An illustrated examination of Donald Rodney’s seminal digital media work Autoicon (1997–2000). Donald Rodney's Autoicon, a work originally produced as both a website and CD-ROM, was conceived by the artist in the mid-1990s but not completed until two years after his death in 1998. Referencing Jeremy Bentham’s infamous nineteenth-century "Auto-Icon," the work proposes an extension of the personhood and presence of Rodney, while critically challenging dominant conceptions of the self, the body, and historicity. Grounded in a partial collection of medical documents that constitute biomedicine’s attempts to comprehensively "know" and maintain Rodney’s body during his lifelong experience of sickle-cell aneamia, Autoicon pursues the artist’s address, from the mid-1980s onward, of the British social and institutional body’s cellular composition through racialized, biopolitical power. Autoicon consists of a Java-based AI and neural network that engages the user in text-based "chat," and provides responses by drawing from a dense body of "data points" related to Rodney and his work, including documentation of artworks, medical records, interviews, images, notes, and video. Pulling both from this internal archive and the external archive of the Internet, a "montage machine" composes constantly mutating images according to a rule-based system established around Rodney’s working process. In this One Work edition, curator Richard Birkett traces the distinct contemporary presence of Autoicon, and the ideas and relations that emerged around its conception before and after Rodney’s death, particularly linking the work to the artist’s seminal 1997 exhibition 9 Night in Eldorado. Birkett addresses Autoicon as both an index of entangled social and material relations around Rodney—a form of dispersed memory—and a vector of critical creative production that continues to resonate with contemporary artistic practices and radical thought. While attuned to late twentieth century discourse around the body’s dissolution into the "virtual" and the technological potential for extending consciousness, in its content and structure Autoicon locates these discourses of the human and posthuman in relation to the durable productive forces of post-Enlightenment racialization and ableism. The workings of the mind that Autoicon presents are intrinsically tied to Rodney’s wider use in his work of bodily matter, and genealogically bound to a Black history of displacement, dispossession, and resistance experienced physiologically, socially, and familially by the artist. Autoicon offers up a counter-manifestation of the subject as formed and multiplied through temporal disjuncture, affectability and acts of preservation, care, and collectivity.

The first comparative history of African American and Black British artists, artworks, and art movements, Stick to the Skin traces the lives and works of over fifty painters, photographers, sculptors, and mixed-media, assemblage, installation, video, and performance artists working in the United States and Britain from 1965 to 2015. The artists featured in this book cut to the heart of hidden histories, untold narratives, and missing memories to tell stories that "stick to the skin" and arrive at a new "Black lexicon of liberation." Informed by extensive research and invaluable oral testimonies, Celeste-Marie Bernier’s remarkable text forcibly asserts the originality and importance of Black artists’ work and emphasizes the need to understand Black art as a distinctive category of cultural production. She launches an important intervention into European histories of modern and contemporary art and visual culture as well as into debates within African American studies, African diasporic studies, and Black British studies. Among the artists included are Benny Andrews, Bessie Harvey, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Noah Purifoy, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, Maud Sulter, and Barbara Walker.

It is virtually impossible to understand the history of modern Guyana without understanding the role played by Forbes Burnham. As premier of British Guiana, he led the country to independence in 1966 and spent two decades as its head of state until his death in 1985. An intensely charismatic politician, Burnham helped steer a new course for the former colony, but he was also a quintessential strongman leader, venerated by some of his citizens yet feared and despised by others. Forbes Burnham: The Life and Times of the Comrade Leader is the first political biography of this complex and influential figure. It charts how the political party he founded, the People’s National Congress, combined nationalist rhetoric, socialist policies, and Pan-Africanist philosophies. It also explores how, in a country already deeply divided between the descendants of African slaves and Indian indentured servants, Burnham consolidated political power by intensifying ethnic polarizations. Drawing from historical archives as well as new interviews with the people who knew Burnham best, sociologist Linden F. Lewis examines how his dictatorial tendencies coexisted with his progressive convictions. Forbes Burnham is a compelling study of the nature of postcolonial leadership and its pitfalls.

An illustrated examination of Donald Rodney’s seminal digital media work Autoicon (1997–2000). Donald Rodney's Autoicon, a work originally produced as both a website and CD-ROM, was conceived by the artist in the mid-1990s but not completed until two years after his death in 1998. Referencing Jeremy Bentham’s infamous nineteenth-century "Auto-Icon," the work proposes an extension of the personhood and presence of Rodney, while critically challenging dominant conceptions of the self, the body, and historicity. Grounded in a partial collection of medical documents that constitute biomedicine’s attempts to comprehensively "know" and maintain Rodney’s body during his lifelong experience of sickle-cell aneamia, Autoicon pursues the artist’s address, from the mid-1980s onward, of the British social and institutional body’s cellular composition through racialized, biopolitical power. Autoicon consists of a Java-based AI and neural network that engages the user in text-based "chat," and provides responses by drawing from a dense body of "data points" related to Rodney and his work, including documentation of artworks, medical records, interviews, images, notes, and video. Pulling both from this internal archive and the external archive of the Internet, a "montage machine" composes constantly mutating images according to a rule-based system established around Rodney’s working process. In this One Work edition, curator Richard Birkett traces the distinct contemporary presence of Autoicon, and the ideas and relations that emerged around its conception before and after Rodney’s death, particularly linking the work to the artist’s seminal 1997 exhibition 9 Night in Eldorado. Birkett addresses Autoicon as both an index of entangled social and material relations around Rodney—a form of dispersed memory—and a vector of critical creative production that continues to resonate with contemporary artistic practices and radical thought. While attuned to late twentieth century discourse around the body’s dissolution into the "virtual" and the technological potential for extending consciousness, in its content and structure Autoicon locates these discourses of the human and posthuman in relation to the durable productive forces of post-Enlightenment racialization and ableism. The workings of the mind that Autoicon presents are intrinsically tied to Rodney’s wider use in his work of bodily matter, and genealogically bound to a Black history of displacement, dispossession, and resistance experienced physiologically, socially, and familially by the artist. Autoicon offers up a counter-manifestation of the subject as formed and multiplied through temporal disjuncture, affectability and acts of preservation, care, and collectivity.

Donald Rodney (1961-1998) was one of the most gifted, perceptive, and innovative contemporary British artists of his time. A protagonist from the first generation of Black British-born art students in the early 1980s, Rodney and his peers brought a new dynamic to British art – a hitherto unseen interplay between aesthetics, politics, humour and Black consciousness. Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic is the first book-length study of a protean practice which spanned the early 1980s to the late 1990s and included a prodigious output of work across painting, photography, collage, assemblage, sculpture, installation, and new technologies. Across eight meticulously researched chapters, the book examines the social and cultural events which inspired Rodney's artwork and the responses it elicited. From his formative years in the West Midlands as a leading exponent of 'Black Art', to a subsequent decade of unbridled visual innovation and social critique, the book ventures new detailed analyses of key works, exhibitions, artistic influences and collaborations. Deploying recurring metaphors of the 'diseased', traumatised and 'raced' body, Rodney addressed racial and social inequality, legacies of slavery, police brutality, sport, and Black male identity in novel and powerful ways. Attending to the artist's material dexterity and visual acuity, the book considers how and why Rodney's innovative practice uniquely challenged delineations between the political and non-political, personal and public, representation and visibility. Over a generation has passed since Rodney's premature death from the effects of the hereditary blood disorder sickle cell anaemia at aged thirty-six. Despite this, Rodney's work continues to speak to our contemporary moment in a multiplicity of ways. As such, the book provides a much-needed critical perspective and insight to the work and legacy of a nonpareil British artist.