Black Phoenix: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture

This publication is a compilation of all three issues of the journal ‘Black Phoenix’ published as a single volume. Edited and published by Rasheed Araeen and Mahmood Jamal between 1978 and 1979 in the United Kingdom, ‘Black Phoenix’ remains a key and radical document of transnational solidarity and cultural production in the visual arts, literature, activism, and beyond.

More than a decade after the liberation movements of the 1960s and the historic Bandung and Tricontinental Conferences, which called for social and political alignment and solidarity among the nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in order to dismantle Western imperialism and (neo)colonialism, ‘Black Phoenix’ issued a rallying cry for the formation of a liberatory arts and culture movement throughout the Third World. International in scope, ‘Black Phoenix’ positioned diasporic and colonial histories at the center of an evolving anti-racist and anti-imperialist consciousness in late 1970s Britain and beyond—one that would yield complex and nuanced discourses of race, class, and postcolonial theory in the decade that followed. ‘Black Phoenix’ proposed a horizon for Blackness that transcended racial binaries, across the Third World and the West.