Introduction / David Bindman -- Part I. Africa: Images of Africans by and of themselves: historical and comparative factors / Suzanne Blier -- The body in African art / Kristina Van Dyke -- Masquerade in Sub-Saharan Africa / John Picton -- The image of the Black in early African photography / Christraud Geary -- The image of the Black in modern and contemporary African art / Steven Nelson -- Part II. Asia: The image of the Black in Islamic art: the case of painting / Robert Hillenbrand -- The image of the Black in India / John McLeod and Kenneth X. Robbins -- The image of the Black in Chinese art / Don J. Wyatt -- The image of the Black in Japanese art: from the beginnings to 1850 / Timon Screech -- The image of the Black in Japanese art: 1850 to the present day / Alicia Volk.
Summary:
The book moves beyond the "West", that is to say Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, to consider the art of Africa and the world to the east, to represent and place in historical context images of people of sub-Saharan African descent. The question remains: what does it mean for an artist of African descent to make an image of him or herself, or another person of African descent, as opposed to an image of a Black person created by an artist who is not Black? This vexed question has been at the heart of debates about "identity politics" for a very long time. In other words, in collecting images of Black subjects created by Black artists, whether from Africa or the African diaspora, we are not making epistemological or ontological claims about a work of art's so-called "authenticity," nor of its artistic quality. We simply see these works as their own canon, as another way of organizing viewing and explicating images of the Black subject in art, one related to Euro-American traditions of representation, but simultaneously with an order and history of their own as well, in the same way that a novel, let's say, by Toni Morrison exists simultaneously in the canon of American literature and of African American literature, among other literary traditions.-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.