The author discusses her recently released book "Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World" with Princeton colleague Chika Okeke-Agulu.
In "Black Bodies, White Gold," Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce and colonialism were intertwined in the 19-century Atlantic world. She will be joined in conversation with artist and art-historian Chika Okeke-Agulu, her colleague at Princeton University.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an assistant professor of African American and Black Diasporic art at Princeton University with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Her forthcoming monograph is called "An Empire State of Mind: Plantation Imaginaries, Colonial Medicine and Ways of Seeing." She is the director of Art Hx, a digital humanities project and object database that addresses the intersections of art, race and medicine in the British empire.
Chika Okeke-Agulu is an artist, art historian, curator and professor in the African American Studies and Art & Archaeology Departments at Princeton. He is the author of several books, the co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, writes for the Huffington Post, and maintains the blog Ọfọdunka.
This event is co-sponsored by the library, Princeton University’s African American Studies and Art & Archaeology departments, Program in African Studies and Humanities Council and Labyrinth Books.