Congo Winckelmann: Exploring African Art History in the Age of White Marble

Abstract:This essay focuses on the emergence of a history of African art in the broadest possible sense and insofar as it merges with the notion of Blackness and diasporic African objects and images. Employing a wide range of sources that go beyond writings on art per se, I explore the following questions: did something like African Art History exist in the long eighteenth century? What kind of epistemological torsions are needed to consider an African Art History of the Enlightenment? My aim is to identify and understand what could be considered the beginnings of a history of African art in a set of European texts interested in Africa, including travel writing, scientific inquiries, and discourses on art. The scholarship on the history of Art History has paid considerable attention to the construction of art theory, art criticism, academic institutions, Whiteness, and the development of archaeology in the mid-eighteenth century. This essay attempts to push this knowledge forward by arguing that there was, at the same time, a construction of Blackness, both as a narrow counterpart to Whiteness and, more generally, as a process for inscribing African objects, materials, and rituals into the realm of Western fine arts.