MONOCULTURE | Une histoire récente

Title: Pour me mettre à leur disposition. Assessing inclusiveness with Richard Wright and Jean Genet

Benedict Anderson’s (1998) The Spectre of Comparisons tracing the disturbing doubling of complex histories which in fact are separated by space and time, could frame parallels between African American writer Richard Wright and French novelist and playwright Jean Genet when considering their reflections on colonialism and colourism. Their ‘comparable’ yet very different quest for a space in which subjectivity might be reimagined and reconfigured in new, more egalitarian ways, was illuminated by Wright’s voyage to the Bandung Conference in 1955 and Genet’s journey with the Black Panthers in 1970. Strange shifts take place when looking at Richard Wright’s Bandung experience with the texts Jean Genet wrote for the Black Panthers in mind. Viewing Wright’s account through Genet, as through an inverted telescope suggested by Anderson in The Spectre of Comparisons, complex histories of colonial domination, inherited by independence movements, seem to strand what could be the founding of an inclusive culture.

Bio: Philippe Pirotte is an art historian and curator. He is the dean of the Städelschule and director of Portikus, both in Frankfurt. Next to that, he serves as Adjunct Senior Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Currently Pirotte conducts research in preparation for a major exhibition, dealing with cultural and artistic developments relating to the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung. Most recently he curated the group show Arus Balik – From Below the Wind to Above the Wind and Back Again for the CCA Singapore (2019). He was artistic director of the 2016 edition of La Biennale de Montréal, and in 2017 he was a member of the curatorial team of the Jakarta Biennale.