The Significance of Diaspora Politics in the Visual Arts

The author's own awareness of having a ‘diasporic identity’ was brought about by my having lived through two historical junctures of heightened racism in my home countries of Britain and Australia. As a consequence this book presents material that relates to historical moments relevant to the author’s lived experience: Powellism (the far-right British politician Enoch Powell’s intervention in 1968 in the field of race relations) and Hansonism (the racialised terrain of Australia and Queensland in particular that surfaced following the creation of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party from the mid-1990s). The cultural counterweights to Powellism and Hansonism – Rock against Racism The Black Art Movement and Pauline Pantsdown – each devised novel ways to resist the resurgence of populist racism. More significantly perhaps the book will shed new light on the seemingly exhausted debate concerning art and protest by positioning the disaporic sensibility as thinking ‘in the interval’ and forging new ways of signifying belonging.