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Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century
Aesthetics, White Supremacy
By P. A. Mullins
This book explores several critical connections between Black African objects and white Western aesthetics and artwork in the United States from the late 1800s until 1939.
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About This Book
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), it 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.
To do this, the book (1) explores white Western aesthetic ideas and contrasts them with Black African aesthetic ideas, (2) explores the history of the use of Black African objects by white Western collectors, artists in and around the Harlem Renaissance, (3) explores the history of the influence of white Western aesthetics on Black collectors, artists, and groups in and around the Harlem Renaissance, and (4) explores how Black African aesthetics as white mythology impacts aesthetics beyond the art world through advertising, commercial popularization with Black Power moment, and today with films like Black Panther and videos starring Beyonce.
This book seeks to bring together previous scholarship, white Western and Black African aesthetic theory, historical documents, and archival research for primary documents that highlight how white supremacy runs through Western scholarship and ideology and how this presents a distorted, degraded view of Black Africa and its people not only for white people but for Black people as well.
Reviews
This book is an interesting and innovative study of how connections between Black African objects and white Western aesthetics and artwork supported and (re)produced the ideology of white supremacy in the United States between the late 1800s and the beginning of World War II. It shows how social and political issues that are acute up to now manifested themselves in specific ways in the art world in that turbulent era. Importantly, Mullins’ book also convinces that Africa has always been an important point of reference for American cultural, intellectual and sociopolitical life. —Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Institute for African Studies.
P. A. Mullins presents a strong case for researchers, scholars, and lay art historians to study and unravel the politics of the art world in national museums with displays about Africa. The scholarship is original and contributes to knowledge in terms of exposing not-so-obvious denials and revisionist US history.—Ronald J. Stephens, Professor of African American Studies at Purdue University.
Author Information
The author is an independent interdisciplinary scholar of philosophy, race, history, sociology, and culture.
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Table of 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
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