Across the twentieth century, Black artists transformed the visual meanings of Blackness under modernity. Introducing a fresh approach, Kobena Mercer shows how such changes were driven by the creative friction of cross-cultural dialogue. In Afromodernism, Mercer examines dialogic aesthetics of ambiguation, hyphenation, and transcoding among African American, Caribbean, and Black British artists at six key turning points, including the New Negro presence at the world’s fairs of the 1900s, Harlem Renaissance encounters with African art, post-1945 abstraction, and the 1960s critique of the society of spectacle. Putting artists such as Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, Frank Bowling, and Adrian Piper into conversation with such critical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall, Mercer reframes the arc of modernism within the Black Atlantic and opens a new angle on twentieth-century art.

Kobena Mercer is Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Art History and Humanities at Bard College. He is author of Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s, also published by Duke University Press.