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Art of the transnational Caribbean has come to be positioned by an understanding of the African diaspora that is oriented to an American “centre,” a situation to be explored for what it reveals about the hegemonic status of the United States in the discipline of contemporary art history. The predominant uses of the diaspora concept both in art-historical narratives and in curatorial spaces are those that connect to United States-based realities, with little pertinence to a strictly transnational theorization. This has implications for how modern art and contemporary art are thought about in relation to the Caribbean and its diaspora, in a way that this article demonstrates with attention to a number of artists at multiple sites, in Trinidad, Guyana, Britain and America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Art of the African diaspora has become the focus of various curatorial interests in displaying and documenting an expanded, circum-Atlantic geography of blackness based on a notion of diaspora that once seemed promising for imagining an inter- or transnational community. However, the recent application of the diaspora concept to curatorial spaces has become susceptible to a provincializing attitude grounded in United States-centered experiences. This essay interrogates the ways in which such a U.S. locus for the African diaspora generates a hegemonic spatio-temporal scheme of new "margins" and "centers." With reference to visual examples, it recognizes attempts among artists and curators in Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean to dismantle and disavow the hegemonic use of race and the diaspora concept as founding categories of art historiography and of public memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contemplates the "Black to Black," an exhibition that tries to rediscover black America as the disregarded cultural locale of Jamaica and Great Britain. The exhibit is a detailed critical inspection of Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the U.S., Jamaica and Great Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the author commented that the exhibition mongers quite a fiction due to the fact that no BAM exist in Jamaica and Great Britain in those periods.