...Margo Natalie Crawford This essay considers the very use of the word “black” in diasporic freedom struggles as a type of strategic abstraction. Crawford’s focus on blackness as a strategic abstraction deepens our understanding of the practice of diaspora as the practice of black abstraction...

... to reflect on juxtapositions of the sacred and profane, the beautiful and ugly, in Ofili’s earlier work and to consider the implications of his strategic shift. Copyright © 2010 Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2010 FROM riot to austerity Chris Ofili’s Retrospective at the Tate...

... but also redefined the exhibition, before its opening in Kassel, by conceiving it as a final installment of several “platforms” staged worldwide. His were strategic, paradigmatic interventions engineered to globalize the art world, and they effectively amounted to acts of art-historical decolonization...

...• sition from principle to abstract motif, from the signified to the Fringe Foyer of the London Royal the sign, in much Yoruba art there is a narrative intercedent Festival Hall in 1991. between the idea and the form...

... and technologies such as pictorial abstraction or photography are localized, and therefore the resultant artwork remains authen- tically African. This of course is an important coun- ternarrative. Yet, such stories or intellectual projects never take into account that they embrace normative understandings...

... geometric forms that make up Melvin Edwards s sculptural installation Homage to the Poet Léon Gontran Damas (1978 81), it is difficult to discern any immediate connection it might have to its namesake, a poet and cofounder of the Negritude movement. Yet, it is precisely this abstract visual language...

... IMka'73 Zwelethu Mthethwa, Untitled, from the Mbkweni series, 1996-1999, the subject disturbs the apparent portrait refer• ject that Emily Speers Mears is gesturing when she ence of his work but, on another, the strategic use writes in her review of Mthethwa's 2003 show...

..., Mixed Media, dimensions variable. © The artist portrayed as the president of Ghana, hang from branches. This room ac- many European countries are less than creating an abstract composition — were knowledges the impact of African art welcoming toward immigrants due to displayed on wooden stands...

..., the with about 200 letters, forming planted near the central struc• abstract sounds created by the components begin to form a fragments of Vallejo's poem ture, leaving the pine trees to composer Neil Leonard, the whole...

... to the appeal of a casual, normative, white supremacism that conceals and negotiates its own disappointments and discomforts by end• lessly holding off the moment in which it has to confront its own strange reflection. To keep that critical, edgy encounter between perfect, abstract whiteness...

...-Poku In the collective experience of African / Diasporic he politics of time has been not only a central histories and futures we live our theories, work and tool to strategically oppress people, but also a praxis not as some distant dream, but as something tool for liberation.1 Given...

... examples of cherished personal items that require strategic expression of desire to a more distant, dispassionate network of manipulation for mediation. Their most striking feature is not passive, solitary frustration made visible through the web of the the reflection of the absent...

... the beauty, by most of his fellow art students, and he admits plasticity, and communicative potential of Amharic to being a bit bored then — particularly because of script. It has become his signature style, though one his growing interest in abstraction, which was not that has continually evolved...

..., and ephemera related to Thomas s travels remain in the artist s archival record. These circumstances, in turn, have precluded much scholarship on Thomas s place in the postwar international art world. Strategic, careful, and persistent digging, however, reveals not only how Thomas and her work traveled beyond...

... that body to insist upon—its own abstraction. We get bare/ visible skin as metaphor, rather than as assured materiality. We are forcibly reminded that the idea...

... experiences of the conflict. The exhibition suffers Angolan war. In this sense, the exhibition deftly side-steps the uncom• from Alvim's particular abstraction from the war archive. In framing the fortable borderland between the open wounds of trauma and the amne• future of "memorias fntimas...

... Middlebrook, has actual tufts of hair lina. These were used to ward off evil spirits and, placed strategically in rows on a wooden play board when worn, had medicinal purposes. They often with wheels resembling a child’s toy. Ritual Console contained earth and various herbs, a tradition still (2009...

... as a public individual during the concerns differed from those of her Western coun - gesture of refusal of its involvement in the institu - painterly gestures of Abstract Expressionism to the early modernization period, in the late nineteenth terpart. 8 For instance, the harem culture, polygamy...

... and fil’d sharp, his Back, world, it’s not just looking back on something as an if rightly remember’d, has many small Marks or abstract history,” he declares, observing that “my Dots”; while he goes so far as to admit that Neptune personal history or my family’s personal histories and Cupid were...

..., a Christian, in a Muslim cemetery. But we are at Sembene African resistance to colonialism shot in Timbuktu, Sembene tells about the para• Ousmane's quarters, and the novelist-filmmaker is presiding over this strategic doxes bedeviling Senegalese society. He believes his artistic...