{"id":20810,"date":"2012-02-23T02:45:22","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T02:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=20810"},"modified":"2012-03-05T03:33:31","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T03:33:31","slug":"%e2%80%9csamo%c2%a9-as-an-escape-clause%e2%80%9d-jean-michel-basquiats-engagement-with-a-commodified-american-africanism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=20810","title":{"rendered":"\u201cSAMO\u00a9 as an Escape Clause\u201d: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cSAMO\u00a9<\/sup> as an Escape Clause\u201d: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journal of American Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 45, Issue 2<\/a>\u00a0 (May 2011)
\nDOI: 10.1017\/S0021875810001738<\/a><\/p>\n

Laurie A. Rodrigues<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Department of English
\nUniversity of Rhode Island<\/em><\/p>\n

Heir to the racist configuration of the American art exchange and the delimiting appraisals of blackness in the American mainstream media, Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/a> appeared on the late 1970s New York City street art scene \u2013 then he called himself \u201cSAMO.\u201d Not long thereafter, Basquiat grew into one of the most influential artists of an international movement that began around 1980, marked by a return to figurative painting. Given its rough, seemingly untrained and extreme, conceptual nature, Basquiat’s high-art oeuvre<\/em> might not look so sophisticated to the uninformed viewer. However, Basquiat’s work reveals a powerful poetic and visual gift, \u201cheady enough to confound academics and hip enough to capture the attention span of the hip hop nation,\u201d as Greg Tate has remarked. As noted by Richard Marshall, Basquiat’s aesthetic strength actually comes from his striving \u201cto achieve a balance between the visual and intellectual attributes\u201d of his artwork. Like Marshall, Tate, and others, I will connect with Basquiat’s unique, self-reflexively experimental visual practices of signifying and examine anew Basquiat’s active contribution to his self-alienation, as Hebdige has called it. Basquiat’s aesthetic makes of his paintings economies of accumulation, building a productive play of contingency from the mainstream’s constructions of race. This aesthetic move speaks to a need for escape from the perceived epistemic necessities of blackness. Through these economies of accumulation we see, as Tate has pointed out, Basquiat’s \u201cintellectual obsession\u201d with issues such as ancestry\/modernity, personhood\/property and originality\/origins of knowledge, driven by his tireless need to problematize mainstream media’s discourses surrounding race \u2013 in other words, a commodified American Africanism.<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSAMO\u00a9 as an Escape Clause\u201d: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism Journal of American Studies Volume 45, Issue 2\u00a0 (May 2011) DOI: 10.1017\/S0021875810001738 Laurie A. Rodrigues Department of English University of Rhode Island Heir to the racist configuration of the American art exchange and the delimiting appraisals of blackness in the American mainstream […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,20],"tags":[9733,496,9734,9735],"class_list":["post-20810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-jean-michel-basquiat","tag-journal-of-american-studies","tag-laurie-a-rodrigues","tag-laurie-rodrigues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}