Enfilade

From Brill:

Jutta Wimmler, The Sun King’s Atlantic: Drugs, Demons, and Dyestuffs in the Atlantic World, 1640–1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 230 pages, ISBN: 9789004336070, 80€ / $93.

In The Sun King’s Atlantic, Jutta Wimmler reveals the many surprising ways in which the Atlantic world channeled cultural developments during the age of the Sun King. Although hardly visible for contemporaries at the time, Africa and America were omnipresent throughout early modern France: in the textile industry, pharmaceutics, medicine, scientific methods, religious discourse, and court theatre. The book moves beyond typical plantation crops and the slave trade to illustrate how a focus on Europe challenges us to rethink the place of Africa in the early modern world.

Jutta Wimmler, Ph.D. (2011), University of Graz (Austria), is a researcher and lecturer at the European University Viadrina, Germany. She has published several articles about Africa’s impact on Europe, most recently in the Journal of Religion in Africa.

C O N T E N T S

1  Introduction
2  Sugar and Slaves? French Atlantic Trade before 1730
3  The Fashionable Atlantic: Innovation and Consumption
4  Body Matters: Remedies, Foodstuffs and Cosmetics
5  The Iatrochemical Advantage: Methods for an Expanding World
6  Perfect French Subjects: Staging the Atlantic World
7  Devils and Martyrs: Religious Concepts Travel the Globe
8  Epilogue

From Harvard UP:

David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017), 456 pages, ISBN: 9780674504394, $95 / £70 / €85.

The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art asks how the black figure was depicted by artists from the non-Western world. Beginning with ancient Egypt—positioned properly as part of African history—this volume focuses on the figure of the black as rendered by artists from Africa, East Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The aesthetic traditions illustrated here are as diverse as the political and social histories of these regions. From Igbo Mbari sculptures to modern photography from Mali, from Indian miniatures to Japanese prints, African and Asian artists portrayed the black body in ways distinct from the European tradition, even as they engaged with Western art through the colonial encounter and the forces of globalization.

This volume complements the vision of art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil who, during the 1960s, founded an image archive to collect the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. A half‐century later, Harvard University Press and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research completed the historic publication of The Image of the Black in Western Art—ten books in total—beginning with Egyptian antiquities and concluding with images that span the twentieth century. The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art reinvigorates the de Menil family’s original mission and reorients the study of the black body with a new focus on Africa and Asia.

David Bindman is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University College London.
Suzanne Preston Blier is Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

C O N T E N T S

Preface, David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Acknowledgments

Introduction, David Bindman

I.  Africa
1  Images of Africans by and of Themselves: Historical and Comparative Factors, Suzanne Preston Blier
2  The Body in African Art, Kristina Van Dyke
3  Masquerade in Sub-Saharan Africa, John Picton
4  The Image of the Black in Early African Photography, Christraud M. Geary
5  The Image of the Black in Modern and Contemporary African Art, Steven Nelson

II.  Asia
6  The Image of the Black in Islamic Art: The Case of Painting, Robert Hillenbrand
7  The Image of the Black in India, John McLeod and Kenneth X. Robbins
8  The Image of the Black in Chinese Art, Don J. Wyatt
9  The Image of the Black in Japanese Art: From the Beginnings to 1850, Timon Screech
10 The Image of the Black in Japanese Art: Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, Alicia Volk

Notes
Illustrations
Index

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