Hew Locke’s Postcolonial Baroque Available to Purchase

Examining the work of British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke in view of the 17th century aesthetic category of the baroque, this essay suggests that Walter Benjamin’s conception of allegory provides the most fitting interpretive framework for understanding the dialogic agency of diasporic indirection that characterizes Locke’s investigations into the crisis of sovereignty. What makes it post-colonial is the double-voiced strategy whereby questions of violence and mourning are inscribed beneath a dazzling masquerade of cross-cultural quotation.