In self-congratulatory tones of tolerance and open-mindedness, the Western gatekeepers of the contemporary art world--gallery owners and museum curators, patrons and promoters--take great pains to demonstrate their inclusive vision of world culture. They highlight the Latin American show mounted "a few years ago" or the African works featured in a recent exhibition of non-Western artists. Non-Western artists soon discover that this veneer of liberalism masks an array of unwritten, unspoken, and unseemly codes and quotas dictating the acquisition and exhibition of their works and the success...

In the celebrated, controversial essays gathered here, Oguibe exposes the disparities of the reception and treatment afforded Western and non-Western artists; the obstacles that these contradictions create for non-Western and minority artists, and the nature and peculiar concerns of contemporary non-Western art as it deals with the ramifications and residues of the colonial encounter as well as its own historical and cultural past. Oguibe's uncompromising and unapologetic criticism provides a uniquely globale vision of contemporary art and culture.

Over a seven-year period between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, Olu Oguibe wrote some of the most powerful and apocalyptic poetry ever to come out of Africa. In that period he published three slim volumes of poems that established his reputation as perhaps the finest poet of his generation: "A Song from Exile, A Gathering Fear," and the long love poem, "Songs for Catalina." Then, he quit writing poetry, almost as abruptly as he began, and declared his work done.

Revised and edited by the poet himself, this collection brings together those three volumes as well as other poems, some of...