Keith Piper, Donald Rodney and the Artists' Response to the Archive (2006)

The Importance Of Being Lady Lucy (2007)

Black British Photography (2007)

Next We Change Earth (2008)

Untitled (the tyranny of distance) (2008)

Drawing Form (2009)

African-American Art: Redefining the Canon (2010)

Ben Jones: In the Spirit, In the Flesh (2011)

African-American Art: Redefining the Canon

...There are of course multiple reasons for this quarantining of African-American art history within published research. First and foremost, perhaps, are the ways in which academia arguably discourages interdisciplinary approaches to its subjects and its teaching. To teach African-American art history within the wider contexts of Pan-Africanism and other international considerations would require an emphatic abandoning of an academic mindset that insists on narrow, rather than broader approaches. In this sense, "knowing about" and "teaching about" African-American artists in the context of such things as the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Works Progress Administration, would have to take place alongside a corresponding and interrelated "knowing about" and "teaching about" these same subjects in relation to personalities such as Marcus Garvey, Edna Manley, and Nancy Cunard.

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), together with several other significant Black thinkers and activists of the early twentieth century, pioneered, developed, and articulated many of the ideas that today we refer to as the Black Diaspora. He was arguably the most important international figure in twentieth-century Black political and cultural thinking and activism. Garvey lived a fascinating and extraordinary life, being born in a small town in rural Jamaica and eventually dying in London at a relatively young age. His life's work embraced, touched, and affected innumerable parts of the world, including Central America, North America, Europe, and Africa. A writer, political activist, editor, poet, and journalist, Garvey's defining work was Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Or, Africa for the Africans (1923–1925).

Edna Manley (1900–1987) was a white Jamaican artist of British birth and upbringing. She occupies the pivotal position in the history of Jamaican Art, having arrived on the island in 1922, the year that Jamaican art history by and large dates its birth. In no small part, Manley's status as a Mother of Jamaican Art is arguably due to her familial connections. She was married to Norman Washington Manley, one of Jamaica's national heroes, who founded the People's National Party and led it for many years. Furthermore, Edna Manley was the mother of another distinguished Jamaican, Michael Manley, who was twice Prime Minister of Jamaica (1972–1980 and 1989–1992). Such impeccable credentials and connections helped to ensure that Edna Manley's work as a sculptor was very much part of the Jamaican project of nation-building and attempts to develop a distinct cultural identity (two agendas that to some extent went hand-in-hand from the early twentieth century up to and beyond the year of Jamaica's independence).

Manley's work fused modernist sensibilities and aesthetics with what was, at the time, a revolutionary attachment to, or empathy for, the darker laboring people of Jamaica—those of African stock. Manley's singular depictions and renderings of these people emphasized their revolutionary potential, their folk culture, and their yearning for fulfillment, respect, and progress.

Nancy Cunard (1896–1965) was born in England into a wealthy family of shipping magnates. A poet, writer, and lifelong political activist, Cunard became somewhat estranged from her family, particularly her mother, in her defiant gestures to distance herself from what she perceived as their racism. The defining work of her interest in Black people (which some might define or describe as negrophilia) was the monumental volume Negro (1934). The book attempted to take a series of focused and considered looks—though a multitude of different texts—at the lives, existence, and history of African people, both those of what we now term the diaspora and those within the continent itself. Negro, in its original edition, ran to some 855 pages and remains, arguably, unsurpassed in its vision.

The full version of the above text was published in the US academic journal, Critical Interventions (6), 2010

For more on Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, visit http://www.aachron.com/editions/critical_interventions/index.php