Black Bodies, White Gold—Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World

In Black Bodies, White Gold, Anna Arabindan-Kesson (African American Studies, Art & Archaeology) uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Artist and art-historian, Chika Okeke-Agulu (African American Studies, Art & Archaeology) joins her for this important conversation; we hope you can too.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an assistant professor of African American and Black Diasporic art at Princeton University with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Her forthcoming monograph is called An Empire State of Mind: Plantation Imaginaries, Colonial Medicine and Ways of Seeing. Chika Okeke-Agulu is an artist, art historian, curator, and professor in the African American Studies and Art and Archaeology Departments at Princeton. He is the author of Obiora Udechukwu: Line, Image, Text; Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria; and (with Okwui Enwezor), Contemporary African Art Since 1980.

Online event; register here.

This event is presented by Labyrinth Books and co-sponsored by Princeton University’s African American Studies Department and Humanities Council and the Princeton Public Library.