Place-Making or in the

“Wrong Place”: Contemporary Art

and the Postcolonial Condition
Okwui Enwezor

To reconstitute the discourse of cultural difference

demands not simply a change of cultural contents . . .
It requires a radical revision of the social temporality
in which emergent histories may be written, the
articulation of the ‘sign’ in which cultural identities
may be inscribed.
— Homi K. Bhabha, “The Postcolonial and The Postmodern:
The Question of Agency,” 1994

The 1990s inspired a putative sense of global

affirmation and renewal. Apartheid ended in South
Africa. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union was
dismantled and splintered into multiple nation-states.
The European Union expanded to the edge of the
Warsaw Pact countries in the east. Europe launched
a new currency. China maintained its communist
identity, but only in name. On the cultural field, Frank
Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao became
the totemic icon of a new museum boom, launching
all manners of destination architecture.1 Biennials
were launched in Istanbul, Gwangju, Johannesburg,
Santa Fe, Berlin, Dakar, and Lyon. But there were also
major hiccups: global wars and massacres; internecine
warfare between and within nations; the killing fields
of the Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, Congo. These wars
served as the revisionary portents of the future,

47
pointing to mass killings earlier in the twentieth century. These events gave did bring about structural and political changes in the societies it marked
the 1990s a slightly contradictory cast, which in a short spell would be deeply, many of which are still ongoing, the same cannot be said for many
swept aside for the more positive story that the rapid economic growth of societies repressed and subordinated by the exorbitant politics of Western
the Internet age would tell of an emergent new reality. hyperpower.
With the Internet communication revolution emerging as the This evident contradiction in world political formation and its
single most radical force in the ordering of modern relationships and continuing realignment returns again and again in the harsh circuitry
subjectivity—“between the net and the self”2—the 1990s also represented of the looped images of the crashing Twin Towers. In the pale light of
the full emergence of globalization as it is currently understood. It marked its aftermath, what our senses can properly apprehend is not the utopian
the radical technological transformation that finally afforded the fusion promise of millennial transformation, but its betrayal. It is ushered in
of once-segmented global public spheres and the transcendence by capital by the sense of urgency announced in the gloomy, sooty blackness that
of national boundaries (accompanied by the stagnation of labor within overcame that scene of Armageddon on 9/11. The image of the falling
them). Yet, the decade was equally characterized by millennial anxiety towers is a sobering one, not least because, in light of the current state of
and a sense of anticipation, even if it still reflected a certain type of world affairs, the assumption of many in the late 1990s that the twenty-
world-changing giddiness, especially in the positivity of globalization as a first century would be another age of spectacular progress—naturally
transformative force in world-cultural domains. overseen and dominated by the forces of Western hegemony—appears
Key to the 1990s was the significant emergence of contemporary either increasingly remote or on the verge of permanent deferral. This
art from postcolonial sites of production into the global network of artistic owes much to the major conflagrations around the globe today, and to the
production, dissemination, markets, media, and institutional reception complexity and heterogeneity of global cultural circuits. In the twenty-first
that would force the reconsideration of the context of artistic activities. century, we all find culture and politics illuminated only in the half-light
The temporary, large-scale exhibition would become the leading place of permanent transitions rather than triumphs.
for enunciating the pluralistic activities of contemporary artistic forms I start with these examples and competing narratives of our global
and strategies. These sorts of exhibitions created a new network without present as a tentative step toward an analysis of the role of place-making
the traditional regulations of the Western museum and art market. They in the work of contemporary artists. If place-making is the name for a type
pierced the shield of this institutional authority. Through them, artists from of active grounding of the potent marks of differenced artistic practices,
postcolonial societies and transnational artists would play a broad role in then we must examine the balance in which the equation of the resistance
the refashioning of contemporary art at large. to being placed on margins hangs. We must examine this balance as it
But while the late twentieth century provided a window into a appears on the ledger of motivated exclusions, and the apologies that
potentially positive future, the twenty-first century has fulfilled none of its accompany them. In this way, we can observe that the effects brought on
utopian anticipations. In the beginning of the 1990s, it turned out that the by transnational cultural formations against the discriminatory practices of
twenty-first century would be marked by the process of undoing the legacy exclusion are the direct results of the politics of contestation that are now
of another failed utopia: the conclusion of one of the grand illusions with part of the routine events of globalization. There are other forces that have
which the previous century began and ended, namely the spectacular rise brought about this examination of the ledger, which go beyond the field of
and ignominious collapse of communism. It also brought about a broad art and its institutions. These are what comprise the heterogeneous events
reconsideration of the nature of globalism to the project of modernity. of globalization. Rather than impose limits, to erect cordons sanitaires
The failure of the communist utopia is part of the crest of many other such on and around economic, political, or cultural speech, they seek to rupture
failures: grand schemes of modernity announcing, if not exactly anticipating, those obstacles and barriers. Some of these events have been positive
new futures, new man, new subjectivity, new society, a new race of workers in the sense that they force a rethinking of the planetary totalization
subordinated to ideology. With historical regularity, these schemes seem to that twentieth-century forms of modernity once embodied.3 They also
presage and anticipate their own striking moments of utter betrayal of the provide object lessons for those forces of globalization that saw global
utopian ideal: fascism, Nazism, socialism, colonialism. The doubt harbored resources as the spoils of predatory, multinational capital. The rejection
by some about the efficacious potential of utopia as the proper name for the of this version of globalization, in which very few rule and enjoy access
dawn of a new age gave millennialism at the end of the twentieth century to the benefits of economic and cultural liberalization, offers fresh insight
a strikingly pallid cast, and a sense of past more than future. into the fact that the global struggles that face us today—immigration,
Yet, the dawn of the twenty-first century did in some sense point environmental worries, ethnic conflicts, terrorism, etc.—recast, in
a way forward by promising a type of new beginning. However, this future the direst terms, the fundamental historical implications of the twentieth
was not bargained for, nor was it anticipated. While the end of communism century as the high point of the logic of empire. These are today being

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48 and the Postcolonial Condition 49 Okwui Enwezor
replayed as continuations of the unfinished political, social, economic, and it seems, is of a biological type. Identity, the ethnic burden, is what they
cultural struggles of the last century. must overcome. And such an identity, one would assume, is a negative
I raise these issues, in a time in which it has become de rigueur model of subjectivity around which artistic practice would make sense
to erect a ghostly silence around notions of global equity in artistic within mainstream discourse. I don’t know whether I agree entirely with
participation, to point to the alarming complacency and weakness of recent Belting’s reading, but his observation is an important one.
curatorial thinking. In enumerating the impact on art and culture by some The changes in historical consciousness and political relationships
of the foundational and important events of the twentieth century and how organized by the radical politics of decolonization and anti-imperialism
they continue to play out into the twenty-first century, I wish to point out have been productive for contemporary art. This is true not simply in
also the degree to which contemporary art in Western institutions—despite ethnic or archival terms, but in deeply ideological terms of institutional
the purported radicalism of the neo-avant-garde—has been complicit individuation and categorization of the works and images of contemporary
in maintaining strong rejectionist cultural politics, while employing artists of diverse historical experiences. The changes of the last
Eurocentrism as an advance guard in institutional policies of exclusion. half-century offer important guidelines for exploring the work of a range
While mainstream museums such as the Museum of Modern of contemporary artists. Belting, therefore, is partially correct in his
Art, Centre Pompidou, and Tate Modern continue to “denationalize” assessment of the field of contemporary art, but only insofar as all artists
and de-emphasize the European attributes of their canons, they have aim to be post-historical. The anxiety of ethnicity belongs to a wholly
done so only on a limited basis, and for the most part, only in regard to different sphere: namely, the question of cultural difference, from which
recent acquisitions. While the major museums have improved over the Western artists are themselves not immune. From the 1960s to the late
last 60 years in including contemporary art and artists from postcolonial 1990s, this became clear as we witnessed how narratives of contemporary
societies in these museums—in collections, monographic surveys, art passed from those formed exclusively under the rules of colonial
group exhibitions—these efforts have not markedly transformed the modernity to those of postcolonial modernity.
complexion of contemporary art within institutions overall. Temporary I do not raise the specter of Eurocentrism as an epithet. It is
exhibitions have been the places where some of the key arguments of essential to recall the way it situates and anthropologizes subjects of
global artistic discourse are being staged. The increasingly transnational artistic contemplation so as to recognize the manner in which specific
character of many of these exhibitions does provide a productive basis discourses about art have been formed and framed by the institutions of
to explore the importance of postcolonial modes of contemporary art. colonial modernity—art academies and museums, critics and media—
Here, postcolonial theory is an indispensable tool with which to examine and how the language of those discourses has been aligned with certain
and take measure of the state of contemporary art and culture. exclusivist and culturally specific judgments that pertain to aesthetic
We have heard so much of how one must excise from the language outcomes and positions. Practices that have come out of other traditions
of critical art discourse any reference to ideas like postcolonialism, have been subordinated, for better or worse, to those judgments. The
multiculturalism, and identity. Except, of course, when they are being relationship between exclusivist and culturally specific judgments, elevated
treated as historical subjects belonging to the past, as if the conditions to universal principles, has left an indelible mark on the development of the
those references helped initiate in the criticisms of artistic practice have non-Western artistic canons, leaving them largely under the interpretative
disappeared. Art historian Hans Belting makes a key point when he control of institutions of colonial modernity.
observes two tendencies that have been part of this situation of critical But, while this interpretive control has frustrated a range of artistic
disavowal. For Western artists, the key point of their cultural practice practices that explore the conditions of otherness, it has ensured that a
has been to become posthistorical (that is, to overcome the shadow of series of healthy counterdiscourses to colonial modernity’s self-authorized
the Western classical tradition); for “non-Western” artists, the struggle evaluation of the cultural worth of artistic canons would be part of the
is to attain the state of being post-ethnic (in this case, to overcome any larger architecture of the critical debates to come. These counterdiscourses
identification with ethnic or racially based categories). These two modes have provided a path toward the development of postcolonial modernity,
of transcending one’s historical condition seem to harbor the fantasy and can be understood, in both an ideological and a historical sense, as
of manufacturing a new set of universals, albeit shorn of references either important critical interventions into the aesthetic judgments and artistic
to one’s past or to one’s ethnicity. The curious thing is that Belting does narratives of colonial modernity: slowly undoing its methods of social
not view the anxiety of Western artists in racial or ethnic terms. For them, control and deconstructing its monopoly in the task of historicizing modern
the classical tradition, the archives of Western culture, represent the key subjectivity.
burden. But for “non-Western” artists, there is no reference whatsoever to If colonial modernity once consolidated its power in order to
a classical heritage, no cultural archives to wage battle with; their anxiety, discipline, dominate, and dismiss its subjects, postcolonial modernity

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50 and the Postcolonial Condition 51 Okwui Enwezor
challenges and disperses that power. The turn toward postcolonial irreducible to the tendentious patterns of binary separation of artists
modernity serves as a historical guide for interpreting the distinct according to the logic of cultural determinism.
artistic practices that have emerged from the cultural context previously The dispersal of artistic content has produced specific places for
constituted under the authority of colonial modernity. The historical their instantiation. Large-scale exhibitions such as the biennial model
coordinates of this turn allow us to draw a map for a series of interlocking represent key testing grounds for our evolving encounters with the histories
arguments about the relationships between a range of producers and of modernity and contemporaneity. Exhibitions of contemporary art over
interlocutors: artists, curators, critics, and historians; museums and cultural the last two decades thus must be perceived as place-making devices
institutions. for articulating the empirical evidence of the imaginative practices of
In the 1990s, there occurred a remarkable shift in the circuits of contemporary art across the world, not just in Western centers of power.4
contemporary art, owing to the slow rise to prominence of new venues for With this shift across the now tenuous borders between center and
the display and reception of contemporary art. This shift occurred both periphery, between mainstream and margins, the question to ask is, how
in the sites of exhibition-making and in the practice of curatorship. Most does contemporary art respond to the dispersal of the old hegemonic claims
importantly, it occurred within the changed conditions of production. of cultural authority that did not recognize difference?5
These three elements collided in the construction of the narratives of If we recognize place-making as a crucial device for exploring the
contemporary art. They became increasingly concerned with the wider heterogeneity of today’s contemporary artistic models, we will then come to
ramifications for contemporary art of the discursive exclusion of art a proper understanding of what it must have meant in the past—before the
of minorities—African, Asian, Latin American, Chicano, First Nation, 1990s—to be differenced and, as such, in the “wrong place,” on the margins
female, queer—within Western societies. These debates grew, based on the of a purported mainstream in some imaginary center of discursive authority,
principles of multiculturalism and the then-emerging globalization. and therefore thoroughly deracinated, beyond the grasp and knowledge
The changes introduced into the field of contemporary art by of institutional recognition. The biennial model as a place-making device
postcolonial politics and poetics—including changes in exhibition practices constitutes what the theorist Hakim Bey calls a “temporary autonomous
and art history, changes in conditions of production, and transformations in zone” of encounters. It reminds us that the exhibition of contemporary art is
contexts of reception and exchange, such as in museums and art markets— modeled, constructed, and constituted as a kind of place for contemporary
mirror the geopolitical realignments that have defined globalization. art and artists. If the goal of any exhibition is to create such a place for
Reticular in its links to the contexts of art-making, the biennial form of the specific visibility of a range of artistic and discursive activities, then
exhibition-making emerged as the preeminent global forum for organizing the biennial model is not, as many have claimed, an encouragement of
the multiple positions of contemporary artistic practice. Biennials, incoherence and, in extremis, a place for artistic nonsense.
especially those occurring outside Europe and North America, such as the Rather, this incoherence is what is proper to contemporary art and
influential and unabashedly ideological Havana Biennial, confronted and therefore one of its salutary features, as it exposes the fault line between
attacked the premise of the earlier modernist dichotomy that divided the former centers and peripheries. The large-scale exhibition model, despite
world civilizationally: between enlightened cultural centers and inferior its shortcomings—and there are many—does offer new institutional
deculturalized peripheries, between progressive avant-garde mainstreams and capacities for curators to articulate the new possibilities of contemporary
atomized, stagnated margins, between modern artists and ethnic bricoleurs. artistic discourses globally. Without those capacities, the solidity of the
Not only were the coordinates of art-making scrambled and made place of contemporary art can just as easily again become differenced as
unstable in such changing global networks—which now include Dakar, yet another whim of fashion that will ultimately change and revert to the
Gwangju, Istanbul, Johannesburg, and Cairo—the narratives of artistic old, stultified model of modernist totalization.
production took on often heterogeneous, competitive, and mutually Throughout my own career, my key interest has been rooted
contradictory logics of production. By recognizing the multiplicity of in the examination of artistic differencing through a form of curatorial
approaches, the biennial model, as the key site for the production of the counterinsurgency. I have been examining contemporary African art
new discourse of contemporary art, began to disperse the centralization of through exhibitions that are specifically decisive places in which the idea
the homogeneous discursive framework in which contemporary art was of the contemporary can be constituted, and, as such, are places for the
once contemplated. While the field of contemporary art still retains many creation of its meaning in relation to an enlarged global public sphere.
aspects of the unevenness between the resource-rich developed world In my work, what has been truly significant about the exhibition venue and
and the resource-poor parts of developing economies, there is no doubt its place-making possibilities is the way it grounds the work of the artists
that the complexity of art-making across many parts of the world has in the framework of their discursive practices and at the juncture of global
been established. Places for the display of contemporary art are no longer and transnational communities.

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52 and the Postcolonial Condition 53 Okwui Enwezor
 I hereby proffer one among many examples I have initiated in my of emergency under which global politics are being conducted. Identity
curatorial work, which I choose for its dialectical expansiveness, because and its stubborn values have served as tools for all kinds of zealous
it sought to abrogate the boundary between politics and art, cultural cultural affirmation. Recently, it has been reignited in the most reductive
production and ideological positioning, and incorporate certain forms and and atavistic of modes and suddenly invested with a striking positivist
poetics of violence and the aesthetics and ethics of contestation. In 1995, veneer in the Western struggle against Islamic radicalism. The phantasm
when I began work on the exhibition The Short Century: Independence of identity as a utopian unifier for the reclamation of a civilizational place
and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994,6 I was not merely in the Western past is curious given the fact that identity was previously
concerned with the relationship of African artists to the contemporary understood, in the hands of those who were differenced, as the means by
global sphere. Rather, in organizing the exhibition around a series of which they were banished from the enlightened circle of modernity.
political attitudes and cultural disjunctures that were features of African Identity—whether false or true, traditional or modern, local
decolonization movements, I thought it critically imperative to establish or global, religious or secular, economic or cultural—has remained
the relationship of the artist and political worker through their shared a surprisingly resilient concept, as one of the major ways people of all
historical affiliation. To my thinking, the decolonization movements of social stripes and ideological positionings define or reflect themselves
independence and liberation were the historical occasions and events to others. Postcolonial cultural politics, to which aspects of Islamic
in which the thesis of the exhibition developed a careful curatorial model radicalism belong, are no different in this regard. The fact that identities
by consciously collapsing into one entangled inquiry the archives of are considered by many to be fictions does not mean that they do not carry
colonial and postcolonial modernities. durable reserves of social empathy in the global public sphere. However,
In a sense, I was searching for what could constitute the terra in many Western democracies, these attributes have often become freighted
firma for the undifferencing of contemporary African thought and cultural with a range of modifiers based on exploitative dichotomies: foreigner
subjectivity, especially in light of the radical discontinuity in artistic forms and indigene, immigrant and citizen, authentic and inauthentic, Muslim
introduced by the institutions of colonial modernity. The Short Century and Christian, terrorist and democrat, barbaric and civilized. In an age
then became more than an exhibition about art as a form of cultural of terrorism, these modifiers have become reduced to a set of mutually
practice, but art as the framework through which a range of discursive exclusive antagonisms that lead to such reductive categories as “friend”
activities could be articulated. My goal for the exhibition was to create and “enemy.”
not merely an event space for the reception of the radical proposals and Passionate identity politics also reveal the extent to which
procedures of decolonization. I wanted it to function as a concatenation these differences are problems of culture at large. Identity represents,
of places signaling the complexity of the contemporary grammar of therefore, not merely a token of cultural affirmation, a simple category of
the postcolonial multitude. differencing, a baggage of ethnic profiling, identification, and classification
The broader context of contemporary art today is situated in the within the rationalities of citizenship and belonging. It also illuminates
domains overseen by those artists whose practices first began as responses the cultural and political frameworks around which the critical contents
to modernism through versions of antimodernism. I associate this of modern and contemporary culture are formulated and built. Part of
antimodernism with acts of engaged criticality and reflexivity. The artists’ art’s task is to argue the importance of identity as something other than
antimodernism is clearly linked to historical models of earlier exhibition an essentialized, ossified model of cultural affirmation in contemporary
formats and to the interrogation of certain institutions’ epistemological cultural discourses. The claim is not to dismiss identity, but rather to
methods. What has emerged from this antimodernism is not a product engage it in its many contradictions, to show how the stubborn myths
of the negation of modernism as such, but a broadening of it; an attempt of identity are relational to the dominant categories to which they often
to foreground aspects of its recalcitrant practices, the joining of the high respond and, as such, have real cultural uses, particularly in the practice of
and low, the novel and the outmoded, vernacular and cosmopolitan, oppositional artistic initiatives.
politics and aesthetics. These disciplinary ruptures, among many others, For numerous artists, postcolonial practices do not inhabit
build the constitutive heterogeneity of the language of contemporary a marginal place on the global stage; instead, they are central to
art today. By the same token, through the historical issues raised by this understanding the critical relationships among artists of divergent
antimodernism, we witness the dispersal of certain modernist styles and experiences across cultures, national affiliations, institutions, and the
institutional logics. historical intersection of identities in Western and in postcolonial societies
I want to conclude by raising the question of identity, which, until found in the European and Islamic worlds. In artistic works and projects,
recently, has been the main lens through which differenced artistic models the postcolonial world is a world of conjunctions, a place of intersections,
have often been critiqued and dismissed. I bring it up in light of the state the point at which one renegotiates dominant practices of inclusion and

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54 and the Postcolonial Condition 55 Okwui Enwezor
exclusion. In fact, under the postcolonial condition, contemporary art This “wrong place” imposes an ethical limit. But it also provides a critical
is enlivened, seen to be both complex and accessible. Such art, as part opportunity for choice, especially as to how artists and curators ought now
of an engaged cultural practice, offers a perspicacious view into how to think of the place of the transnational contemporary subject in the world
dominant practices and the legibility of the counter-practices that have of globalization, in a network of deep entanglement.
brought them coexist in crisis. I have begun with the anachronism of millennialism in the
Herein, the routes of exile and the dispersion of migration can be 1990s and globalization as the founding political truth of a new and
defined as a response to the late capitalist intersection of globalization radical subjectivity, as the moment of reckoning for today’s postcolonial
and postcolonialism. To the degree that the figure of the immigrant has domains of experience. Behind this historical view lie the troubled but
become a specter of modern biopolitical discourse, as thinkers such as well-concealed assumptions that come with its promulgation: namely,
Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Arjun Appadurai, and others remind the denial of the postcolonial epiphany. Yet, forms of artistic practice need
us, questions of place and belonging will remain with us for a while, not deny the roots of their reference systems in order to attain to some
not least because the twentieth century’s massive, unprecedented migration posthistorical or post-ethnic bliss. The anxieties of contemporary art today
and colossal displacement of peoples have continued unabated. These are reflections of its discomfort with this form of transcendence and its
movements remain the norm of the present. Due to the problems of uneven entanglement with postcolonial subjectivity. But this discomfort does
development and violent conflict that form the background to global not arise from the incommensurable demands of the so-called relativism
migration, the general crisis often ascribed to the unending movement of postmodernism. It comes from the core recognition that postcolonialism
of large populations will remain part of the global discourse about place. and its transnational enunciation—not only in political and discursive
These movements disturb the spatial coordinates of contemporary dwelling terms, but also in analytic and aesthetic terms—are today the very
and place, rearticulating the ethical confrontation between the stranger foundation of the contemporary.
and the neighbor. The disputes that arise about the condition of place
make clear that out of the violent logic of colonization has dawned a new This is an abridged version of the text that was first published in Diaspora Memory Place:
David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z, Salah M. Hassan and
order of postcolonial migration, one continuously emblematized in the Cheryl Finley, eds. (New York and Amsterdam: Prestel and Prince Claus Fund Library, 2008),
writing of new scripts of settling and unsettling, unhinging and rehinging reprinted here with the permission of the author and Prince Claus Fund.
of the national space, reimagining national identity while contradicting
1. See Terry Smith, Architecture of the eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago
the fictions of national wholeness and completeness. Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
The agencies involved in the reinscription of space as concrete Press, 2006). 6. The exhibition was produced by the
places convey to us, in the moment of displacement, a wholly different 2. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Museum Villa Stuck, Munich and opened
Society: The Information Age: Economy, in February 2001. It subsequently traveled
relationship to place than biennials, which have offered valuable Society, and Culture, vol. 1 (Oxford: to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum
opportunities for new politics of spatial description. In the migrant’s Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 3. of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and P.S.1
social experience, cities and imaginaries of far-off national spaces, 3. If one observes the recent changes in Center of Contemporary Art (now MoMA
the Venice Biennale, the oldest biennial PS1), New York.
neighborhoods, and communities are the spatial coordinates of place. They exhibition of contemporary art, one
each engender new conditions of territoriality, identity, and citizenship. soon notices that these changes have
led to the establishment of Aperto ’93.
Out of them, aesthetic and cultural activities emerge as witnesses to the The more recent increase in the number
continuous transformations of the cultural and political self. Examining of participating artists from outside
the fissures of these negotiations has been the legacy of curatorial practices Europe and the United States is the
direct result of pressures exerted by
of the 1990s, as the place for the continuing undifferencing of centers other biennials that have bypassed the
and peripheries, while investing global exhibition spaces with a sense of nationalistic and repressive model of
radical contingency. Venice. Venice has changed because it
had no choice but to acknowledge the
Whether in the figuration of the visa queue or the immigration present global reality.
queue—which artists working in the global arena routinely endure—their 4. I borrow this term from Smith’s (2006)
idea of world-making as part of the
projects have focused critical attention on the question of open borders, construct of contemporary cultural
as it encounters reactionary ideas about the integrity of the national experience.
space. In response, I want us to think of the anomalous, indeterminate, 5. For a sustained review of how the notion
of difference plays out in responses
distorted places that enable the exorbitant designation of certain cultural to the colonial experience, see “Race,”
spaces as off-limits to particular paradigms of contemporary practice, as Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis
the “wrong place” or destination for certain types of artistic subjectivity. Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah,

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56 and the Postcolonial Condition 57 Okwui Enwezor