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\"The year 2007 marked the bicentenary of the Act abolishing British participation in the slave trade. \"Representing Enslavement and Abolition on Museums\"- which uniquely draws together contributions from academic commentators, museum professionals, community activists and artists who had an involvement with the bicentenary - reflects on the complexity and difficulty of museums' experiences in presenting and interpreting the histories of slavery and abolition, and places these experiences in the broader context of debates over the bicentenary's significance and the lessons to be learnt from it. The history of Britain's role in transatlantic slavery officially become part of the National Curriculum in the UK in 2009; with the bicentenary of 2007, this marks the start of increasing public engagement with what has largely been a \"hidden\" history. The book aims to not only critically review and assess the impact of the bicentenary, but also to identify practical issues that public historians, consultants, museum practitioners, heritage professionals and policy makers can draw upon in developing responses, both to the increasing recognition of Britain's history of African enslavement and controversial and traumatic histories more generally\"-- Provided by publisher.

The Rethinking Iran Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies hosted an online event on Apr 12 that discussed the history and legacy of anti-Black racism, erasure and enslavement in modern Iran. Dr. Beeta Baghoolizadeh, the author of the recently released The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran, commenced her talk by exploring Iran's 1977 \"Art of Black Africa\" exhibition, organized by Queen Farah Pahlavi during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah. The exhibit was billed as a significant cultural moment in Iranian-African relations. \"In the event's catalog, they really stress the importance of this exhibition being the first time Iran and Africa had met at this crossroads, how a bridge had been built to transverse oceans and deserts that had separated Iran and Africa,\" Baghoolizadeh explained. However, Baghoolizadeh noted the catalog's complete erasure of slavery in Iran, which formally lasted until the early 20th century. Ironically, enslaved East Africans had once served the royal family at the exhibit's precise location, the palace of Baghi Firdaws in Tehran. \"This is just a very easy example of how they're rewriting, erasing and replacing these histories, the history of Black Iranians, East Africans in Iran and the history of enslavement,\" she said.

\"This exhibition offers an unprecedented look at the life and artistic achievements of seventeenth-century Afro-Hispanic painter Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608-1670). Largely known today as the subject of The Met's iconic portrait by Diego Velázquez, Pareja was enslaved in Velázquez's studio for over two decades before becoming an artist in his own right. This presentation is the first to tell his story and examine the role of enslaved artisanal labor and a multiracial society in the art and material culture of Spain's so-called \"Golden Age.\" Representations of Spain's Black and Morisco populations in works by Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Velázquez join works that chart the ubiquity of enslaved labor across media, from sculpture to silver. The Met's portrait, executed by Velázquez in Rome in 1650, is contextualized by his other portraits from this period and the original document whereby Pareja was freed upon return to Madrid. The exhibition culminates in the first gathering of Pareja's rarely seen paintings, some of enormous scale, which engage with the canons of Western art while reverberating throughout the African diaspora. Harlem Renaissance collector and scholar Arturo Schomburg was vital to the recovery of Pareja's work and serves as a thread connecting seventeenth-century Spain with twentieth-century New York, providing a lens through which to view the multiple histories that have been written about Pareja.\"-- Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2023/juan-de-pareja

In 2009, in Lagos, Portugal, the remains of 158 bodies of fifteenth-century enslaved Africans were unearthed. In 2016, Lagos City Council inaugurated a slavery-themed exhibition in collaboration with the Portuguese Committee of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project. Through an analysis of the exhibition’s rhetoric and poetics, I argue that the former is yet another instance of Lusotropicalism, a theoretical construct developed by Gilberto Freyre throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to support the construct of Brazil as a racial democracy, and appropriated by Portugal to support the “benign” character of its colonial system. As a consequence, slavery and Portugal’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, although apparently brought into the light in this exhibition, are in fact hidden in plain sight because both the rhetorical and poetic devices at play conspire to evade addressing the colonial order and its historical consequences, both past and present.

In August 2012, a curious website \"opened its doors to the public\" with a startling declaration: that the prison island of Guantánamo had been closed in 2010 and subsequently turned into \"The Guantánamo Bay Museum of Art and History.\" Its creator, Ian Allan Paul, professes to present a \"mobile collectivity of artists, theorists, and other members of the public,\" one that is only partially real. Promising revolving exhibitions of protest art and theory at the facility, the museum also hosts the equally virtual Jumah al-Dossari Center for Critical Studies, with articles of political theory by scholars like Judith Butler and Martin Puchner. The exhibits are housed in museums and art venues located in different parts of the world, but the Guantánamo Bay Museum itself is an elaborate fiction premised upon the lie of the detention center's closure. In other words, the museum is a conceptual reality but a spatial hoax. The premise of this floating institution is that it displaces the once-prison into a rotating, global artistic and intellectual community. While the museum's digital coordinates certainly appear on Google Maps, its counterfactual presence-the prison was not closed in 2012 and remains open to this day-makes a sardonic joke about the \"Global War on Terror\": the closing of Guantanamo Bay as an extralegal detainment center is unimaginable in the prevailing geopolitical climate.The counterfactually closed prison-museum acknowledges a definitive and universal human rights paradigm that remains out of reach for the detainees at the prison.3 Moreover, the museum looks to do the impossible by turning the space of detention into one of critical inquiry through both artistic and political contemplation. And yet, while Paul's ironic \"museum\" may not exist, it forces us to contend with an institutionalized aesthetic practice integral to both US and international prisons, that of a prison art program. Like prisoner artists in the United States, detained artists at Guantanamo engage in creative labor-sanctioned, clandestine, and defiant-from within a fully operational prison site. Around 2009, the Obama administration instituted an art program for prisoners at Guantanamo as mental stimulation as well as temporary relief from its extreme conditions. Driven by a liberal-humanitarian impulse, it allowed, until a November 2017 Department of Justice order, the production of paintings and art models under heavy military supervision. For about eight years, the prison authorities championed art made under incarceration as a palliative to the extreme isolation and bodily vulnerability endured by the detainees, before the Department of Defense abruptly changed policy to all but eliminate the program.4If the virtual, counterfactual museum imagines the end of extralegal detention as the blossoming of artistic critique, then how might current and former detainees at Guantanamo imagine their condition as both artistic expression and a testimony to their imprisonment in a global incarceration network? Taking seriously that the representational strategies of art and literature generate specific political positions, how might an aesthetics of detainment allow us, as a non-incarcerated audience, to understand Guantanamo Bay Prison's exceptional status (as outside the national legal, territorial, and sovereign infrastructure of the United States) in ways that cut against the liberalhumanitarian rhetoric of the art program? Bringing both questions together, what implications might detainee cultural production have in understanding Guantanamo as an unexceptional US prison? An examination of post-9/11 art produced under captivity helps us understand the stark political predicament and dislocation faced by transnational Muslim prisoners. This essay argues that cultural production by detainees-paintings and life-narratives, in particular-questions the securitized justifications of extralegal detention when put in conversation with paradigms of US slavery, discourses of fugitivity, and the nineteenth-century penitentiary.5 If slavery and incarceration created the indefinite category of fugitivity, that is, the continuing status of the fugitive slave as an escaped form of borderless, retrievable property, then post-9/11 detainment reframes discourse around so-called global terrorism by deploying a parallel formal conceit of the terroristas-fugitive, that is, calling attention to a new kind of geopolitical captive who hovers uncertainly in the US political spectrum between enslaved person and prisoner of war. I examine paintings from a detainee art exhibition \"Ode to the Sea\" and Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantánamo Diary (2015/2017) to show that detainee cultural production refuses the exceptionality of Guantanamo Bay. Instead, these works present a critique of extralegal detainment practices in ways that illuminate a totalizing regime of US captivity that is not just a post-9/11 phenomenon but a feature of US incarceration within and without. In other words, US extralegal detainment relies on a suspension of the rule of law, but in doing so, it takes recourse to the very foundations of domestic US slavery and incarceration that afford the state to exercise complex legal maneuvers in the production of fugitivity. By invoking international copyright, this essay shows that detainee cultural production bypasses Guantánamo's elaborate exceptionality paradigm. A consideration of the intellectual property rights of detainees, what I call detainee copyright, makes apparent the demand for the US state to recognize otherwise fugitive works of art, a demand, as I note later, that is made by detainee counsel in a bid to visibilize the vexed question of detainee rights. The question of detainee rights activates a key analogy between post-9/11 detainment and the long history of US carcerality and slavery. Detainee copyright calls attention to artistic and narrative objects as owned property, made apparent through Department of Justice policy or systematized through military protocols of censorship, and thereby subverts the strategic feints of Guantánamo's extraordinary territoriality. The vexed question of art ownership removes the screen around the carefully managed legal limbo occupied by its producers. While the US government is at pains to hold its prisoners as unlawful combatants without stripping them legally of their international citizenship, its simultaneous claim of ownership over detainee cultural production effectively converts transnational Muslim subjects, by proxy, into the property of the United States. Detainee copyright thus showcases the suspension and erosion of postcolonial citizenship by the US security state, where the basic rights of non-American citizens are effectively made obsolete in a way that renders them entirely dependent upon US power.

Kara Walker’s art, known for its stark depictions of race, history, and power dynamics, offers an invaluable entry point for discussing race in higher education. Integrating Walker’s work into the humanities classroom allows for critical engagement with historical and contemporary issues of race, ethnicity, and systemic oppression. Through her use of silhouettes and narratives that expose the brutal legacies of slavery, racism, and colonialism, Walker’s art challenges students to confront uncomfortable truths and foster deeper conversations about intersectionality. Discussing Walker’s art can lead to explorations of how race intersects with class, gender, sexuality, and disability, revealing the layered and compounded experiences of marginalized groups. Through the flipped classroom approach, students were introduced to Kara Walker’s work outside of class through assigned readings and materials. During class time, discussions were facilitated by students themselves, enhancing peer-to-peer learning. The session was led by a pupil responsible for elaborating on Walker’s work and guiding the discussion. In-class time was dedicated to small-group discussions where students critically engaged with the themes in Walker’s art. These groups provided space for more intimate, reflective conversations. After small-group discussions, insights were shared in a larger panel discussion format. This allowed students to synthesize ideas, compare perspectives, and engage with a wider range of interpretations of Walker’s art. By engaging with Walker’s work, students develop a more nuanced understanding of oppression and social justice, making her art a powerful tool for transformative education.

This article explores and assesses the pivotal roles of self-inscription, mediation, and audience participation in and around Kara Walker's controversial 2014 installation “A Subtlety, or the Marvellous Sugar Baby.” It argues that exhibition's elicitation of visitor photo-sharing via the hashtag #karawalkerdomino cannot be understood only through a postmodern framework that highlights the artist's intentional and wily use of the power of pastiche to confront American amnesia about slavery's ongoing brutal legacies. Rather, a theory and analysis of immaterial (digital and affective) labor is necessary for grappling with the exhibition's versions and afterlives, including the para-curatorial on and offline labor of black critique, resistance, and collaboration. To unpack the implications of “A Subtlety”'s recruitment of audience labor, I draw together black feminisms and humanisms; critical research on selfies, digital photography, and platform affordances; the cultural politics of emotion; and the racialization of digital labor. What comes into view as a result is the deep imbrication of digital interactivity, visitor vernacular photography, and racial capitalism in twenty-first-century crowdsourced art projects.

This paper highlights the circumstances of the Amistad case to discuss the connection between phrenology and race in antebellum American society. The trial of the Amistad captives in 1840–41 occurred at a time when opinions about racial differences were evolving into scientific theories about racial hierarchies. Phrenology was a popular science disseminated through publications, itinerant practitioners, and visual exhibitions that reinforced long-held beliefs about race. As subjects of phrenological investigation, the African men and children of the Amistad were examined, measured, and assessed within the context of ongoing debates about race and about American slavery.

In 2008 and 2009, a Dutch photographer, Jan Banning, and an anthropologist, Hilde Janssen, traveled around Indonesia to document, with photographs and testimonies, survivors of militarized sexual abuse by the Japanese military during the three-year occupation (1942–1945) of the former Dutch colony, the Netherlands East Indies. We argue that the resultant photographic project can best be understood within the framework of the “politics of pity” and the associated genres of representation. The project creators anticipated a cosmopolitan audience that might be moved to action to support the survivors. Yet, as the project was exhibited in different sites, the women's memories were interpreted through local knowledge systems and mnemonic practices. We analyze the reception of these photographs in diverse local contexts.

This study focuses on the making of African bark-cloth in the Caribbean and the use of plant fibers and pigments in the production and care of clothing for members of the colonized population. The material artifact of interest in this study is lace-bark, a form of bark-cloth, obtained from the bark of the lagetto tree found only in Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti. The fibres of the lagetto bark were removed by hand and dried, and the end result resembled fine lace or linen that was used by enslaved and freed women in Jamaica to make clothing as well as a substitute for manufactured lace. Although lace-bark is derived from the bark of a tree, it is different from other forms of bark-cloth. For instance, unlike most bark-cloth, the bark of the lagetto tree was not beaten into malleable cloth. The scientific name for the lace-bark tree is Lagetta lagetto; however, common names and spelling vary across regions. The author argues that a vibrant cottage industry based on African bark-cloth and lace-bark developed in Jamaica in response to economic conditions, and the insufficient clothing enslaved Africans received from their enslavers. Women dominated this industry and it fostered a creative space that allowed them to be expressive in their dress and simultaneously to escape, at least temporarily, the harsh realities of the plantation. The subjects of this study are women of African ancestry living in Jamaica from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. By the late seventeenth century, a bark industry had developed in Jamaica that was responsible for producing exquisite bark material that was widely popular. The laghetto tree was known in Cuba as the Daguilla, and in Haiti as bois dentelle.