African Arts

This review brings together two books published in 2021 that share a focus on the material cultures of imperialism. Both enrich the growing corpus of art historical scholarship that deconstructs the images of Africa, Africans, and Africa-descendent people that supported the cultures of European and North American imperialism. Both take capacious approaches to the fields of art history and visual culture, bringing together a wide array of visual expressions, from landscape painting and architectural sculpture to board games, dioramas, and cloth swatches. Anna Arabindan-Kesson's Black Bodies, White Gold, a monograph, explores Euro-American images of Blackness in Anglophone Atlantic cultures of the nineteenth century, particularly in the context of US chattel slavery and the cotton economy. Her wide-ranging investigation is structured around contemporary artworks that interrogate these histories. Visualizing Empire, an edited volume, examines ephemera as a vehicle for the dissemination of French constructions of the nation's African colonies and their inhabitants as inferior, thus serving the cause of colonial empire. Both publications attest to the vast breadth of visual culture created in support of, or in alignment with, Western imperialist projects of colonization in Africa and oppression of people of African descent. The authors demonstrate the ubiquity of these images, whether projected through fine art or popular culture, and whether their messages were overt or implicit.

The editors of Visualizing Empire introduce the volume with an assertion of the profound impact of imperial visual culture: "these images and ephemera were primary agents in constructing and maintaining French imperial ideology" (p. 4). Arabindan-Kesson describes the nineteenth century circulation of Euro-American representations of Blackness and cotton as similarly transformative, for these images created "conditions of viewership through which Blackness could be transformed into a commodity and Black lives into fungible objects" (p. 21). She concludes the book with an assessment of the "immense power" of the "image bank" that constitutes a nation's—or an empire's—collective memory (pp. 203–204). This immense power reverberates into the present, attesting to the necessity of these art historical reassessments of the imperial image bank. Recent worldwide movements to recognize and confront the consequences of imperialist imagery—including public art only now removed and histories of Black oppression and resistance only now acknowledged—demonstrate the continued relevance of this research. In their introduction, the editors of Visualizing Empire cite the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report on the restitution of African cultural property held in French museums as evidence of the persistent, unresolved legacy of colonialism in contemporary France. Arabindan-Kesson powerfully invokes the events of 2020 as she describes the stakes for her analysis of the visuality and value of Black bodies in US culture: COVID's unequal impacts, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Elijah McClain (p. 27). By turning attention to nineteenth and early twentieth century visual culture, these studies richly (and depressingly) illuminate the still-colonized present.

Visualizing Empire explores a single archive: the Getty Research Institute's French colonial collections, assembled by the Association Connaissance de l'Histoire de l'Afrique Contemporaine or ACHAC, a French research consortium well known [End Page 93] to students of French colonial history. The ACHAC collection "documents the impacts and influences of French colonialism, both on Africa and on France itself." The volume aims to give the ACHAC archive more visibility through a critical examination of its thousands of images. Eleven contributors richly contextualize several genres of imperial ephemera represented in the ACHAC collection, including board games (Thomas), toys (Forsdick), comic strips (Bloom), posters...