Marcus Garvey’s incantatory words to “Look for me all around you, look for me in the whirlwind” (1925) as he faced incarceration in Atlanta following the failure of the Black Star Line continue to resonate across the African diaspora almost a century later. Or do they? How do contemporary scholars and artists find path back towards Garveyites’s global and racial politics at this time of heightened anti-black sentiment, and how might historical discourse and artistic practice provide avenues for divesting from the hate?

Taking her upcoming eponymous curatorial platform for Sharjah Biennial 14 (March 2019) as a starting point, curator and scholar Claire Tancons brings Indian Ocean epistemologies to bear on a primarily Afro-Atlantic diasporic discourse while introducing ideas from a few of the biennial’s new commissioned projects. Together, these projects by artists such as Rose, Leo Asemota, Jace Clayton, Peter Friedl, Meshac Gaba, Isabel Lewis, Carlos Martiel, Mohau Modisakeng and Caecilia Tripp propose different tracks onto which to embark in the ever-political task of embodying blackness through enfleshment (through the body, movement, with the people) and materialism (from matter)—all the while attending to the global concerns of the cosmo-ecological, the techno-sensorial, and the museo-imaginal.

By bringing together a global outlook onto the cultural conditions and artistic manifestations generated by a concern with the African diaspora at large whose experience all too often functions as a litmus test for global developments to follow, Tancons proposes that processes of diasporisation are always already alternatively dispossessive and repossessive and, as such, reveal the aporetic dimension of the contemporary.