Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Sonponnoi, 1987. Gelatine silver black and white with hand tinting. 16 x 12 inches. Courtesy of Autograph: Association of Black Photographers, London

Too snugly for many Britons, the children of people who emigrated from the colonies in large numbers after World War II. By the mid-Seventies, those children--born in Britain--began reaching early adulthood and found themselves "really having to insist upon the validity of what it means to be black and British," says Baucom. "And out of that kind of generational experience and experience of active disenfranchisement, alienation, and real discrimination, a variety of political movements emerge--particularly young artists who want to represent visually the reality of Britain's multi-racial characteristics, what it means for the body politic to include black bodies, black cultures."

The question of how (and whether) to define a "movement" made up of so many threads--people, cultures, experiences--is at the heart of Shades of Black. There are no easy answers. Many of the issues that spawned the movement "are as yet unresolved," British scholar Stuart Hall writes in an essay, one of thirteen contributed by many of the major players in the movement, including artists and curators, as well as scholars. Theirs is a lively--and sometimes contentious--discussion. In the best tradition of scholarly discourse, the essayists debate how to analyze and present the work created by these artists. They examine social, political, cultural, and artistic currents that led to and ran through the movement, even as they disagree over the appropriateness of encapsulating such a diverse group of artists and body of work as a movement.

Baucom: book visually represents "what it means for the body politic to include black bodies, black cultures"Photo: Jon Gardiner

"We wanted to maintain uncertainty about that," Baucom says. "To listen to artists who wanted to say, 'This is an academic enterprise to classify this movement. There was no movement; these are artists.' " Those artists produced work as varied as Rotimi Fani-Kayode's Sonponnoi (1987), an elegant photographic portrait that celebrates the nude, black masculine form, and Sutapa Biswas' disturbing Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985), which depicts an ordinary Indian woman as Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. One of her four hands clutches the severed head of a white man; another, a bloody meat cleaver.

And yet there is common ground, Baucom says, the "sense that it has been a movement to engage, visually, the experiences, the aesthetic richness, and the vibrant cultural life of black Britons in the post-World-War II period." Perhaps more significant, "it is a movement, also, to re-imagine the very contours of 'Britishness,' to expand and refashion understandings of what Britain is and what it will continue to be."

"There is a wonderful line in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses: 'The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don't know what it means.' In one sense this movement can be understood to emerge when that overseas history came back to England in the person of these artists and they resolved to make themselves, and their histories, so vibrantly visible."