Anna Arabindan-Kesson, "Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World" (Duke UP, 2021)

New Books in African American Studies · Nov 23, 2022 · 1h 11m

In Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke UP, 2021), Anna Arabindan-Kesson 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. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production. She traces the emergence of a speculative vision that informs perceptions of Blackness in which artistic renderings…