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Abstract
Histories are also stories of forgetting. How do we go about recovering long-lost voices and stories to fill the gaps and silences? How do works of art dwelling on the periphery transform and unsettle our understanding of what is in the dominant center? In images sacred and profane from Venice and Genoa, to Florence and Livorno, Antwerp and Lisbon, Black Africans were largely marginalized in Renaissance imagery – often literally so, represented as they typically were as bystanders, nurses, kitchen maids, pages, musicians and entertainers, boatmen and gondoliers, executioners, and servants in crowded banquet halls. Still starker inequalities are impossible to ignore in contemporary lived realities – nowhere more so than that of the slave trade. The international conference Hidden in Plain Sight: Black African Lives and Visual Histories in the Early Modern World is conceived with these inescapable truths firmly in mind. Hosted by the Dutch University Institute of Art History (NIKI) and NYU-Florence, the three-day event will bring together scholars in a wide-ranging conversation spanning a multiplicity of disciplines. The latter will range broadly, embracing global art history, African and African diasporic studies, anthropology, history, literary culture, and musicology. By necessity, ours must be a collective inquiry, drawing on contributions from specialists in different fields, working on different lands, practices, and knowledge systems.
The conference and its subsequent published proceedings will expand substantially on the power dynamics of class and race that defined cross-cultural aesthetic production, commerce, and consumption in fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Europe. Not content with simply tracing global provenances, however, a number of talks will also turn the telescope to focus on Africa as our point of origin.
Speaking in multiple voices, Hidden in Plain Sight will put a variety of persistently accepted narratives to the test, finding new apertures through which to deal critically not only with the African-European trade in material goods and subjugation of animals but the most pressing questions addressing transculturation’s darkest aspect: the dislocation and trafficking of human lives.
As envisioned, Hidden in Plain Sight will not only reckon with the past but also confront subjects of great immediacy, even urgency, in their timely relevance to our lived present. When a renewed focus on enslavement and exile, dominion and empire, compels us to consider anew the Black African presence in early modern Europe, how does our thinking about the entire period change? In reading images and texts against the grain, how might we reimagine the shape and boundaries of our interwoven disciplines? Our gathering aims to give space to – and thereby better understand – the many entangled histories and geographies implicit in such questions.
