Black Bodies, White Gold

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora Art at Princeton University.

“Beautifully conceived, consummately researched, and effectively presented, Black Bodies, White Gold makes an important contribution to art history, African American and Black diaspora studies, American studies, and British Empire studies.” - Lisa Lowe, author of (The Intimacies of Four Continents) “Anna Arabindan-Kesson's book offers an expansive visual accounting of cotton and its representations, from ‘negro cloth’ to contemporary art, that impressively charts the materiality, meaning, and memory of 'white gold' in the making of the Atlantic world and beyond. It is an exemplary model of African diasporic and globally oriented histories of art.” - Krista Thompson, author of (Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice) “Arabindan-Kesson’s book expands the analytic potential of previous art-historical studies that trace the representation of Blackness across the threshold after emancipation.... One of its most valuable contributions to the field of art history ... is its inventive recourse across time, folding contemporary art into a methodology that illuminates subaltern historical conditions otherwise excluded or redacted from the archive."- C.C. McKee (Panorama) "This thoughtful, well-illustrated book offers a long-overdue, original, engaged approach to studies of the cotton economy in tandem with slavery. . . . Arabindan-Kesson initiates new ways of seeing and reading visual art toward revealing and facing difficult truths about persistent race discrimination and injustice. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty."(Choice) "[Arabindan-Kesson's] beautifully written storytelling is not only highly engaging and compelling to read, but . . . also offer[s] an indispensable account of the ways in which racial capitalism and corporate imperialism have shaped and been shaped by visual culture.” - Edwin Coomasaru (Oxford Art Journal) “Black Bodies, White Gold . . . is a tour de force in its seamlessly transnational approach, uniting of historic and contemporary artworks, and creative deployment of theoretical approaches for ethically attending to the absence and the violence of slavery’s archives. Arabindan-Kesson’s commitment to antiracist work consistently drives her analysis.” - Jennifer Van Horn (Art Bulletin) “Black Bodies, White Gold is a thoughtful, rigorous meditation on materiality, meaning, and memory. . . . Arabindan-Kesson’s methodologically innovative emphasis on materiality, land, labor, and value has significant insights for environmental studies, showing how vision materially shapes the world.” - Anita Girvan (The Goose) “With beautifully-printed images, Arabindan-Kesson’s well-researched text uses a variety of historical and contemporary examples to drill down into the often-shrouded history of the Black lives behind the journey of cotton. . . . Black Bodies, White Gold is highly relevant for studies in art history, African American art, African diaspora history, colonialism, and business and commerce.” - Suzanne Sawyer (ARLIS/NA) “Black Bodies, White Gold carefully unpacks the material, representational, and historical complexities of cotton with impressive skill and knowledge, offering a compelling, original and expansive approach to art history, fit for the twenty-first century.” - Sarah Thomas (Art History)

• Acknowledgments  viiIllustrations  xvIntroduction: Threads of Empire  11. Circuits of Cotton  292. Market Aesthetics: Color, Cloth, and Commerce  673. Of Vision and Value: Landscape and Labor after Slavery  1214. Material Histories and Speculative Conditions  171Coda: A Material with Memory  203Notes  213Bibliography  247Index  285