AFRO-ATLANTIC HISTORIES

389pp., b/w & colour illus., hardback, New York, 2021

Published in conjunction with the travelling exhibition which opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in October 2021.

More than 130 works of art made in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe from the 17th to the 21st century. The works are organised in eight thematic groupings: Maps and Margins; Emancipations; Everyday Lives; Rites and Rhythms; Routes and Trances; Portraits; Afro-Atlantic Modernisms; Resistances and Activism.

"A feast of images and ideas ... Afro-Atlantic Histories raises the stakes of so-called global modernism by boldly setting forth the conditions of an art history that is for, rather than against, a global majority - a majority with which existing institutional structures have only just begun to reckon." Joan Kee, Artforum"

"... a powerful corrective has arrived in the form of Afro-Atlantic Histories, a visual survey of the diaspora ... assembles more than a hundred and thirty art works - paintings, prints, sculptures, and more - in an odyssey that extends from seventeenth-century Kongo to present-day Puerto Rico ... The exhibition boldly dispenses with any distinction between artifacts and works of the imagination ... Anchored by specific historical convergences, from shared deities to analogous struggles with stigma and stereotype, Afro-Atlantic Histories also explores the creation of transnational unity by people of African descent." Julian Lucas The New Yorker

Contributions include:

"Slave Markets: When resignation is a form of resistance" by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

"Visualising Slavery: Image and text" by Deborah Willis

"A Place to Call Home: Reflections on transnational translations" by Vivian Crockett.