From Transnational to Transafrican: Winold Reiss and Romare Bearden
41 • November 2017 30 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-4271630 © 2017 by Nka Publications I n this article I explore some of the hidden resonances, the “anomalous intimacies,” to borrow Stephanie Smallwood’s term, that exist within art history and trouble the conventional ways in which we practice a kind of segregated spatiality when we discuss artists and their relationship to American social history.1 I also problematize our usual understanding of transnationalism as an arc of freedom that occurs for those who migrate internationally, leave their homeland for another place, and represent, reputedly, a kind of global cosmopolitanism. Instead of becoming free-floating subjects, the transnational artist often identifies with a particular subject position in that new place. In looking at the transmigration of European artists in the 1930s and into the 1950s, what we see are people coming, not as cosmopolitans, but as refugees who embrace, perhaps understandably, the freedom that a certain kind of whiteness provides them in the United States. That leads me to think that transnationalism needs to be rethought, not so much as a new kind of cosmopolitanism, but as a process of detachment and reattachment to the spatial and racial politics of national imaginaries. That brings me to Winold Reiss (1886–1953). FROM TRANSNATIONAL TO TRANSAFRICAN