Seeing Race Before Race - Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World
Published on 20. June 2023
Book
Hardback
300 pages
978-0-86698-841-4 (ISBN)
Description
Explores the deployment of racial thinking and racial formations in the visual culture of the pre-modern world.
The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance.
Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noemie Ndiaye calls "the racial matrix" and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition "Seeing Race Before Race"-a collaboration between RaceB4Race and the Newberry Library-as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.
The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance.
Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noemie Ndiaye calls "the racial matrix" and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition "Seeing Race Before Race"-a collaboration between RaceB4Race and the Newberry Library-as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Arizona
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 313 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
1392 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-86698-841-4 (9780866988414)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Noemie Ndiaye is assistant professor of Renaissance and Early Modern English Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race and Racecraft: Early Modern Repertoires of Blackness. Lia Markey is director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library. She is the author of Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence and coeditor of The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750.
Content
Foreword- by Ayanna Thompson and Daniel Greene
Introduction- by Lia Markey and Noemie Ndiaye
Part 1: FIGURING
Essay 1. Manuscripts and Printed Books: Book History and Race. By Brandi K. Adams and Carissa M. Harris.
Essay 2. Fashioning Racial Materiality in Nicolas de Nicolay's Representations of Jews. By M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dana E. Katz.
Note From the Field 1. "Touching each book": Demystifying Special Collections in Community. By Analu Maria Lopez.
Exhibition Catalog: "Seeing Race Before Race." Part 1: Figuring. Entries 1-14.
Part 2: MAPPING
Essay 3. Geographies of Race: Constructions of Constantinople/Istanbul in the Western European Imaginary. By Roland Betancourt and Ambereen Dadabhoy.
Essay 4. Race, Empire, and Cartography. By Ricardo Padron and Risa Puleo.
Note From the Field 2. Displaying Black Art in the Medieval Galleries at The Met Museum. By Andrea Myers Achi.
Exhibition Catalog: "Seeing Race Before Race." Part 2: Mapping. Entries 15-26.
Part 3: PERFORMING
Essay 5. Back Bending Labor, Savage Dances, Pious Stances: Race in Motion between Africa and the Americas. By Elena FitzPatrick Sifford and Cecile Fromont.
Note From the Field 3. Bringing Premodern Critical Race Consciousness to Shakespeare's Globe. By Farah Karim-Cooper.
Exhibition Catalog: "Seeing Race Before Race." Part 3: Performing. Entries 27-42.
Interview. On Early Modern Critical Race Studies and Critical Indigenous Studies. By Kim F. Hall, Scott Manning Stevens, and L. Lehua Yim.
Glossary
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index
Introduction- by Lia Markey and Noemie Ndiaye
Part 1: FIGURING
Essay 1. Manuscripts and Printed Books: Book History and Race. By Brandi K. Adams and Carissa M. Harris.
Essay 2. Fashioning Racial Materiality in Nicolas de Nicolay's Representations of Jews. By M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dana E. Katz.
Note From the Field 1. "Touching each book": Demystifying Special Collections in Community. By Analu Maria Lopez.
Exhibition Catalog: "Seeing Race Before Race." Part 1: Figuring. Entries 1-14.
Part 2: MAPPING
Essay 3. Geographies of Race: Constructions of Constantinople/Istanbul in the Western European Imaginary. By Roland Betancourt and Ambereen Dadabhoy.
Essay 4. Race, Empire, and Cartography. By Ricardo Padron and Risa Puleo.
Note From the Field 2. Displaying Black Art in the Medieval Galleries at The Met Museum. By Andrea Myers Achi.
Exhibition Catalog: "Seeing Race Before Race." Part 2: Mapping. Entries 15-26.
Part 3: PERFORMING
Essay 5. Back Bending Labor, Savage Dances, Pious Stances: Race in Motion between Africa and the Americas. By Elena FitzPatrick Sifford and Cecile Fromont.
Note From the Field 3. Bringing Premodern Critical Race Consciousness to Shakespeare's Globe. By Farah Karim-Cooper.
Exhibition Catalog: "Seeing Race Before Race." Part 3: Performing. Entries 27-42.
Interview. On Early Modern Critical Race Studies and Critical Indigenous Studies. By Kim F. Hall, Scott Manning Stevens, and L. Lehua Yim.
Glossary
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index