AFRICANAS – serie

As Dutch merchants became drivers of the transatlantic slavery business in the seventeenth century, Dutch art increasingly used Blackness to signal slavery and servitude. In this brilliant and pathbreaking work, Angela Vanhaelen proposes new ways of looking at Dutch paintings that do not equate Blackness with enslavement. Vanhaelen reframes the conversation on Netherlandish art by placing seventeenth-century domestic scenes and portraits in dialogue with images of trading forts, markets, and plantations in West Africa and Brazil. She argues that Dutch paintings depicting enslaved Black Africans—for example, Frans Hals’s Family Group in a Landscape—not only obscure information about the institution of slavery but fail to capture the resistance and dissent of people who did not conform to the anti-Black world created by Dutch art. Opacity leads readers to grapple with difficult and complex questions: How do we reconcile images of peace and prosperity with the horror of the slave trade? How do we teach imagery of Black people as enslaved without reinforcing anti-Black racism? Can we interpret dehumanizing imagery in ways that consider the complexities of enslavement?Refusing to view Dutch pictures on their own terms, Opacity recognizes the historical persistence of non-sovereign positions, anticolonial settlements, non-patriarchal homeplaces, open-ended forms of religion and culture, as well as the possibilities of oppositional modes of world-making. This important, thought-provoking book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Black studies and early modern European art history as well as general readers looking for a fresh approach to Dutch art of the period.

For centuries, Africa has been the center of the global trade in gold. Synonymous with wealth and power in African cultures, this precious metal was also central to the emergence of Europe’s colonial empires and the contemporary world made in their wake. Black and gold have thus always been conjoined and yet set in opposition: blackness as negation, gold as universal standard of value. Black & Gold is a genealogy of this seeming contradiction—a global history of value told through episodes of Black creative practice.Featuring the work of acclaimed contemporary artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Theaster Gates, Wangechi Mutu, El Anatsui, Chris Ofili, and Kerry James Marshall, this book unearths a series of historical and ecological connections—the mining of gold on the continent and its relationship to the diaspora, “black gold” as a colloquialism for oil, and Blackness as a form of cultural “gold.” By bringing early modern histories of alchemy, art, and colonial contact into the present, W. Ian Bourland tells a multifaceted story about the fetishization of gold, driven by an impulse to extract Blackness and refine people and matter into ever greater forms of abstraction with devastating consequences for the environment and humanity. In simplest terms, Black & Gold reconsiders the material and symbolic life of gold and the Black labor that has always sustained it. It will resonate with art critics and scholars, museumgoers and collectors, and anyone interested in modern and contemporary art, the Black Atlantic, and global histories of empire and culture.

For centuries, Africa has been the center of the global trade in gold. Synonymous with wealth and power in African cultures, this precious metal was also central to the emergence of Europe’s colonial empires and the contemporary world made in their wake. Black and gold have thus always been conjoined and yet set in opposition: blackness as negation, gold as universal standard of value. Black & Gold is a genealogy of this seeming contradiction—a global history of value told through episodes of Black creative practice.Featuring the work of acclaimed contemporary artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Theaster Gates, Wangechi Mutu, El Anatsui, Chris Ofili, and Kerry James Marshall, this book unearths a series of historical and ecological connections—the mining of gold on the continent and its relationship to the diaspora, “black gold” as a colloquialism for oil, and Blackness as a form of cultural “gold.” By bringing early modern histories of alchemy, art, and colonial contact into the present, W. Ian Bourland tells a multifaceted story about the fetishization of gold, driven by an impulse to extract Blackness and refine people and matter into ever greater forms of abstraction with devastating consequences for the environment and humanity. In simplest terms, Black & Gold reconsiders the material and symbolic life of gold and the Black labor that has always sustained it. It will resonate with art critics and scholars, museumgoers and collectors, and anyone interested in modern and contemporary art, the Black Atlantic, and global histories of empire and culture.

During the height of France’s colonial period, museums served as key sites for teaching the public how to see themselves and others through the lens of race and sexuality. This museal gaze continues to haunt representations of Blackness in contemporary France, especially amid intensified debate over the country’s colonial legacy and racial politics. Unlearning the Gaze examines how African and afrodescendant Francophone creators confront, reinterpret, and unsettle these inherited visual regimes.Focusing on contemporary literary, performance, and visual works by creators such as Bintou Dembélé, Omar Victor Diop, Fatou Diome, and Julien Creuzet, among others, Abigail E. Celis analyzes a corpus that repurposes the tropes and mechanisms of colonial exhibition and collection. Some works depict the inner workings of ethnographic museums or revisit representational forms such as natural history treatises and colonial fairs; others more subtly rework the hierarchies of humanness disseminated through such sites. Celis identifies two broad strategies offered in response to these museal practices: reprisal, which exposes and deconstructs the myths and mechanisms of the racial-colonial gaze, and refusal, which turns toward queer, afrodescendant, decolonial, and ecological ways of seeing. Rather than proposing a singular alternative gaze, the book demonstrates the diversity of aesthetic engagements that unlearn colonial visual biopolitics.Unlearning the Gaze offers an interdisciplinary account of the afterlives of colonialism and the politics of representation. It will interest scholars and graduate students in Francophone and Africana studies, as well as readers in visual culture, art history, museum studies, and comparative literature.This book is published in open access thanks to the financial support of the Université de Montréal Libraries.