Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean Paperback - 2011

Timed out is a pioneering study of modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire. It addresses the current 'global turn' in the study of art by way of the transnational Caribbean, offering an in-depth account of its integral role in histories of art in the Atlantic world. It looks at why art of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora has been placed not only 'outside' but 'behind' more familiar and dominant art canons, and how the politics of space and time can be engaged in new ways to rethink the global geography of art.

This is an essential addition to the growing field of world art studies, bringing concerns around temporality together with cross-cultural issues and debates. It shows how art and artists of the Caribbean have encountered and challenged the charges of belatedness, anachronism, provincialism and marginalisation that are fundamental to the time-space logic of art history.

Wainwright shows the Caribbean to be a vantage point for reassessing the core issues and practices of art history as a discipline. He explores the transnational interconnections of modern and contemporary art in the Caribbean, Europe and North America, redrawing the map of centre and periphery, the mainstream and the provincial. Keeping in view art, migration and diaspora, the focus shifts between abstract expressionism and figuration; Pop art and decolonisation; British 'Black art'; cultural policy, diversity and multiculturalism; art, music and celebration in the Indo-Caribbean; and new directions in curating and art criticism.

Timed out will appeal to all those who are reconsidering modern and contemporary art, world art history and the global geography of visual culture.