From the Harlem Renaissance to Black Dada: Adam Pendleton’s entangled histories

Abstract

The Black Dada Reader by the American artist Adam Pendleton collates a range of literary, philosophical and visual resources to form an educational guide to Black Dada as an artistic concept. Kathryn Brown’s article studies the structure of the Reader through a close investigation of four included texts: by W.E.B. Dubois, Hugo Ball, Amiri Baraka (also known as LeRoi Jones) and Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael). Focusing on Pendleton’s combinations of word and image in a range of formats, Brown explores how Black Dada problematises histories of conceptual art and connects them to political narratives about race that have unfolded in the United States over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.