Detours Through the Black Country: On Al‐An deSouza's Expeditionary Under‐Writings

Abstract

During the summer of the 2016 Brexit vote, the artist Al‐An deSouza (formerly known as Allan deSouza), in the persona of Hafeed Sidi Mubarak Mumbai, was in London conducting a performative expedition, Through the Black Country (TBC). The expedition culminated in a travelling exhibition consistent with deSouza's larger practice of ‘restaging the material culture of the colonial period in order to identify its ongoing aftermath’. TBC rescripts Henry Stanley's published expedition diaries, Through the Dark Continent (1878), to describe instead a ‘reverse’ journey from Zanzibar to England. This essay contextualizes TBC and related projects through deSouza's history of multiple migrations, involvement in the Black Arts movement in 1980s Britain, and their claim to a multiple self as simultaneous self‐explication and resistant opacity. Central to deSouza's project are questions of what it means to be not‐British, a consideration of ‘British art’ as counter‐imperial, and their implications for post‐Brexit nationalism and empire‐nostalgia.