In View of the Tradition: Black Art and Radical Thought

.A field-shaping account of how contemporary Black art revitalizes the Black radical tradition In View of the Tradition argues that contemporary Black artists do not simply comment on politics.They help to generate it. Moving across sculpture, installation, photography, and film, Roderick A.Ferguson shows how Black art clarifies the stakes of capitalism, migration, war, settler colonialism, and ecological crisis while widening the tradition’s feminist, queer, and transnational horizons.The book asks what it means to relocate Black art in the annals of freedom rather than the balance sheets of the marketplace.Reading work by John Akomfrah, Stephen Hayes, Hew Locke, Fabrice Monteiro, Wangechi Mutu, Noah Purifoy, Cauleen Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, Ferguson restores the social character of art: how artworks imagine community, connect histories, and model ways of making and remaking the world.Street-level practices associated with Purifoy reframe official narratives of disorder into studi