics surfaced—and was derailed. Some see the decade as the moment when the arts were harnessed to the expression of excluded cultural, national, ethnic, and racial identities—and became mired in the multicultural trap of "cultural difference." Some see the 1980s as the moment when what was progressive in modernism was subverted by the vagaries of postmodernism and betrayed by cultural theory's so-called collusive relationship with global capitalism. The protagonists of these various positions are unlikely to agree—or even to agree to differ! Indeed, the old antagonisms are still pursued, sometimes with a venomous intensity. We are still in the post-1980s, living its turbulent afterlife, with all the heated controversy of an unsettled history in which everything is still urgently at stake.

We need to bear in mind the transatlantic nature of the dialogue that "Shades of Black" initiated. Here, comparisons are useful, but closeness can also be a source of misunderstanding. The Black Arts Movement in the United States, which emerged during the post-civil rights period, was enormously influential for black British artists like Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper and the formation of the Pan-Afrikan Connection in 1982. However, the term "black" in the British context (and, incidentally, in this essay) always also references migrants from the Asian subcontinent as well as the African diaspora, a fact that makes the politics of antiracism significantly different on the two sides of the Atlantic. There are deeper historical differences. For African Americans, the key factor has always been slavery, whose consequences continue to shape daily domestic American life. In the Caribbean case, in the 1950s and 1960s, the central issue seemed to be, not slavery per se, but colonialism. Certainly, the postwar generation of Caribbean and Asian artists who migrated to Britain were...