Full Description
This book will explore several critical connections between Black African objects and white Western aesthetics and artwork in the United States from the late 1800s until 1939. Drawing from primary source materials and various scholarship in the field (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, museum studied, art history, cultural studies), the book provides an analysis of the threads of white supremacy which run through early scholarship and understandings of Black African object within the United States and how scholars use the objects to reinforce narratives of "primitive" Black Africa and civilized, advanced white Europe and the United States.
Contents
1.The Enlightenment and White Supremacy; 2.Objects, Sensation, Truth; 3.Black African Aesthetics; 4.Appropriating Black Africa; 5.Black African Art?; 6.Collecting Black Africa, Exhibiting White Supremacy; 7.Ancestral Contact: Victorian Phantasmagoria, Artists, and Black Africa; 8.Diasporic Nostalgia: The Harlem Renaissance and Black African Objects; 9.Blackness after the Renaissance; 10.Twenty-First-Century Colonialism
