This event was originally scheduled to take place on March 16, 2022, and was postponed due to an emergency.

On Wednesday, April 13, 2022, Princeton University Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson presents, “Black Bodies, White Gold: Visualizing Value, Materializing Race in the Atlantic World.” This talk is part of the On Speculation annual lecture series, and is co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, the Department of Africana Studies, the Department of History, and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

In “Black Bodies, White Gold,” Professor Arabindan-Kesson uses historical case studies and contemporary art to analyze the visual relationship between the cotton trade and the representation of the Black body in U.S. culture. She asks how cotton materially influenced the way Black bodies were seen, and how Black Americans saw themselves, as both enslaved and free Americans. Tracing this relationship, she argues, deepens our understanding of the intersections of vision, value, and subjectivity in the production of racial identity in nineteenth-century America, as well as today. 

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Assistant Professor of Black Diasporic Art, with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. She published her first book, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World with Duke University Press in 2021, and is the director of the digital humanities project, Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism. 

This lecture takes place in Friedman Hall 102, from 5:30-7:00 pm. For more information, please visit Events@Brown.