CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/9/2022

A new facsimile of 'Black Phoenix: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture'

Featured spreads are from Primary Information’s new facsimile of the anti-racist, anti-imperialist, late-70s UK-based international art journal Black Phoenix, whose three uncompromising issues anticipated both the British Black Arts Movement and future progressive views of diasporic and colonial histories. “The problems of contemporary art in the Third World today are part of its socio-economic and political predicaments, resulting from colonialism and its present relationship with the West,” co-founder and co-editor Rasheed Araeen wrote in his introduction to the first issue, “We must therefore go beyond formal and aesthetic considerations and look into the historic factors which influenced or suppressed artistic developments in the last few centuries, as well as those forces which are today predominant, in the Third World.” Contributors include art critics, scholars, artists, poets and writers, including Rasheed Araeen (Pakistan) and Mahmood Jamal (Pakistan), Guy Brett (United Kingdom), Kenneth Coutts-Smith (United Kingdom), Ariel Dorfman (Chile), Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay), N. Kilele (Tanzania), Babatunde Lawal (Nigeria), David Medalla (Philippines), Ayyub Malik (Pakistan), Susil Siriwardena (Sri Lanka) and Chris Wanjala (Kenya).