ABSTRACT

August Agboola Browne (1895 – 1976) was a Nigerian-born jazz musician who resided in Poland from 1922 to 1956. Since the discovery and initial publicisation in 2010 of archived documents Browne submitted in 1949 for membership in a veterans’ association, on which he declared that he had been an insurgent in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 under the code name ‘Ali’, he has been heroised rhetorically and memorialised formally by individuals and institutions in Poland across the political-ideological spectrum as ‘the only Black participant in the Warsaw Uprising’. The present article explores the cultural, discursive, historical, and representational implications of one such project: a portrait interpreting Ali by the queer artist Karol Radziszewski (b. 1980) in a style influenced by Pablo Picasso’s African Period. The article deploys Morrison’s literary-critical concept of ‘playing in the dark’ to engage with this visual art object, analysing, through an optic of racialisation, what it proposes to do as an act of remembrance, an artefact of portraiture, and a discourse on race, particularly Blackness, specifically Black masculinity.

摘要

August Agboola Browne (1895 – 1976) 是尼日利亚出生的爵士音乐家，1922 年至 1956 年居住在波兰。 自从 2010 年发现并首次公开了布朗于 1949 年提交的退伍军人协会会员档案文件以来，他声称他曾是 1944 年华沙起义的叛乱者，代号为“阿里”，他被波兰政治意识形态领域的个人和机构正式颂扬和纪念，称他为“华沙唯一的黑人参与者”起义'。本文探讨了这样一个项目的文化、话语、历史和代表性意义：酷儿艺术家 Karol Radziszewski（生于 1980 年）以受巴勃罗毕加索非洲时期影响的风格诠释阿里的肖像。