Decolonising Love

Abstract

This article reconsiders Frank Bowling’s figurative paintings from the early 1960s, emphasising the recurrence of intimate affects in this body of works. It argues that the representation of romantic entanglements is cardinal rather than marginal in this artist’s negotiation of both personal and pictorial freedoms. This becomes especially clear when Bowling’s early work is set against the backdrop of nativist anxieties about the growing visibility of interracial unions in postwar Britain. With this in mind, and in a nod to the growing literature on love and anti-racist resistance, the article presents affective relationships and their visual manifestations as charged sites for the renegotiation of unequal power relations. Not only does this analysis restore political substance to a series of paintings that is rarely considered by scholars of Bowling’s work, but points toward new ways of reassessing the field of mid-twentieth century modernism in terms of diasporic and intersectional phenomenologies of desire.