Remember to die: recovering belonging in diasporic end of life art

Abstract

ABSTRACT Anticolonial and Black feminist scholars and artists have made a convincing case that political and social legibility for racially marked peoples requires active and multi-sensory reiteration. To presence what has been effaced or distorted, images, numbers, and texts must be redacted, annotated, rescaled, reframed, relocated, and repurposed. In dialogue with this work, this piece discusses the vernacular of the diasporic art made in English hospices with Black and Brown migrants at the end of their lives. I suggest that such outsider art makes and rehearses migrant belonging in two interrelated ways: by creating temporary niches for rest, recovery, and pleasure; and by bringing into appearance the quotidian, heterogenous times of Black and Brown diasporic belonging that are out of sync with the rights and timelines of formal citizenship. The critical possibilities that attunement to rest and pleasure can precipitate in citizenship studies is an underlying theme.