Imagine a World Without America

2006 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
27 x 27 x 2 inches

This screen-print by Dread Scott titled Imagine a World Without America shows a map without the landmass that is the USA, as if the continents have drifted, or as if it never existed in the first place. Artist Dread Scott’s work is founded upon challenging “American patriotism as a unifying value,” and as such he claims that it is necessary to “burn the US Constitution (an outmoded impediment to freedom), and position the police as successors to lynch mob terror.” Perhaps one must imagine a structurally different world to produce new and freer modes of thought. While not explicitly related to Afro-Futurism, one of the key sub-genres of science-fiction and related thought is speculative revisionism; asking ‘how would the world be different if X never happened?” This modest work is a call to our daily imaginary, an invitation to zoom out to the scale of the global human condition, and implicitly America’s role in trade, war, cultural exchange, and the spread of western values.

Dread Scott is an interdisciplinary artist who for three decades has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering ideals of American society. His interdisciplinary practice employs symbolic and visual forms to instigate, rile, and provoke social transformation. He works in a range of media including performance, photography, installation, screen-printing and video. In 1989, the US Senate outlawed his artwork and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its transgressive use of the American flag. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others burned flags on the steps of the Capitol. He has presented a TED talk on this subject. A skilled public speaker, Scott often unflinchingly calls out tense political issues rather than aesthetic ones. He uses the name Dread Scott firstly to call up the presence of history, for Dread Scott was a slave, sued for his freedom, and his case was a landmark Supreme Court decision. Secondly, Scott uses the name to obfuscate his identity, creating a protective barrier between his personal life and artistic persona.

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