Samantha Noël

Diasporic Art in the Age of Black Power seeks to examine the impact of the Black Power Movement on visual art as it emerged in the political, historical, and social contexts of the United States and the Anglophone Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, it aims to identify instances in which the iterations of the Third World Left in the US and the Caribbean crossed paths and determined a need for internationalism in Black creative expression that worked in tandem with the political radicalism of that era. Diasporic Art in the Age of Black Power aims to determine whether or not these artists were able to create a connective notion of a trans-Black aesthetic that was distinct from American art and Caribbean art altogether and that could ultimately find an affiliation with art of the Third World. Within this trajectory, the international reach of art created in Kingston, Jamaica, or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could be vast. Despite the fact that abstraction created in the Western world may have been perceived as universalist, the art created by Black Caribbean and American artists may very well have been just as universalist in the Global South, which holds the majority of the world’s population.