“A Sculptor of Black Heroes Leaves a Legacy”
Month: May 2016
HIDDEN FIGURES and the genre of “race” film
Taraji P. Henson’s question at the end of this preview feature piece, “Rocket Science, Race and the ’60s,” published in today’s Times is provocative:
“I hate when I do a film, and it has a lot of African-Americans and they call it a black film,” Ms. Henson said. “I don’t wake up and go, ‘Let’s see, this weekend, I’m going to see a Chinese film, I’m going to see a black film, no I’m going to see a while film with a black person in it.’ Who does that?”
(Hmmm, everyone.)
Malevich’s BLACK SQUARE–race/racialization as underpinnings of modernism
In Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America, I wrote that “race was discursively central to modernity” and that “modernism depended on the the conceptualization of race in ethnocultural, social, and national terms.” Moreover, I argued that “the idea of the essential subject, as a construct, allowed for the preservation of racist and limiting terms used by admirers and detractors.”
The book’s focus were the conditions of early twentieth-century American modernism. Yet, it’s well-established that some of the ethno-racial preoccupations of US modernism had parallels in Europe. Christian Weikop’s and Esther Schreuder’s research, published in The Image of the Black in Western Art: The Twentieth Century—The Impact Images of Africa, are recent additions to the scholarship as it concerned the modernists of Western and Northern Europe and the modern images of those regions.
But what of Russia and Eastern Europe during the same period? The time is now.
“Russia Discovers Two Secrets Under Avant-Garde Masterpiece”
Art Historians Find Racist Joke Hidden Under Malevich’s BLACK SQUARE
Profile: J. A. Rodgers, Historian
by Patrick Vernon After my recent article on the absence of black historians and the growing network of independent black scholars, I felt I wanted to share one of my personal heroes who embodies the characteristics and challenges that black historians face today. This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Joel Augustus Rogers, […]
Zwarte Piet is a product of the Netherlands’ long involvement in the slave trade — Media Diversified
by Karen Williams The first time that I saw a photograph of the Zwarte Piet celebrations in the Netherlands, the door to questions of slavery in my own life swung wide open. There – right there – looking back at me was the representation of my personal history, and the long history of Dutch slavery […]
via Zwarte Piet is a product of the Netherlands’ long involvement in the slave trade — Media Diversified
ACRAH 