Articles
Title: Rubens and His Black Kings
Author: Professor Elizabeth McGrath
Date: 2008 (Rubens Bulletin)
Host: koninklijke musea voor schone kunsten (http://www.fine-arts-museum.be/)
Abstract:
“That one of the Wise Men was African or black is not stated in the biblical account of the Adoration of the Magi, any more than that they were kings – or indeed that they were three in number. Matthew 2.1-12 is the scriptural text, and it is also the gospel of the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January, one of the greatest feasts of the Catholic Church; in this text we read simply of magi (a term most naturally interpreted as applying to members of the Persian priestly class) who came from the east (ab oriente; apo anatolõn in the Greek) led by a star. However, Matthew goes on to say “and entering into the house, they found the child with Mary his mother, and falling down they adored him. And opening their treasures they presented unto him gifts: gold, and frankincense and myrrh” (“Et intrantes domum, invenerunt puerum cum Maria matre eius, et procidentes adoraverunt eum: et apertis thesauris suis obtulerunt ei munera, aurum, thus, et myrrham”); it was the triplicity of these gifts that encouraged the idea that the Wise Men were three in number (an idea which starts with Origen and was reinforced by St Augustine).”
Title: “If You Don’t Tell it Like it Was, it Can Never Be As it Ought to Be”
Author: David W. Blight
Date: 26th September 2002
Host: Gilder Lehrman Center, for the study of slavery, resistance and abolition; Yale University (http://www.yale.edu/glc/index.htm)
Abstract:
“In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s epic novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a plague attacks a small village, causing the people to lose, in stages, parts of their memories. First, each person loses the ability to recollect their childhood, then names and functions and all manner of objects. Then identities begin to vanish; people do not recognize one another, and some even lose a sense of their own being. A silversmith who is terrified that he cannot remember the word “anvil” for one his own crucial tools, frantically places labels on everything in his house in the hope he will not lose all memory. He labels animals and plants, furniture and windows — a cow, a pig, a banana. “Little by little,” writes Garcia Marquez, “studying the infinite possibilities of the loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but no one would remember their use.” So, he began to write longer and longer descriptions of function: “this is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk…” and so on.
So, Buendia, the silversmith, becomes traumatized by the prospect of living a life of endless labelling to survive with a sense of humanity. He tries to develop a memory machine that will store written entries of all experiences and all knowledge in each villagers life. After placing thousands of entries into his machine, Buendia is mercifully saved from his nightmare by a friend who cures him miraculously from the plague. Buendia recovers his full power of memory. But he had seen this world without memory, a world of despair and incurable confusion, a world where people lost their humanity in an anarchy of ignorance. Personal identity had died, and all forms of symbolic commuication had ceased. Memory, this story implies, is at the heart of our humanity; as individuals, and perhaps as societies as well, we cannot function in practical or moral terms without memory.”
Title: Problems in Studying the Role of Blacks in Europe
Author: Professor Allison Blakely
Date: May-June 1997 (Perspectives Journal)
Host: American Historical Association (http://www.historians.org/index.cfm)
Abstract:
“A discussion of the influence of black Africans on Europe and on Europeans is complicated by the absence of a universal definition of black. In general, the designation black in Europe, unlike in the United States, has been reserved for those of dark color, not the broader definition based on known black African ancestry. Consequently, awareness of a black population in Europe has been limited by the fact that when interracial marriage occurred, subsequent light-complexioned generations might never be referred to again as black. Hence the debate over whether Alexandre Dumas père, who had African ancestry through his paternal grandmother, was black. Consistent with the predominant European attitude, he emphatically rejected the notion that he was. Besides, in his France-as in all the other European societies-class was far more important than color, at least until the 20th century. The great Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin, who took pride in his African ancestry, shrugged off aspersions cast on that score, but took great offense at those who did not respect the centuries of nobility on his father’s side.”
Title: ART AND ‘ART’ IN AFRICA: Conceptual clarification, confusion or colonization?
Author: Jennifer Wilkinson
Date: 2002 (Journal of African Philosophy, Vol.1.1)
Host: Journal of African Philosophy (http://www.africanphilosophy.com)
Abstract:
“The concept of art that we have more or less come to accept is under siege both internally and externally. While some artists challenge its boundaries from within, many artefacts from Africa, a continent often presumed not to have or at least not to have had the concept, stretch its limits. In South Africa, since boundary disputes about art help to keep old racial prejudices alive, clarification is not merely of academic interest but is urgently required to assist in the process of transformation and reconciliation. Although there have been philosophical efforts to include ‘African art’ in the fold, by producing wider definitions and criteria, these tend to be paradigmatic. The result is that African art hovers as a hybrid at the edges with the art of Western countries continuing to occupy center stage. Reaction in South Africa to a situation in which art is measured according to the perceived uncritical assimilation of foreign criteria, calls for conceptual decolonization.”
Title: The Negro Digs up his Past
Author: Arthur A. Schomburg
Date: Originally published March 1925 in Survey Graphic (Harlem issue)
Host: Africa Within (www.africawithin.com)
Abstract:
“The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset. So among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and apt out of the very pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all.”
Title: Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico
Author: Ilona Katzew, New York University
Date: Originally published in the catalog for the exhibition ‘New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America’, organized by the Americas Society Art Gallery, Sept. 26-Dec. 22, 1996
Host: LABERINTO: An Electronic Journal of Early Modern Hispanic Literatures and Culture (www.gc.maricopa.edu/laberinto/2002/welcome.htm)
Abstract:
“…the social composition of Mexico during the eighteenth century was based on the existence of various castas or castes. This term was used in Mexico to refer to the different mixed races that comprised society; it also served to indicate socioeconomic class. The Spanish prelate’s emphasis on social heterogeneity was not meant to imply a harmonious coexistence of the diverse races, but instead to remind both colonial subjects and the Spanish Crown that Mexico was still an ordered, hierarchical society in which each group occupied a specific socioeconomic niche defined largely by race. Throughout the colonial period Spanish civil and ecclesiastical authorities emphasized racial differences as a way of exerting their control over the population. But the blurring of social boundaries that resulted from race mixing precluded a de facto categorization of the population, which greatly concerned Spanish authorities. Anxiety over this loss of control permeated much of Mexico’s reality during the eighteenth century and also accounts in part for the emergence of the distinct pictorial genre produced there known as casta painting.”