This book is a long-awaited study of the intersecting histories of Black Consciousness (BC) and visual culture in South Africa, framed around the politics and ideas of Bantu Stephen Biko and the influence that he and BC had on the discourse of race in South Africa and the world. Shannen Hill has deliberately chosen to present accounts of BC, Biko, and the visual cultures that were created in the same space, in order to comprehend them together. This book's emergence constitutes a timely intervention in the field of South African art history and visual culture that has generally favored simplistic but uplifting narratives of the triumph of nonracialism. These accounts have failed to understand the significance and meanings of artworks produced under the influence of BC, even within cultural formations associated with the politics of nonracialism.
Far from being a project of race-centeredness and racial awareness, Hill argues that BC...