2 - Diasporan Dialogues: How the Caribbean Mediates between African and Asian Artistic Practices

This paper centres the Caribbean as a third cultural and artistic space mediating artistic and cultural dialogues between the African and Asian continent vis-a-vis colonialism. Starting with Brunias’s ‘Dancing Scene in the West Indies’ (1764-96) as a symbolic gesture in how Africa and Asia meet via the motifs of the ‘madras cloth’ adorned on enslaved African bodies, to the writings of the Jamaican-British scholar Stuart Hall, who speaks of the intimacies between African and Asian cultures in the Caribbean and in a post-war migrational Britain. This historical and social context will inform the understanding of the writing, curatorial and artistic politics and practices of Rasheed Araeen via his publication ‘Black Phoenix’ which explored the relationship between contemporary art and racial politics; to his groundbreaking exhibition ‘The Other Story: Afro-Asian artists in post-war Britain’  (Hayward Gallery, 1989) that brought together intergenerational African, Asian and Caribbean artists (born both in the UK and abroad) under the positionality of ‘Political Blackness.’ This exhibition mediated diasporan intimates between Africa, Asia and the Caribbean as interconnected geo-political sites and solidarities to the wider social and political gatherings (e.g. Festac’ 77) and movements between artists from these three crucial locales.