Post-Imperial Legacies: The Art of Ingrid Pollard and Sokari Douglas Camp

Due to the complex web of race discrimination, gender oppression, art-world elitism, and economics, black British women artists have been neglected by art historical discourse and criticism. My dissertation critically addresses these omissions. Since the 1980s, two London-based artists have begun consciously to articulate their personal histories, investigate the politics of race and place, disrupt traditional artistic canons, and address the xenophobia that has been lodged in popular culture, films, literature, and art since Britain's nineteenth-century imperial territorial expansion. Guyanan-born Ingrid Pollard investigates the underexamined relationships between perceptions about race and sexuality, representations of black women, travel writing, nationalism, and British landscape painting through her hand-colored photographs and photo-constructions. Through her life-size, abstract, metal sculptures of Kalahari masquerades, Sokari Douglas Camp, a Nigerian-born artist, examines the Western ethnographic method of exhibiting African art. By questioning the perceived sanctity of British museums and the British landscape-sites that signify the prowess and cultural contention that British imperialism ignited-Camp and Pollard through their investigation of black bodies intentionally challenge the authority of history and formulate self-determined, alternative legacies. While my dissertation focuses on the work of Camp and Pollard, it examines the historic black presence in Britain, investigates the origins and significance of the black British arts movement in the 1980s, and constructs a broad narrative of postimperialism and black British art. This study is based in part on extensive interviews that I conducted with Pollard and Camp between 1997 and 2001. In addition, this dissertation, which is firmly rooted in the traditional tools of art history (iconography, iconology, and formal analysis) and informed by black cultural studies, feminism, literary criticism, postcolonial theory, semiotics, social history, and Victorian cultural and travel theories, reexamines the ways that black British artistic and intellectual life has previously been theorized. Moreover, my dissertation has larger art historical implications, as it explicates the richly complex multiple layers of contemporary artistic practice.