Cut And Mix Culture: Visual Explorations Of Contemporary Diaspora Identity

Abstract

In a globalised world, some black diaspora artists have used the agency of blackness as a strategy to interrupt our default thinking about visual arts formed by a dominant Western culture. This strategy, in combination with the methodologies of collage and street art, is an effective tool for black diaspora artists to interrupt the senses and challenge reductive ‘either/or’ categorisations (e.g. primitive vs. modern). The black diaspora identity has been established through a vocabulary developed by significant twentieth-century African-American texts and the field of cultural studies. It has also been shown through dialogic theory that black cultural identity is fluid in nature and can be redefined. This model of redefinition can be applied to my studio practice through Japanese and black cultural signifiers. In this paper, I establish that that I am a black diaspora artist and present the development of my artwork and the theoretical contextualisation through the texts of theorists Kobena Mercer and Stuart Hall and linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, and through the artists Romare Bearden, Firelei Báez and Swoon.