13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics

This book brings together a variety of recent texts by artists, critics and curators on ethnicity and racialized difference, as manifested in the contemporary visual and media arts. A principal touchstone for this book is the celebratory explosion and proliferation of work by artists of colour and First Nations artists in Canada during the 1980s and 1990s in the visual arts, film and video.

These Conversations attempt to illuminate the complexity of the evolution of cultural race politics over the last two decades, engaging its history and formative concepts and by speculating on its future. Several underlying questions remain : what does it mean to continue thinking critically about race in relation to artistic practice and other cultural processes? What has created the situation wherein a recent history of cultural race politics seems to have withered? What is the impact of accelerated globalization and so-called “global culture” on our considerations of culture, race and difference? The authors question “cultural appropriation” and authenticity of cultural forms, so critical and widely debated a decade ago, and question what these concepts continue to mean within “global” cultural contexts, where notions of cultural hybridity, syncretism and fusion are now the order of the day.

With contributions by Cameron Bailey, Dana Claxton, Karma Clarke-Davis, Andrea Fatona, Sharon Fernandez, Gaylene Gould, Richard William Hill, Ken Lum, Scott Toguri McFarlane, Alanis Obomsawin and Kerri Sakamoto.