‘Dreaming Has a Share in History’: Biding Time in the Work of Lubaina Himid

Abstract

This essay analyses a selection of work by British painter Lubaina Himid through the lens of time, specifically non‐synchronous time as adumbrated by Ernst Bloch, conjunctural time after Stuart Hall, and constellations of Benjaminian time. It engages in close visual readings of Naming the Money (2004), Tousssaint L'Ouverture (1987), and a series of nine paintings Himid has referred to as the Walter Benjamin Kangas (2016), also known as New Kangas from the Archive. Taking different kinds of time as its structural framework, the essay presents new ways of thinking about these artworks that cross past and present narratives of trauma, political agency, subjectivity and change. The essay demonstrates how the use of colour, installation and collage, in a re‐address to history, to art history, to monuments, to time, to memory and to visibility, are central to Himid's practices as an artist: a practice in which she wrests painting from its traditional function as an instrument for white western canon formation, and re‐deploys it in dialogical relation to its origins.

Drawing African Diasporic women anthropologists in dialogue: Decolonizing the canon

“…Such regimes habituate the treatment of Black people as a “kind of raw material” (Spillers et al, 2007, 300), which in anthropology manifests in the treatment of Black anthropologists as informants or assistants rather than theorists (Harrison, 2012, 88–89). Parallel to these regimes in anthropology are those in Western portraiture, which have rendered Black painted subjects as “mute attendants” or “nameless…accessories” (Price, 2021, 655), or exoticized objects. Such images exist within the historically persistent repertory of media representations of Black cisgender and trans women that Bailey (2021) describes as “misogynoir.” The gaze of misogynoir simultaneously seeks possession over Black women's sexualities and productive capacities, yet also dispossession of their symbolic and material capital.…”