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Foreword / Patricia Bickers -- The harmful consequences of Postblack -- Africa 05 : polemic -- Dead artists' society -- Black artists and the fetishisation of the 1980s -- Black British artists and problems of systemic invisibility and eradication : creating exhibition histories of that which is not there -- Framing Black art -- 'Handsworth songs' and the archival image 10 Black British and other African diaspora artists visualising slavery -- 2000's got to be Black -- Next we change Earth -- Keith Piper, Donald Rodney and the artists' response to the archive -- Black British photography -- Sokari Douglas Camp CBE -- William Kentridge : the main complaint -- Hurvin Anderson : double consciousness -- Jonathan Jones : untitled (the tyranny of distance) -- Vanley Burke : an Inglan story, an Inglan history -- Helen Wilson : painting for a brighter future -- Barbara Walker : private face -- Barbara Walker : it's a bit much -- Reviewpiece : Ajamu & Sunil Gupta -- Pat Ward Williams : isolated incidents -- Donald Rodney : three songs on pain light & time -- Ben Jones : in the spirit, in the flesh -- Frank Bowling and the enigma of Guyana -- Charles White's 10- and 12- inch vinyl messages -- Hew Locke's depictions of royalty -- Independence and cultural nationalism in Caribbean art -- Black artists and the Greater London Council -- Art and Society, Jonathan Greenland interview with Eddie Chambers -- Contemporary art or contemporary African art? : the inevitable death of the latter -- Richard Hylton, the nature of the beast : cultural diversity and the visual arts sector : a study of policies, initiatives and attitudes 1976-2006 : afterword -- Elvan Zabunyan, Black is a color (a history of African American art) : book review -- "Black my story, (Museum de Paviljoens, Netherlands, 2003) : book review -- Criticize : press responses to Black art an' done and the pan-Afrikan connection exhibitions -- Àsìkò goes outernational -- Jamaica goes outernational.

Cover -- Half-title -- Endorsement -- Title page -- Copyright information -- Table of contents -- List of Illustrations -- Black: For Those Who Have Been for Generations in 'the Lower Case' -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Introduction: England Isn't Home -- 1 De Street weh Dem Seh Pave Wid Gold -- 2 Towards the Black 70s -- 3 Rasta This and Dreadlocks That -- 4 Leggo de Pen1 -- 5 Africa: The Call of the Continent -- 6 Fyah! -- 7 Picture on the Wall -- 8 Failing the Cricket Test -- Conclusion: (Dawning of a) New Era -- Notes -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: De street weh dem seh pave wid gold -- Chapter 2: Towards the Black 70s -- Chapter 3: Rasta This and Dreadlocks That -- Chapter 4: Leggo de Pen -- Chapter 5 Africa: The Call of the Continent -- Chapter 6: Fyah! -- Chapter 7: Picture on the Wall -- Chapter 8: Failing the Cricket Test -- Conclusion: (Dawning of a) New Era -- Bibliography -- Publications -- Songs and music -- Exhibitions -- Websites -- Press releases -- Television -- Film -- Index

This article concerns itself with a new body of work by Jamaican artist T'waunii Sinclair. The work utilizes the machete, in some respects a common, everyday implement but one which is imbued with all manner of associations, some challenging (for example, the British media's reference to machetes as code for Black criminality). Other associations, ones that Sinclair is keen to advance in his work, relate to the African diaspora, Caribbean history (particularly that of Haiti), and the machete as a symbol of enslavement and a tool in insurrections against slavery. The article places Sinclair's work into several machete-related contexts and considerations. While a machete is not an expansive surface on which to execute a figurative painting, Sinclair achieves a copious amount of expression in these works, creating images that range from cartographic depictions of Hispaniola to an insurrection in progress to sets of eyes expressing horror, terror, or surprise. Through these images, the cultural life of the lowly implement is given the most dramatic range of fillips.

This discussion essay on Hazel V. Carby's Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands considers the contrasting ways the dominant society and the people of the African diaspora approach and regard research into family histories. Beginning with reflections on the somewhat dreaded though seemingly benign question, "Where are you from?," the essay explores the shortcomings and racial biases of popular genealogical websites, contrasting these with the deeply and profoundly nuanced ways Carby's book tackles fundamental questions, shortcomings, and difficulties in endeavors to trace ancestry. Along the way, the essay references Alex Haley's Roots and then takes up the Moynihan Report and Maury Povich's daytime TV show, Maury, both of which, the author asserts, reflect the pathology of depicting the black father as absent and deviant. The essay concludes with considerations of an inevitably settled yet nevertheless creatively fertile "mixed upness" of the creation of African diaspora family histories.

This article discusses the changing nature of art history when it comes to black British artists and suggests that such history has perhaps moved away from existing to instead correcting or addressing the systemic absences of such artists from British art. This is typified by Rasheed Araeen's 1989 exhibition The Other Story, the first major attempt to create a broad black British art history, and several other not dissimilar, exhibitions. The article also considers what changes to the fortunes of a small number of black British artists might be deduced from the awarding of honors by the queen and the extension of membership in the Royal Academy to a handful. The article draws attention to the ways in which major London galleries such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Serpentine, and the Whitechapel have, over the course of the past two decades, hosted the first main-space solo shows of black British artists' work. With so much having happened to limited numbers of black British artists, this introduction suggests that burgeoning scholarship on these and other artists is timely, and that the articles assembled for this issue of Nka are a reflection of this increased attention. Among its concluding considerations are the ways in which much of this new scholarship emanates from US rather than from British universities. Finally, the article urges a "rescuing from obscurity" of important pioneering texts on black British artists.

Photographer Mia Gröndahl takes as her subject the people caught in the struggles and seismic changes taking place in countries and sites of tension, such as Egypt and Palestine. In ways markedly distinct from typical photojournalism, Gröndahl's images show her to be a particularly empathetic documenter of the visual manifestations of struggle, resistance, and change, revealing both the humanity and tenacity of her subjects. Gröndahl has produced fascinating visual documents that emphatically avoid the simple dichotomies beloved of the mainstream media, frequently enabling, or compelling, us to look again at the powerful medium of graffiti and how, in cities such as Cairo, the graffiti artist articulates and documents social upheaval. To engage with Gröndahl's photographs is to begin to engage with the complexities of the Arab Spring and the ways in which Cairo's graffiti artists have learned so much from the graffiti of the Palestinian struggle.

This text explores some of the ways in which press photographs have visualized key episodes of rioting involving Black people in the English cities of London and Birmingham. These range from the Notting Hill riots of 1958 through the riots that took place in Birmingham, Brixton, and Tottenham in 1985. This text considers four wire photographs from the Baltimore Sun's historical photo archive. Wire photos differed from traditional photographic prints insofar as the wire print resulted from breakthrough technology that allowed a photographic image to be scanned, transmitted over "the wire" (telegraph, phone, satellite networks), and printed at the receiving location. Opening here with a press photograph of a group of Black youth overturning a large police van during the course of the Brixton riots of 1981, I argue that all of the photographs discussed shed light on the multiple challenges endured by generations of Black people in Britain, even as they have endured pronounced episodes of violence, at the hands of individuals as well as the state. Considering the image of the lone petrol bomber participating in the Lozells, Birmingham, riots of 1985, I further examine the media-generated pathology of the Black bomber, forced to take his place alongside existing pernicious notions of the Black mugger and Black rapist.

Cherise Smith's book Enacting Others brings together a disparate group of artists who "have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed." Smith delivers a particularly engaging study because questions of identity and the possibilities of shifting or transforming identities are particularly relevant in societies, such as the United States, that seem emphatically riven and delineated along fixed lines of identity — of race, sex, gender, and so on.