In the new millennium, scholarship is divided in debate over ineffectual cultural, ethnic, geographical and national discursive taxonomies. Post-black, post-Chicano, post-identity, post-everything. These postulates can be identified as direct responses to a phenomenon in America's recent cultural and political history: the backlash against multiculturalism of the 1990s.

The semantic nightmare of the 'post-identity' faction offers the field an experiential and psychosocial impossibility.¹ However, this sect is on to something. The ongoing polarisation of theoretical models for cultural production and posturing is cyclical and infertile. Contemporary paradigms of difference are muddied by a rupture between regionalist allegiances rooted in a discourse of specificity, and an internationalist bent based on fluidity, interconnectedness and identification with global culture and exchange. The 'post' advocates back an honest effort to extend and implode existing typologies in the discussion of models of representation and difference. The post-identity attempt at articulating a movement beyond the parameters of biography, geography, nationality or ethnicity must, however, be articulated and understood through specific artists' practices rather than through totalising misnomers and paradigmatic proclamations signaling the end of a moment or movement. Postcolonial models of engagement never rely on the proponents of exoticism, mythology and spectacle to lag too far behind, but always assume them, ready to reclaim hierarchy and polarity in matters of aesthetic citizenship.

What are the terms that approach an open and flexible concept addressing the concerns dominating contemporary international art, particularly the displacement of the identity concept of difference? From the regional to the global to the transnational, what lexicon signals a space of contradiction that addresses the tension between homogenisation and difference in the constitution of subjectivity? What visual language represents a model of production that questions