Reading Race Early Modern Art

Catalog description

This seminar explores the ways in which artists and craftspeople created representations of non-Europeans that shaped, negotiated, and challenged pluralistic biological and symbolic conceptions of race between 1450 and 1700. Against the backdrop of increasing global contact, European colonial enterprises, and the explosion of the Atlantic slave trade, this seminar will critically explore constructions of Blackness, whiteness, and racialized otherness and will consider the roles played by art and material culture in practices of race-making. Thinking materially, students will assess the impact of different artistic media on understandings of racialized difference. Considering race at its intersections with gender, class, religion, science, and disability, this seminar will analyze how artworks reveal and obscure the real, complex experiences of non-Europeans in Europe.