Differential Proliferations

This chapter offers a midcareer review of cut-and-mix collage strategies in black British artist Keith Piper’s multimedia art practice, which spans painting, installation, computer-generated montage, and video. Approached as a “history painter” of post-Empire Britain, in that his art bears witness to the way the colonial past has imaginatively returned to be reworked in the present, Piper is situated in a postcolonial relation to his archival sources. The chapter explores how his choices led him to the aquatic imagery that aligns his conceptualism not only with Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic model of interpretation but also with Caribbean poets and writers such as Derek Walcott and Édouard Glissant, for whom the sea opens up a metaphorical line of escape, or marronage, from the territoriality of nation-states, thereby enabling a future-oriented search for alternative conceptions of imagined community.