Distinct yet intersecting debates concerning the possibilities of a global art history and a decolonial or decolonized art history have reoriented the mainstream of the discipline’s focus in the last decade. Among the art historical strategies stemming from this inquiry, an incorporative mode, seeking to bring underrepresented artists and makers into the fold of global history as moderns, emerges prominently alongside a deconstructive mode, which eschews the universality of the global in favor of a plurality of local differences and counter-institutional proposals. Both approaches have been variously formalized in recent years, reverberating through recent shifts in curatorial practice, curricular designs for survey courses, and the training of the discipline’s students at all levels. Coedited by Huey Copeland and Steven Nelson, Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World arrives at these debates with a collection of essays that negotiate a third approach. Addressing what the coeditors term the “troubled conjuncture” of Blackness and modernism (1), the volume examines how Black artists and makers have been both integral to and repressed from the narrative of modernity and its aesthetic dispositions—“mutually constituted and fractured from each other,” as Copeland and Nelson write (5). The task of rereading modernism from the perspective of the Black Atlantic demands a “weaving together of discourses” that refuses either the “supplantation or supplementation of existing structures” (8). Taken together, the nine essays and the volume’s introduction make an important intervention in the evolving consideration of (Black) modernism’s location within art history and its methods.

The anthology’s multifarious methodological itinerary reflects a form of critical flexibility modeled arguably by Black studies; one would think especially to Christina Sharpe’s call that Black studies scholars become “undisciplined” (Sharpe, 2016). The book takes up this task through its anthological form, hosting scholarly interventions that cover multiple time periods, methodological approaches, geographic locales, and writerly forms. Distinct from the more typical scholarly chapters that follow, the first piece in the book is a photo essay by Nelson accompanied by a short text introducing recent work by Simone Leigh. Subsequent chapters use tools from psychoanalysis, deconstruction, theology, and intellectual and social history mobilized toward analyses involving Brazil, the United States, Nigeria, Suriname, Cuba, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. This notably contributes to prior attempts to expand the typical Anglo-American remit of Black Atlantic scholarship and curation to its Francophone, Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch provinces in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Double Consciousness and Modernity (Gilroy, 1993; Naro, Sansi-Roca and Treece, 2007; Pedrosa and Toledo, 2021).

Several of the volume’s contributions follow this expansive trajectory. C. C. McKee’s essay traces the ambivalences of Camille Pissaro’s time in the Danish West Indies and Venezuela. Reading Pissaro’s representations of laboring Black women in his Caribbean scenes as fantasy constructions, McKee persuasively identifies how the artist’s images “retroact Black being toward bondage in freedom with picturesque lens” (61). The paintings depict Black women in an ambiguous temporality whose visual language presents an indistinction between slavery and free labor. In McKee’s reading, the paintings express a desire for the stability of colonial authority (75). Their analysis demonstrates the formative yet shadowy work of anti-Black desires in generating painterly visions of the world heralded as radical in the work of historians like T. J. Clark and Linda Nochlin as distinctly modern (59).

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie’s contribution examines how the Yoruba figure of Eṣu models a “discursive framework” through which the multiplicity of Black diasporic modernisms can be interpreted (132). Ogbechie looks specifically to artworks of Wifredo Lam, Ben Enwonwu, and James Hampton to discern the work of what he calls “numinous affect,” a spiritual sensibility that manifests across the three artist’s works as traces of the aesthetic cults surrounding Yoruba and Fon deities. The chapter notably extends pathways of interpretation that have identified the ways African spiritualism has been syncretically remixed throughout the Black Atlantic, pointing to what the author deems the centrality of Black artists to the tropes of circulation, exchange, networks, and connectivity that have defined modernity and modernism (151).

Adrienne Edwards’s analysis of the “peripatetic artist Stanley Bruown” expands the volume’s concern for movement and migration as key modernist thematic reoriented through Blackness’s interrogative force (180). Edwards identifies how the Surinamese artist while working in the Netherlands, pursued conceptualist strategies that departed from the wholeness envisioned in the promise of representation and embraced the minoritarian possibilities of a “partial presence” (195). Edwards locates these tactics in Brouwn’s works like this way brouwn (1962), a piece compiling maps of the directions the artist receives upon asking urban passersby for assistance. One of Edwards’s contributions is to situate Bruown’s minoritarian dissent as responding to the longue durée of a racializing regime of representation in the Dutch context, stretching from John Gabriel Stedman’s eighteenth-century travelogue in Suriname to the first Surinamese feature film released after independence, Wan Pipel (1976). In addition to its deft analysis, the essay is significant for attending to Brouwn’s relatively understudied practice in histories of conceptual art.

Matthew Francis Rarey’s study traces the racialized dynamics of bodily signification and inscription in eighteenth-century Portugal and Brazil. Rarey attends specifically to how remnants of archival discourse produced a racializing account of Black people through official anecdotes describing mandingas or bolsas, talismanic leather pouches worn largely by men. Rarey’s reading of discursive violence, and its creative deconstruction by the Black mandingueiro José Francisco Pereira, exemplifies the volume’s interest in the discrepant timelines produced by the conjunction of Blackness and modernism. More than simply demonstrating the common postulate that Black artists are modern, the essay’s focus on the eighteenth century extends one of the anthology’s overarching claims: that Blackness productively troubles the presuppositions that have generally guided the when, where, and who of modernism (9).

Scholarly work on the Black Atlantic has continually pointed to the synonymity of modernity with slavery, empire, racializing schemas, and the capitalist world system. The aesthetic practices that attain the label “modernism” variously bear the traces of such violence, and the volume holds that Blackness might serve as the royal road towards examining this dynamic. This is what Simon Gikandi identifies in his chapter within Black Modernisms as “Blackness as part of the primal scene of modernism” (81). Gikandi’s study approaches an intellectual history of Black modernism, tracing how it emerges dialectically in confrontation with modern regimes of racial violence and the political crises they trigger. Gikandi’s dialectical view seeks to account for the contradictions navigated by a nascent Black modernist artistic production, one that was contemporaneous with the typical periodization of European modernism’s break with tradition. Gikandi describes how these aesthetic negotiations, exemplified in the work of Aaron Douglas and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, took up the ambivalent notions of race, nation, and culture through which Blackness came to be known in modern culture. “[Rather] than try to escape the tropes of difference that modernity had come to privilege,” he argues, “early Black modernists developed a discourse and practice in which primitivism and exoticism could be made serviceable to the project of Black freedom and self-expression” (97).

Put into view through Gikandi’s argument is an interpretation of Black modernism as a multifarious assembly of Black voices with distinct answers to the question, “What does it mean to be Black in the violent culture of modernity?” (101). That the question concludes Gikandi’s text points to an indeterminacy or potential that his argument, and the anthology more broadly, seeks to open on to. This openness might accord with a critical project which desires “to introduce a new semantic field/fold appropriate to [the Black subject’s] historic movement,” to refer to the introduction’s engagement with the thought of Hortense Spillers (Spillers, 1987; quoted in Copeland and Nelson, 11). Such a project unites the distinct but consonant arguments elaborated in the book’s essays by Kellie Jones, Kobena Mercer, and Mabel O. Wilson. For Jones, the sculptures of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and Augusta Savage reflect an interpretation of Blackness stemming from their encounters with the French academy’s sculptural ideals, Paris’s racial and sexual liberalism, and the complexities of their social-historical positions as Black women. Jones is particularly attentive to the way Prophet’s and Savage’s sculptures and lives envisioned forms of Black appearance that aligned with contemporaneous debates about the possibilities of a new Negro modern art in the early twentieth century, while also indicating the queer and fem limits of such a conversation (124). On this front, Jones provocatively identifies how Prophet and Savage mobilized their neoclassical sculptural training towards the creation of androgyne and “nonbinary” forms that “reimagine accepted categories and subjectivities, challenging controlling images of gender and pleasure” (117).

Kobena Mercer’s essay extends the volume’s interest in such reimagining by investigating Blackness as an interrogative position that questions modernity’s aesthetic, political, and epistemological precepts. Analyzing abstraction in the practices of Roy DeCarava and Norman Lewis, the essay considers how Blackness becomes “a site of multiplicity—where unforeseeable possibilities come into being—by virtue of being set loose from dualistic codes” (157). Mercer elaborates how both artists productively sever the visual association of racial Blackness with phenomenal darkness through techniques of abstraction in painting and photography, especially sfumato (167). Relativizing a representationalist framework that would read black color in these works exclusively as a racial sign, Mercer offers that DeCarava and Lewis mobilized color and shade to probe the limits of the knowledge vision has long been thought to secure—a problem uniquely relevant to a world reordered by the threat of nuclear destruction at midcentury (164).

Mabel O. Wilson’s chapter concludes the volume, reading Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic work with a focus on its itinerant deconstruction of modern categories of time, space, and history. Drawing the term “roaming” from a Weems series of the same name, Wilson examines how her imagery deploys the significatory site of Black womanhood to force a reexamination of modernity’s “signifiers of nationalism, culture, gender and racial difference,” those terms that “mark history’s unfolding and its hierarchies of power” (202). In the Roaming series and other works discussed in the chapter, Wilson locates the artist’s production of counterhistories that mark an “estrangement” from modernist triumphal architecture (especially, monuments, fascist structures, and museums) and the modern will towards archival knowledge.

The essays collected in the volume undertake, to borrow a phrase from Nahum Dmitri Chandler, the problem of Blackness as a “problem for thought” in general (Chandler, 2008). They elaborate an order of art-historical questions that productively troubles the notion of a stable (Black) modernism, suggesting methodological possibilities that might be taken up across the discipline more broadly.

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One of the book’s contributors, Kobena Mercer, served as the author’s PhD adviser. The author’s review of the text was not motivated by this relationship in any way.