World is Africa

World is Africa: Writings on Diaspora Art brings together more than 30 important texts by Eddie Chambers, who for several decades has been an original and a critical voice within the field of African diaspora art history. The texts range from book chapters and catalogue essays, to shorter texts including an op-ed and an afterword. Chambers focuses on contemporary artists and their practices, from a range of international locations, who for the most part are identified with the African diaspora. The book will be a valuable and important contribution to the emerging discipline of black British art history in particular, as well as the broader field of African diaspora studies. None of the texts brought together are available online and none of them, until now, have been available outside of the original publication in which they first appeared. The volume contains several substantive new pieces of writing, one of which reflects on the patronage of the Greater London Council (GLC) extended to a number of Black artists in 1980s London. Another text considers the art world 'fetishisation' of the 1980s as the latest manifestation of a field reluctant to accept the majority of Black British artists as valid individual practitioners in their own right. Another new text introduces readers to the little-known record sleeve and book jacket illustrations of Charles White, the American artist who was the subject of a major retrospective in 2018 at major galleries across the US Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The other new text re-examines the map paintings of Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born artist who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain. Chambers provides a compelling commentary on work by a number of important artists, written at various stages of their careers. Together, the range of texts in World is Africa amount to a convincing and engaging overview of rarely-considered narratives relating to artists of the Africa diaspora. As such, the book will be a valuable and important contribution to the emerging discipline of black British art history in particular, as well as the broader field of African diaspora studies and African diaspora art history.