Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century

The author is an independent interdisciplinary scholar of philosophy, race, history, sociology, and culture.

• 1.The Enlightenment and White Supremacy; 2.Objects, Sensation, Truth; 3.Black African Aesthetics; 4.Appropriating Black Africa; 5.Black African Art?; 6.Collecting Black Africa, Exhibiting White Supremacy; 7.Ancestral Contact: Victorian Phantasmagoria, Artists, and Black Africa; 8.Diasporic Nostalgia: The Harlem Renaissance and Black African Objects; 9.Blackness after the Renaissance; 10.Twenty-First-Century Colonialism

This book is an interesting and innovative study of how connections between Black African objects and white Western aesthetics and artwork supported and (re)produced the ideology of white supremacy in the United States between the late 1800s and the beginning of World War II. It shows how social and political issues that are acute up to now manifested themselves in specific ways in the art world in that turbulent era. Importantly, Mullins’ book also convinces that Africa has always been an important point of reference for American cultural, intellectual and sociopolitical life. —Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Institute for African Studies.