Third Text

Third Text: Critical Perspective on Contemporary Art & Culture July 2010 issue is out. Covering a breadth of geographical zones, issue 105 addresses critical cultural matters against the background of global contexts and localities such as Brazil, Turkey, the Balkans, Hungaria, India, Palestine and Haiti, to name but a few.

Featured in this issue is Christine Eyene’s essay ‘Sekoto and Negritude, the ante-room of French Culture’. Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993), one of the pioneers of African Modernism, left South Africa in 1947 to further his art training in France and engage with the School of Paris that had been so influential in the development of South African Modern art.
Having managed to overcome the colour bar in a society racially divided, well before the advent of Apartheid, Sekoto found himself alienated in post-war Paris. A Black African with no command of the French language, stumbling against the Eurocentrism of the Parisian art scene, he found a sense of community with the French-speaking African and Caribbean Diaspora rallied behind the ideology of Negritude.
Drawing on written resources and testimonies from Sekoto’s friends, this essay investigates the painter’s relation to Négritude from a diasporic perspective and proposes to examine Sekoto's and his mentor Ernest Mancoba's contrasted responses to this movement.

Of interest to Creative Caribbean Network readers, ‘The Germ of the Future’, a review of the Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Haiti by Polly Savage.

‘Third Text is an international scholarly journal providing critical perspectives on art and visual culture. It examines the theoretical and historical ground by which the West legitimises its position as the ultimate arbiter of what is significant within this field. Third Text provides a forum for the discussion and reappraisal of the theory and practice of art, art history and criticism, and the work of artists hitherto marginalised through racial, gender, religious and cultural differences. Dealing with the diversity of art practice within the visual arts. Third Text addresses the complex cultural realities that emerge when different world views meet, and the challenge this poses to eurocentric and ethnocentric aesthetic criteria. Third Text develops new discourses and radical interdisciplinary scholarships that go beyond the confines of eurocentricity.’ (Source: Third Text)

See full content of Third Text issue 105, Volume 24, Issue 4, July 2010 here.
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