Daily Archives: November 7, 2018

Flora in bloom: Meet China’s veteran 79-year-old botanical painter

Colloquium with Mary Hicks: ‘Africa/Brazil: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery’

 

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Hutchins Center    Streamed live 10 hours ago (11/07/18)

Mary Hicks is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and History at Amherst College, her current research examines the maritime dimensions of the African Diaspora, with a particular focus on eighteenth and early nineteenth century colonial Brazil. She explores how the seafaring activities of enslaved Africans and creoles shaped the world of south Atlantic slavery.

More broadly, her research seeks to interrogate the multiplicity of connections between coastal West Africa and Brazil through the lens of mutual cultural, technological, commercial, intellectual and environmental influences. Furthermore, her research seeks to redefine how historians understand experiences of enslavement and the middle passage. In addition to investigating the lives of African sailors, her current work also reveals the centrality of enslaved and freed African women’s market activities in introducing West African material culture and aesthetic values to urban Salvador. She has previously served as a Ford Foundation and Jefferson Foundation Fellow. Her work can be found in the Journal of Global Slavery.

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The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art: David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Karen C. C. Dalton

Contributors: David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Karen C. C. Dalton, Kristina Van Dyke, Christraud M. Geary, Sheila Crane, Robert Hillenbrand, John McLeod, Kenneth X. Robbins, Don J. Wyatt, Timon Screech, Alicia Volk, John Picton

The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art asks how the black figure was depicted by artists from the non-Western world. Beginning with ancient Egypt―positioned properly as part of African history―this volume focuses on the figure of the black as rendered by artists from Africa, East Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The aesthetic traditions illustrated here are as diverse as the political and social histories of these regions. From Igbo Mbari sculptures to modern photography from Mali, from Indian miniatures to Japanese prints, African and Asian artists portrayed the black body in ways distinct from the European tradition, even as they engaged with Western art through the colonial encounter and the forces of globalization.

This volume complements the vision of art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil who, during the 1960s, founded an image archive to collect the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. A half‐century later, Harvard University Press and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research completed the historic publication of The Image of the Black in Western Art―ten books in total―beginning with Egyptian antiquities and concluding with images that span the twentieth century. The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art reinvigorates the de Menil family’s original mission and reorients the study of the black body with a new focus on Africa and Asia.

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Meet Chris Reddy: A Career Spent Studying Oil Spills (Gulf Dispatches)