Creating notebooks, photographs and interventions: Visualizing African, Caribbean and Arabic presence in Europe

The article explores the way in which African, Caribbean and Arabic European presence is visualized by diasporic women artists. With histories associated with recent migration to Europe by persons from non-European, Southern backgrounds, perceptual practice is presented as partial and feminist. The article makes explicit the perceptions, perspectives and viewpoints we are positioned by as persons associated with the postcolonies making claims of identity in Europe. Charting a historical trajectory of cultural politics, aesthetics and activism associated with photography and film, I explore the artworks in relation to aesthetics, tropes and techniques. The work will be contextualized within recent popular media images and perceptions of African and Arab migration by the European press. The artworks explored here are imaginary inscriptions whose starting point alludes to migratory routes and journeying – often initial experiences in developing a sense of belonging. I present my own recent screen/photography installation Arrival (2010) and include works by Yto Barrada, and Berni Searle. They evoke critical perspectives that talk back, emerging from long histories of counter-narration that make meanings of blackness that engage with the gaze outwards from postcolonial spaces and diasporic subjects, as well as from the look back.