Counternarratives of West African Visual Artists’ migration to Britain

Amid growing calls to decolonize institutions and renewed public engagement with the histories and legacies of empire, slavery and colonialism, this research aims to reconstruct lost or erased histories of West African visual artists who migrated to Britain between 1930 and the late 1970s. By collecting new archival and oral histories, the study seeks to recentre these histories epistemically. Significantly, it moves away from British encounters with African art through colonial exhibitions and ethnographic collecting, instead mapping networks, relations and cultural exchanges shaped by and within the context of empire that facilitated these artists’ migration. Foregrounding West African British historical entanglements, these historic accounts will be used to further debates over decolonizing the interdisciplinary field of migration studies.

Biography

Pamela Kea is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on: West African regional and international migration; return migration; transnationalism and relations of care; archival recovery and entangled histories between West Africa and Britain. She is the author of Land, Labour and Entrustment: West African Female Farmers and the Politics of Difference (Brill 2010) and many journal articles. She has recently started a Leverhulme trust project grant entitled Counternarratives of West African Visual artists' migration and travel to Britain.