University of Cambridge
‘We Shift You’: Experimental Infrastructures, Race, Gender, and Unity and Difference in Britain, 1980–97
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis thesis is a cultural study of four ‘experimental infrastructures’ which emerged in the context of race ‘coming home’ (Stuart Hall) in postwar Britain. The four infrastructures are: a friendship group of art students in Leeds (1981–84); Bazaar: South Asian Arts Magazine (1987–92); Panchayat archive (c. 1992–2003); and Horizon Gallery (1987–91). None have been the focus of any major study, thus this thesis offers granular historical reconstructions, drawing from archival research and oral history. It also offers critical analysis of the experimental infrastructures by relating close readings of their formal cultural properties to the conjunctures in which they were situated. This thesis is intended as an interdisciplinary contribution to cultural studies and art history. The first chapter studies Leeds-based art students’ conceptualisation and enactment of political solidarities in artworks and a friendship group (the artist-led infrastructure under discussion in this case) in the years 1980–85. I explore how students at the University of Leeds and Leeds Polytechnic pushed against the limitations of the intellectual and artistic projects developing in their respective art schools, particularly with respect to the articulation of race, gender and class as modalities of domination. The second chapter, a study of Bazaar: South Asian Arts Magazine (1987–92), explores how internationalist queer South Asian and second-generation South Asian cultural activists in Britain ‘repoliticised’ the liberal anti-racist orientation of the magazine’s founders. In a coda to the chapter, I analyse photographer and frequent Bazaar contributor Sunil Gupta’s alternative to the magazine: a media infrastructure coextensive with his artistic practice and aligned with queer black coalitional politics. The ‘Third Worldist’ archive of contemporary art (c. 1992–2003) created by the artists’ collective Panchayat is discussed in Chapter 3. I study this experimental infrastructure in the context of Panchayat’s broader project of renewing earlier histories of internationalist black liberatory and Third Worldist solidarities during the 1990s, following Panchayat’s participation in the Tercera Bienal de la Habana (1989). The fourth chapter explores exhibitions and an art gallery created by ‘London-based Indian modernist’ (LBIM) artists’ collectives in the 1980s. Specifically, I argue that these experimental infrastructures challenged racism in Britain on the basis of a liberal humanist aesthetic philosophy, which was then contested by artists of the British Black Arts Movement and artists engaging with socialist feminism, with whom the LBIMs came to collaborate. The chapter conclusion explores the LBIMs’ and the British Black Arts Movement’s common experience of state multiculturalist depoliticisation. The thesis conclusion considers the demise of Bazaar and the Horizon Gallery in the early 1990s from the standpoint of anti-racist cultural strategy. I argue that the neoliberalisation of both public cultural infrastructure and of racial politics in Britain – carried out as part of the consolidation of the global project of neoliberalism – required a revision of the strategies adopted by artists studied in this thesis, namely liberal pluralism and identity politics. I then gesture to some contemporaneous examples of this re-strategisation. Finally, I offer some summative reflections, which amount to the beginnings of a theory of ‘experimental infrastructures’ as designs and lived examples of non-normative social spaces.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2024
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Khakoo, Alina
- Advisors dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Gopal, Priyamvada
- Tobin, Amy
- Meghani, Shamira
Subjects
dc:subject × 8Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.122319
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/391030