Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the essays in this collection by interrogating the existing questions that have been posed about the relationship between creativity and politics in the light of the socio-political upheavals that have shifted the essences of black cultures in the twenty first century. The cultures of the world are going through a period of flux due to globalization, migration, interaction of local and global politics, and the black cultures are not left behind. In terms of art and its production, there is a fashioning of the self and one’s creativity to respond to the realities of a world reshaped by the inward and outward mobilities of different cultural groups. We are concerned with the question of the ways black artists, vertically and horizontally mobile, now interpret their art to interpret the world. We note that the artistic productions of black artists in Africa and the African diasporas have been always been seen through the prism of liberatory politics sometimes to the exclusion of its other potentials. Yet, technological innovations, migratory patterns, changing meanings of diaspora, have all given us new lenses through to view how humans are reformatting their subjectivity.