Description
Book SynopsisSamantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other hegemonic regimes through tropicalist representation.
Trade Review“From Alexander von Humboldt to Wangechi Mutu, art historian Samantha A. Noël has tracked the allure of ‘tropical aesthetics’: landscapes, regalia, and choreographies that betray modernism's debt to the equatorial realm and its treasures. Black artists especially have had to contend with these sensibilities, responding to their appeals for diaspora camaraderie
and struggling with the challenges they pose to a postfolkloric contemporaneity. This tension—along with Professor Noël's deft, critical purview—commends this important study.” -- Richard J. Powell, author of * Going There: Black Visual Satire *
“
Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism impressively explores how artists and performers throughout the twentieth century used visual tropes of the tropics to advance different ways of knowing and imagining modernity, modernism, primitivism, imperialism, nature, the environment, decolonization, and the ‘Black speculative.’ From the artwork of Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Wangechi Mutu, and Edouard Duval-Carrié to the performances of Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker, and the jamette women of Trinidad Carnival, the book newly calls attention to the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the practice of Black internationalization.” -- Krista Thompson, author of * Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Tropicality, Modernity, and the African Diaspora 1
1. American Tropical Modernism: The African Diasporic Reaches of Aaron Douglas's Landscapes 23
2. Brazenly Avant-Garde: Wifredo Lam's Transformation of Cuba's Tropical Terrain 60
3. Early Twentieth-Century Trinidad Carnival: Tropicality and Strategies of Space-Making 96
4. Pan-African Geographies in Motion: The Tropical Performances of Maya Angelou and Josephine Baker 142
Conclusion. The Black Body, Tropicality, and the Black Speculative 177
Notes 195
Bibliography 221
Index 237
