Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art

219 Pages·2021·17.034 MB·English

by  Nana Adusei-Poku

Nana Adusei-Poku
Taking Stakes in the Unknown
Image | Volume 180
Nana Adusei-Poku (PhD) is a Senior Academic Advisor and Luma Fellow at the
Center for Curatorial Studies and Contemporary Art at Bard College. Her main
research interests are cultural shifts and how they articulate themselves through
the intersections of art, politics, and popular culture; artistic productions from
the Black diasporas and critical pedagogy in relationship to decolonial aesthetics.
She has articulated these interests through her academic work, the development
of performative Lectures & Workshops as well as curatorial projects. Her articles
have been published in Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art, eflux, Kunst-
forum International, Flashart!, L’Internationale, multidudes, Darkmatter, Afterall
and Yale Theater Magazine a.o. and translated into English, German, Portuguese,
French and Swedish.
Nana Adusei-Poku
Taking Stakes in the Unknown
Tracing Post-Black Art
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
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© 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utili-
zed in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld
Cover illustration: Leslie Hewitt: Riffs on Real Time (1 of 10), 2002-2005 30 x 24 inches
(76.2 x 61 cm), Courtesy the artist and Perrotin
Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld
Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar
Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5294-9
PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5294-3
https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839452943
Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.
Contents
Acknowledgement 7
I. Introduction 9
II. Destabilizing Meaning  41
1 The Textures of History  41
2 What is the script of your time? 42
21 I am everything and now what? 52
3 Economies of the Double-bind 59
31 ADS IMITATE ART, ART IMITATES LIFE, and LIFE IMITATES ADS 64
32 The Economy of Blackness in Unbranded 66
III. Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women 89
1 De-Interpellating Interpellation—Visual Disobediences 89
2 How do I look? (Very good, I must say I am amazed!) 92
3 O my Body, will always remain in question!—
Reviewing the Fanonian Moment 104
31 The Colonial Gaze 105
32 Entanglements 110
IV. Heterotemporality as a Way
of Understanding the Contemporary 113
1 Reclaiming our time 113
2. Riffs on Real Time and the present that is fleeting
though captured 116
21 Possible Presents 121
3 Rewind Selecta 123
4 Hetero-temporality 125
V. Paradox Synchronicities 129
1 Contextualization 129
2 IWHISHIWAS or WISHIWASHI ? 134
21 Taking a Closer Look 135
22 Disposed Desires 136
23 Retrospective Introspectives 139
24 Visual and Temporal Polyphonies 142
3 From Leitkultur to Leightkultur 143
VI. Abstract Facts 155
1 Enter and Exit the New Negro 155
11 Quare—“Built in History” 158
2 Enter and Exit the New Negro—From Invisible Visibilities 160
21 (Qu-)hair Politics and Material Connections 162
3 Enter the New Negro 165
31 Exit the New Negro 167
4 Ambiguity as Chance—Abstraction as Means of Identity 169
41 hidin’ like thieves in the night from life,
Illusions of osasis makin’ you look twice 172
42 Norman Lewis—the not quite “invisible man”
of abstract expressionism 173
43 Playing by the Rules—Turn off the light! 178
VII. Post-Post-black 183
VIII. Bibliography 193
Acknowledgement
This research is the product of a journey—personal, collective, and episte-
mological—and without the support and guidance of many scholars, artists
and friends this book wouldn’t have been possible. In the beginning of my
studies it was a challenge to defend the intellectual value of Taking Stakes in
the Unknown- Tracing Post-Black Art in the German academy and thus I am
honored that this project overtime has been championed and is seen to have
intellectual value. For all of this and more I feel incredibly accomplished to
have this text published with a German press and to contribute to the ongoing
discourses of race and visual culture. I would therefore first like to express
my gratitude to those who have funded and supported this project: the grad-
uate program “Gender as a Category of Gender” at the Centre for Transdisci-
plinary Gender Studies; the Women’s Funding scheme by the Women’s Repre-
sentative at Humboldt University Berlin; the Erasmus funding scheme, which
allowed me to study at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences’
Gender Studies Department. I equally thank the Research Department Cre-
ating 010 at Hogeschool Rotterdam for their support in terms of time to pur-
sue my research, the German Studies Program at Columbia University New
York, the Residency Program Denniston Hill, New York and The Center for
Curatorial Studies, New York.
The coordinates of this project spanned from Berlin over London to Hol-
land and then United States, and made stops from Dakar to Paris. My sincer-
est appreciation goes to my supervisors Gabriele Dietze and Huey Copeland,
who have left their mark on my thinking and constantly challenge me. Their
support, encouragement and belief in this project has often given me the con-
fidence to stand my ground, for which I am eternally grateful. I also would like
to thank Mamadou Diouf, Lawrence Chua, Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie,
for their mentorship. I have encountered so many inspiring thinkers and I
am extremely grateful for their input, critique and thoughts on my project,
including: Lotte Arndt, Sonja Boyce, Avtar Brah, Ama Josephine Budge, Pau-
line Boudry, Lawrence Chua, Florian Cramer, Antke Engel, Lukas Engelman,
David Freedberg, Coco Fusco, Michael Gillespie, Kavita Philips, Julia Roth,
Gayatri Spivak, Greg Tate, Linda Hentschel, Renate Lorenz, Julie Mehretu,
Rene Mussai, Tavia N’yongo, Elizabeth Povinelli, Annie Seaton, Sadie Wear-
ing, Deborah Willis, Michelle Wright, my students at the Humboldt Universi-
8 Taking Stakes in the Unknown
tät zu Berlin, Züricher Hochschule der Künste; Willem de Kooning Academie
Rotterdam; Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and at the
Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College.
I cannot thank you, Alhena Katsof, enough for being a critical friend, deep
thinker and perceptive editor.
Special thanks, goes to all the artists who have allowed me into their stu-
dios, and thus often into their lives and thoughts. I appreciate your generos-
ity and here in particular: Hank Willis Thomas, Philip Metz, and especially
Leslie Hewitt, whose practice and intellect have often left me lost for words
and intellectually activated. I acknowledge the galleries Galerie Perrotin,
Yancey Richardson, Jack Shainman and Hauser&Wirth for their generosity
in providing the included images and support. I must also acknowledge the
profound impact of the Studio Museum of Harlem and the work of Thelma
Golden on this project’s formation.
Finally, I would like to thank my mother and father, who have shared with
me from an early age an appreciation of learning and to my love NIC Kay,
thank you for your patience and care.
I. Introduction
“I believe there is an aesthetic that informs
the art works of black peoples [...] since
aesthetic formulations derive from cul-
tural responses, not from inherent racial
endowments.”
(Bearden 1974, 189)
Post-black—a term popularized by African Americans—was an attempt to
explore and, some might argue, define a collective Blackness in aesthetic,
cultural, and historical terms for the 21st century. The provocative prefix was
easily read as akin to the term post-race and subsequently as a claim to the
end of Blackness. For some, post-black1 epitomized a hopefulness and anti-
cipative futurity at the beginning of the century. Within a linear logic– that
is—the belief that the passing of time is an indicator of progress / change /
evolution, post-black reprised a centuries old desire to realize a multiplicit,
nuanced, and untethered Blackness freed from both the gratuitous violence
and structural oppression that brought it into being whilst easing obligations
to resist such violence and oppression.
I read post-black as a symptom of a discourse that was already in the mak-
ing in Black Studies (in the US) and Cultural Studies (in the UK) since the
beginning of the 90’s and was launched by the arrival of post-structuralism
in the English speaking world. Whether one engages with Hortense Spillers
close reading of Louis Althusser in the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: The Post
Date 1994, listens to Stuart Hall’s speech Race as a Floating Signifyer 1997 or
thinks with Eduard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, which was first translated
into English in 1993, the time prior to the turn of the century was marked by a
decisive shift in Black intellectual thought towards a fusion and further inte-
gration of post-structuralist, post-marxist and post-colonial theory. These
1  I will use two different spellings throughout this text: when I use “post-black” it refers to 
Thelma Golden’s conceptualization and when I use “postblack” I refer to Robert Farris
Thompson’s concept. When I use Black with a capital B, I am highlighting the political di-
mension rather than pointing to skin color. I am also emphasizing that hyphened identities 
like African American or Afro German, may be useful in their specific context, but it is the 
term “Black” that works as an umbrella for an African Diasporic experience.