Black Mediterranean: Artistic Encounters and Counter-narrative.
For a critical Re-Writing of Mediterranean Histories
Avinoam Shalem, Riggio Professor, arts of Islam at Columbia University
Lecture Description
Does North Africa belong to African or Mediterranean studies? How should we, historians and art historians, address and treat this specific geographical space? How can we make sure to challenge its narrative with colonial, rather racial, theories, which created spatial divisions in Africa and helped in dividing Arabs from Africans? How can we integrate North Africa’s wide network of trade and cultural connectivity with other cultural spaces, like, for example, Black Africa, Mid Saharan kingdoms, the Amazigh- ‘Berber’ cultures of the Sahel, Islamic and islamicate worlds of Asia, and even the Indian Ocean? This lecture takes this investigative path by shaking the deliberately and ideologically manipulated adjective “Mediterranean”, which has been and still is, associated with this space. Moreover, it questions Mediterraneanism as a frame of thinking and matrix of interpretation for medieval and early modern North African art and architecture and for the fabricating European art history too.
Avinoam Shalem is an art historian. He holds the Riggio Professorship for the Arts of Islam at Columbia University in New York. He has published extensively on the arts of Islam, especially on ‘the art of the object’. His main field of interest is the global context of the visual cultures of the world of Islam in the Mediterranean, Near East, North Africa, Spain, South Italy and Sicily, as well as on medieval aesthetic thoughts on visual arts and craftsmanship, the image of 'Islamic' art, and the historiography of the field.
This event is open and free to the public.
If you require accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact the department at historyofart@osu.edu. Requests made two weeks before the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
