The image of the Black in African and Asian art

About this book

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.--