Postcolonial Research Group Seminar Series

Wednesday December 10

Dr Kobena Mercer, “Poetic Monsters and the Postcolonial Grotesque”

5 pm

Room G9, Percy Building

Poetic Monsters and the Postcolonial Grotesque

Excessive, incongruous, changeable and contradictory: the very reasons why the “grotesque” was once devalued in Western art history are now key factors in its resurgence among artists addressing the post-colonial condition. Examining works by Hew Locke (Guyana/Britain) and Jane Alexander (South Africa), this talk considers the “poetic monsters” of cross-cultural hybridisation as a mode of imagistic intelligence that cuts through the binary language of identity to reveal alternative approaches to the ethical dilemmas of living with difference.

Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora and is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. He was Reader in Art History and Diaspora Studies at Middlesex University, London, and has taught at New York University and University of California at Santa Cruz, and has received fellowships from Cornell University and the New School University in New York.

His first book, Welcome to the Jungle (1994) opened new lines of enquiry in art, film, and photography and his writings feature in several landmark anthologies, including Out There (1990), Cultural Studies (1992), Art and Its Histories (1998) and Theorizing Diaspora (2003). His monographs include James VanDer Zee, Adrian Piper, Issac Julien, Keith Piper and Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

He is series editor of Annotating Art’s Histories, co-published by MIT and inIVA, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (forthcoming 2008).