The peer-reviewed international journal African and Black Diaspora recently published an article about the work of Studio Art Assistant Professor Nicole Awai from Dr. Marsha Pearce, Cultural Studies scholar and educator at the University of the West Indies (UWI) St Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago.
The article, “Picturing theory: Nicole Awai’s black ooze as post-diaspora expression,” attends to the motif of ooze in Awai’s work which made its first appearance in early the 2000s. “Rather than dislocation and disjuncture, the article posits the idea of the viscous or the ooze as a symbol of diverse affiliations and nuanced mobilities,” writes Pearce in her abstract.
Given contexts of globalization and transnationalism, and calls within the academe for new vocabularies to describe contemporary migrations and encounters, this article looks to the visual arts in its proposal of a lexicon for articulating mobilities and self-fashioning. In its consideration of a post-diaspora theory, the article lays a foundation for its argument by putting the ideas of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in dialog with the work of Trinidadian-born, US-based contemporary artist Nicole Awai....Furthermore, the ooze is advanced as a means of understanding post-diaspora in gendered terms. The article asks: what forms of expression are available to reconfigure identities as post-diasporic? It argues that Nicole Awai’s work is one such expression.
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