In this magnificent volume, beautifully produced with copious illustrations, consisting of the discussion of over fifty artists from across the diaspora, Bernier essays a remodelling of an artistic canon that works against a narrow nationalist paradigm. In doing this she follows writers and curators such as Stuart Hall, Jean Fisher, Gen Doy, Gilane Tawadros and Kobena Mercer in carving out space in discussions of international black art for those working in the black British tradition. As she says, “Black British artists’ lives and works suffer from incomplete information and scholarly distortions in comparison to African American artists and in too many cases have been subjected to wholesale erasure” (9). Bernier's volume in its comprehensive excavation of key figures in this tradition such as Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Maud Saulter and Sonia Boyce rides a tidal wave of long-awaited illumination over the last decade which is exemplified by Himid's winning of the Turner Prize in 2017. Despite her acknowledgement of particular British aspects to many of these artists, her chapters refuse to group artists by nationality and instead analyse their work thematically placing them in the context of transnational regimes of oppression either through imperial and postimperial racial stratification or through American racisms from the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. These juxtapositions enable dynamic readings of artists in a black Atlantic context. Thus the chapter “Enter at Your Own Risk” dialogizes black British artists Donald Rodney (b. Birmingham) and Keith Piper (b. Malta) with African Americans Thornton Dial (b. Emelle, Alabama) and Kara Walker (b. Stockton, California). Placed in the context of their British coconspirators Dial and Walker's art is shown to have dynamic black Atlantic valences. No hagiography, the study wades into controversies such as the criticism of Walker by an older generation of artists such as Betye Saar, who felt that her demeaning depictions of stereotyped African Americans were “basically for the amusement of the white art establishment” (141). For Bernier, though, the depictions are “the visual antithesis of a ‘closed system’ … she experiments with formal techniques and alternative media to keep the ‘story’ circulating and destabilize the boundaries between ‘slave’ and ‘master’” (142). Such a discussion links her work to those who critique her, or, as Carrie Mae Weems puts it, Walker “is in deep trouble … so are all of us – in deep trouble” (141). The volume is replete with artists’ statements from obscure interviews and deep in the archives brought together here to illuminate debates, controversies and everyday practice. The depth of Bernier's scholarship is admirable and makes this volume essential for any university library. Again and again she highlights how the interactions of memory and history are seen to be crucial to almost all these artists as, like Lubaina Himid, “they bring neglected histories back into the visible” (39). Himid's articulation of life “inside the invisible” has its transatlantic counterpoint in Betye Saar's articulation of how her art is the “struggle of memory against the destruction of forgetting” (41). The juxtaposing of these modes of thinking across Atlantic geographies is shown up in the work as well and Bernier is a wonderful and articulate guide to all these works. The range of this work is a tour de force ranging from African American stars such as Faith Ringgold, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Carrie Mae Weems, through British pioneers such as Rasheed Araeen, Eddie Chambers and Vanley Burke, to new kids on the block such as Hank Willis Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Nicola Frimpong. The book, like the artists it venerates, eschews differentiating between different kinds of black British artist using the 1980s delineation of black British art to include all nonwhite artists. Thus Juginder Lamba, born in Nairobi of Punjabi parents, is included, as is Gavin Jantjes, born in Cape Town.

I have two small disappointments with this magnificent volume. First, although it is copiously decorated with nearly a hundred colour illustrations, several of the artists are not represented by their artwork, including such seminal figures as Carrie Mae Weems and Rasheed Araeen. Second, although it is comprehensive, some artists are not included at all – Ellen Gallagher, for instance, whose signature piece Bird in Hand (2005) is pivotal to an understanding of art submerged, deeply sedimented in the black Atlantic worldview. Finally, there is a wonderful discussion here of the deeply affecting work of Alabama-born Lonnie Holley, but nothing of his brilliant avant-garde musical contributions which would have added greatly to the discussion – his aural scope means that his work has resonance beyond the visual. Despite this flaw in the analysis this section illustrates the strength of the study, allowing Holley his voice, as he admits, “I haven't been trained to do art. I didn't go to school for art. I started to do art one day in my backyard because I had to make tombstones” (243). His yard art is brilliantly described here, showing how he navigates the African American history of violence and survival to create dynamic works. In talking of his work here, Holley is an exemplar of all the artists Bernier so brilliantly navigates betwixt and between, using skilful interpretations of their words and art to illuminate an African Atlantic diasporan tradition that transcends national borders. As Holley explains, “To deal with me as an artist, and see all of my art as art and not just as garbage or junk, is to see that I went to the depths of where no one else even would go to speak for life” (251). As Bernier contends, along with many of the other artists in this study, Holley, by plumbing these depths, does “justice to the untold narratives, hidden histories and missing memories of black people” (251).