Third Text

1 November 2023

Akin Oladimeji

This book serves as an illuminating guide to the work of artists engaging in the most avant-garde ways to ameliorate society’s ills. Its first chapter, which is really the introduction, starts off with a funerary procession in Cachoeira, Brazil, an annual event to mark the passing of victims of slavery. Beasley then outlines his aim: to highlight how African and diasporic artists showcase survival strategies and future imaginaries. He explains how he came to focus on this, although there is no explanation of Achille Mbembe’s coinage ‘necropolitics’ itself. Not clearly defining such a key term at this stage is a flaw in this text, and it is not the only one.

The second chapter concentrates on Haitian-born Giscard Bouchotte’s efforts to facilitate artworks as a curator focusing on the precarious conditions the residents of Haiti exist in due to the neoliberal policies endorsed by local politicians in cahoots with international statesmen like Bill Clinton, and the artworld. Beasley describes it all from the viewpoint of someone who has repeatedly visited the island and who was even one of the organisers of the 2009 Ghetto Biennial, which he asserts has not improved the global exposure of local artists. It is in this chapter where another flaw of the book makes its first appearance. Various spelling mistakes and other typos abound throughout the book. The first name of the famous New York designer, Donna Karan, is, for example, spelt as ‘Danna’, and on page 16 we find this garbled sentence: ‘He [Bouchotte] left Haiti to study politics in France and it was there that he witnessed impact of the arts on social and political policy and begin the question the concept of creative capital.’ If only these were isolated mistakes but nearly every chapter is littered with them, slowing the reader down as they try to decipher what is meant by the author. The author does, however, give a convincing description of the various factors that led to Haiti’s precarity. 

The third chapter is where necropolitics is defined as systems sanctioned by the political elites that damage, through violence, their victims. ^[1]  Mbembe saw slavery as a form of necropolitics, and Beasley sees his book as a means of outlining how the artists he investigates deal with the legacy of such a catastrophe. The chapter touches on Ebony Patterson’s participatory work in Trinidad and Tobago. Patterson embellished nine caskets with all manner of decorative features, to draw attention to those killed in a week in 2011 on the islands. Seven of these were taken through the city, accompanied by a band. The chapter emphasises the carnivalesque aspect of this and utilises Claire Tancon’s writing on carnival and Deborah Thomas’s book Exceptional Violence to look at Patterson’s work and its implications. ^[2]  While Tancon’s work on Hew Locke’s The Procession installation in Tate Britain’s Duveen Hall in 2022, and her breathtaking introduction to Leah Gordon’s documentation of carnival in Haiti, are touchstones of mine, some images of Patterson’s delegated performance would have been helpful.

Next, Beasley discusses the work of the Nigerian Jelili Atiku whose practice is at the intersection of Yoruba metaphysics and Western live art. He clearly outlines Atiku’s rationale and practice and makes meaning of it in a non-essentialist way. Atiku, a research interest of mine, ^[3] confirms Beasley spent days interviewing and observing him, but it is disappointing to see misspellings again – for example, the Yoruba word for ‘life’ is spelt in a way neither I nor any Yoruba person I asked recognises.

The following chapter focuses on Nona Faustine, a New Yorker who carried out a series of photographic documentations of performative actions in her White Shoes project (2013–2021). The images count as anti-monuments, because instead of creating sculptures to commemorate those enslaved Faustine takes images of herself in various New York locations connected to the slave trade wearing nothing but white shoes. Beasley highlights the multiplicity of interpretations that arise from this, including the fact that by showing her thickset black body the artist stands in clear opposition to images of idealised white femininity. Beasley also brings in recent attempts to remove Confederate monuments, and cites Katherine McCritick who argues diasporic blacks are subjugated by the fact they are in a majority-white space that does not cater to their ‘needs, expressions and knowledges’ (p 57).

The sixth chapter looks at Nathalie Bikoro, a Gabonese artist based in Berlin who uses performance to refer to colonial violence. Beasley discusses two such performances from Bikoro’s After Sundance: On Indigenous Resistance anthology (2013–2018) highlighting how their spiritual and durational nature in Latin American and Canadian sites chosen for their connection to colonial injustices forcefully serve as mnemonic devices. Bikoro has also led meditation workshops to facilitate healing among descendants of the victims of such subjugation and Beasley makes the point that by utilising those strategies she shines a spotlight on the trauma they have inherited.

Dianne Smith is the focus of chapter 7. Smith’s works seek to address Harlem’s gentrification, which she sees as the death of black culture. Beasley reads it through W E B Du Bois’s ethnographic project in that part of New York that highlighted how race and class combined to bring about segregation, even though black communities in such areas also had a creative freedom they might not have been afforded in integrated neighbourhoods. To celebrate Harlem’s residents, Smith has undertaken various projects, including For Colored Girls (2020), an installation using butcher paper, African fabrics, embroidery and wooden mannequin heads. Additionally, in Between Harlem and Me (2021), she has juxtaposed images of past and present Harlemites. Through her works Smith gets the local people to identify and celebrate themselves, to recognise their agency and attain self-pride. Beasley convincingly analyses how and why her projects are empowering.

The final chapter looks at the socially engaged practices of Simone Leigh and Vanessa German. The projects here fall under the category of social practice, which is the interaction of artists with communities to foster awareness around an issue, or to boost the physical or psychological health of the audience over a period of time. ^[4]  Beasley describes Leigh’s Waiting Room from 2016 at the New Museum in New York, where she co-ordinated several activities to improve the mental and physical well-being of women of colour. It was fascinating learning about this as my frame of reference for her work was as a sculptor, having come across her work at the Venice Biennale in 2022 where she represented the United States. Vanessa German bought a building in her neighbourhood in Pittsburgh that she dubbed the Art House and where she has launched a few programmes enabling children, LGBTQ and BIPOC artists to flourish creatively. Beasley describes both artists as ‘cultural workers who carve out spaces of rest, resistance and renewal to reimage possibility as a strategy to survive and live’ (p 96). While the statement is a bit woolly and not the easiest to decipher, the impression made on the reader is that their practice helps the vulnerable to make sense of their situations and consider solutions.

This is a valuable book as it enables readers to learn about disparate practices. The artists Beasley analyses look at the legacies of slavery and colonialism and work at mitigating these. The author has spent time with the subjects and adds his scholarly foundation to evaluate the products of their imaginations in a compelling manner. If a future edition clears up the various typos, it will become an essential guide to the ways artists of colour address necropolitics in Africa and beyond.

Myron M Beasley, Performance, Art, and Politics in the African Diaspora: Necropolitics and the Black Body is published by Routledge Focus, 2023, 120 pp, 16 b/w illustrations, ISBN 9780367136925

^[1]   See Myron M Beasley, Performance, Art, and Politics in the African Diaspora: Necropolitics and the Black Body, Routledge, London, 2023 p 30

^[2]   See Claire Tancons, ed, Revelling the Past, Carnivalizing History: On Leah Gordon’s ‘Kanaval: a People’s History of Haiti in Six Chapters’, Cross Fine Art, London, 2022; and Deborah A Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2011

^[3]   See Akin Oladimeji, ‘Performing History: Jelili Atiku’s performances, Lubaina Himid’s and Kimathi Donkor’s Toussaint Louverture, Steve McQueen’s Carib’s Leap and Yinka Shonibare’s Mr & Mrs Andrews, Third Text Online, 12 May 2023

^[4]    See the Tate’s definition of ‘Socially Engaged Practice’

Akin Oladimeji is a writer, critic and lecturer in visual culture at the London College of Contemporary Arts (an associate college of the University for the Creative Arts), and a regular contributor to eflux.com. His interview with Jelili Atiku was published in the Spring 2023 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.