Living Cargo: How Black Britain Performs Its Past
Steven Blevins
Abstract
Living Cargo offers a wide-ranging study of contemporary literatures, films, visual arts and performances by writers and artists who live and work in the UK but who also maintain strong ties to postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean. Grounded and theoretically nuanced, the book considers how contemporary black British writers and artists engage with the long history of European colonization, in particular the colonial archive, to reframe the dominant narratives of multi-cultural Britain that emerged in the post-war era. Surveying a wide range of contemporary literary, visual, and performance-ba ... More
Living Cargo offers a wide-ranging study of contemporary literatures, films, visual arts and performances by writers and artists who live and work in the UK but who also maintain strong ties to postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean. Grounded and theoretically nuanced, the book considers how contemporary black British writers and artists engage with the long history of European colonization, in particular the colonial archive, to reframe the dominant narratives of multi-cultural Britain that emerged in the post-war era. Surveying a wide range of contemporary literary, visual, and performance-based creative work, the book looks from works of fiction by Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, Bernardine Evaristo, Caryl Phillips, and Dorothea Smartt; works of film and video by Inge Blackman and Isaac Julien; and public art and gallery installations by Yinka Shonibare, Graham Mortimer Evelyn, and Hew Locke; to the bespoke style of fashion icon Ozwald Boateng.
Keywords:
Contemporary black Britain,
Colonial archive,
Critical redressive historiography,
Pubic history,
Public cultures,
Literary figures,
Artists,
Urban Regeneration,
Urban Gentrification,
Political action
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816697144 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: May 2017 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816697144.001.0001 |
