ABSTRACT
The civilizing mission on which colonial rule was normatively predicated, entailed producing colonial subjects who were like their colonizers, in abandoning their allegedly uncivilized primitivism and adopting civilized ways, and yet simultaneously different from them. The civilized colonizer was white, for whom the blackness of the colonized was not to be obliterated, but rather changed by its relationship to whiteness: changed to a condition of desirous approximation, but always mindful of a lag, of inevitably coming to civilization “belatedly”. An assertive blackness – a speaking back to whiteness – has a political market value. The art world, perhaps pre-eminently, offers a space for transgressive depictions of its own underlying conditions, including the hegemony that makes art saleable. Thinking with the concept of ambivalence, then, hones in on the underlying and persistent conundrum of race in these times.
