Performing Race and Belonging in the Modern City: Richard Bruce Nugent, Yinka Shonibare, Hank Willis Thomas, and Les Sapeuses as Postcolonial Flâneurs

In Performing Race and Belonging in the Modern City: Richard Bruce Nugent, Yinka Shonibare, Hank Willis Thomas, and Les Sapeuses as Postcolonial Flâneurs, I examine four transnational case studies that each seeks to disrupt the power of colonialism through art and material culture by considering race and visual culture within the geopolitical boundaries imprinted on the spatial makeup of the modern city. The artists and subculture movement include Richard Bruce Nugent, Yinka Shonibare, Hank Willis Thomas, and Les Sapeuses of the Congo. I consider the ways in which they incorporate a concept that I term postcolonial flânerie, referencing the nineteenth-century Parisian concept, that calls attention to historical relationships of power enacted through intertwined ideas of gazing and surveillance in the contested space of the city. Each artist tethers the visual language and formal elements of their writing or artwork to the nineteenth-century colonial era and the European flâneur. Their work exists in and hovers between two temporal locations at once: then and now, here and there. They assert their right to space by metaphorically inserting themselves, through their writing or artwork, into the historical space of modernity – and the city – that previously excluded them. Through their varying acts of postcolonial flânerie, the artists and writers in this dissertation assert their belonging in the spaces of the city. As I show, they take up literal space in different ways, such as constructing large scale public artworks that feature black subjects; they traverse the invisible boundaries of segregated spaces in the city through the simple act of walking and being; and they take up historical space by inserting themselves into the modernist canon through their revisionist art or writing that looks back to nineteenth-century Europe in different ways. It is important that the subjects of this dissertation bind their work to nineteenth-century Europe. The modernist canon has long excluded people of color and failed to recognize the ways in which modernism and its developments are intertwined with both colonialism and the history of slavery. Each of the case studies that I examine reinterprets the historical flâneur vis-à-vis race and the idea of taking up space regarding the ongoing social and political regulation of public space and the city