Get Your Own Stuff: The Colonial Canon and the Subversive Art of Appropriation

Abstract

This article analyzes the various ways in which artists of color are using appropriation in their work as a subversive tactic to undermine the historically exclusionary white European or ‘Western’ canon that continues to permeate throughout various aspects of our globalized societies. Colonial tropes of the other versus the white body continue to affect many of the ways that we perceive not only art but one another. Acts of appropriative subversion make the socio-cultural power of the colonial canon redundant and shift the asymmetrical power relations held within it. By utilizing a blend of contemporary and historical case studies ranging from fifteenth-century Italian paintings to twentieth-century fascist colonial monuments, and to contemporary artists like Kara Walker, Titus Kaphar, and Harmonia Rosales, I examine the various hypocrisies that this art form identifies and subverts in the Eurocentric canon. To do so, I employ iconoclasm and mimicry as two theoretical approaches to distinguish between the various distinct forms of subversive appropriation in our contemporary world.