This book examines Théodore Géricault’s images of black men, women and children who suffered slavery’s trans-Atlantic passage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including his 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa. The book focuses on Géricault’s depiction of black people, his approach towards slavery, and the voices that advanced or denigrated them. By turning to documents, essays and critiques, both before and after Waterloo (1815), and, most importantly, Géricault’s own oeuvre, this study explores the fetters of slavery that Gericault challenged—alongside a growing number of abolitionists—overtly or covertly. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, race and ethnic studies and students of modernism.

In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.

This book examines Afrofuturism in African American art, focusing specifically on images of black women and how those images expand the discourse of representation in visual culture of the United States. This volume defines a visual language of Afrofuturism that includes materiality, temporality, and black liberation. Elizabeth Hamilton discusses the visual progenitors of Afrofuturism. In the artworks of Pierre Bennu, Sanford Biggers, Alison Saar, Mequitta Ahuja, Robert Pruitt, Renee Cox, Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Alma Thomas, and Harriet Powers, the fantastic narratives of Afrofuturism are uncovered through in-depth case studies. These case studies engage with Afrofuturism as a black feminist visual theory that helps to unburden the images of black women from the stereotypical visual scripts that are so common in contemporary visual culture of the United States. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, American literature, gender studies, popular culture, and African American studies.

This volume examines the evolution of the depictions of black femininity in French visual culture as a prism through which to understand the Global North’s destructive relationship with the natural world. Drawing on a broad spectrum of archives extending back to the late 18th century – paintings, fashion plates, prints, photographs, and films – this study traces the intricate ways a patriarchal imperialism and a global capitalism have paired black women with the realm of nature to justify the exploitation both of people and of ecosystems. These dehumanizing and speciesist strategies of subjugation have perpetuated interlocking patterns of social injustice and environmental depletion that constitute the most salient challenges facing humankind today. Through a novel approach that merges visual studies, critical race theory, and animal studies, this interdisciplinary investigation historicizes the evolution of the boundaries between human and non-human animals during the modern period. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, critical race theory, colonial and post-colonial studies, animal studies, and French studies.

By studying multiple cultural expressions of Blackness throughout different regions of the Americas, the chapters of this book consider the relationship that social and historical processes such as sovereignty and colonialism have on cultural productions made by and about Black Latin American women. Rosita Scerbo analyzes a range of power dynamics as represented in different artistic media of the Afro-Latin/x American community, including photography, muralism, performance, paintings, and digital art. The book acknowledges that racial and gender equity cannot exist without Intersectionality and that is why the entirety of the chapters focus on cultural and visual productions exclusively created by Afro-descendant women. The Black Latin American women featured in the various chapters, spanning multiple artistic mediums and originating from various Latin American and Caribbean nations, including Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Cuba, collectively pursue the central aim of foregrounding the Afro-descendant woman’s experience. Simultaneously, they strive to enhance the visibility and acknowledgment of gendered Afro-diasporic culture within the Latin American context. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s studies, Latin American studies, African diaspora studies, and race and ethnic studies.

This book is an interdisciplinary study aimed at re-imagining and re-routing contemporary migrations in the Mediterranean. Drawing from visual arts, citizenship studies, film, media and cultural studies, along with postcolonial, border, and decolonial discourses, and examining the issues from within a human rights framework, the book investigates how works of cultural production can offer a more complex and humane understanding of mobility in the Mediterranean beyond representations of illegality and/or crisis. Elvira Pulitano centers the discourse of cultural production around the island of Lampedusa but expands the island geography to include a digital multi-media project, a social enterprise in Palermo, Sicily, and overall reflections on race, identity, and belonging inspired by Toni Morrison’s guest-curated Louvre exhibit The Foreigner’s Home. Responding to recent calls for alternative methodologies in thinking the modern Mediterranean, Pulitano disseminates a fluid archive of contemporary migrations reverberating with ancestral sounds and voices from the African diaspora along a Mediterranean-TransAtlantic map. Adding to the recent proliferation of social science scholarship that has drawn attention to the role of artistic practice in migration studies, the book features human stories of endurance and survival aimed at enhancing knowledge and social justice beyond (and notwithstanding) militarized borders and failed EU policies.

Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia questions what are ideas of vertiginous collecting, art-making and museums as expanded fields, including wonder houses and missionary museums (or museobuses) in Britain and South Asia. If the historiography of British India has privileged photography and the 'Imperial Picturesque', the emphasis here is on the formation of a creole modernity, one that considers the relationship between art and labour, including pearlescence and pearl fishing in Sri Lanka, and the iconoclastic/fetish debates and forms of collecting amongst missionaries. Eaton explores these themes alongside the genealogies and modernities of white(ness) in contemporary curating and amateur female practice, and how the museobus or museum as a unique object has informed the work of contemporary artist group Raqs Media Collective. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, Asian history, and imperial and colonial history.