Black Worlds (?)
Observing "Blackness" through Photography and Time.
I am in a new place. Last August, I flew across the Atlantic – from England to New England – to study at Harvard Divinity School. Navigating these red paved streets and clipped grass has been like stepping into an alternate universe.
I did my undergraduate degree at Cambridge University in the UK with its maze-like streets and jutting chimneys. The American Cambridge feels like a newer, pristine version of the other. And like Cambridge, England, the Massachusetts version has its own collection of art museums, which I found myself wandering into on the Saturday before my classes started .
I had seen online that a new exhibition was opening that day: ‘The Art of the Black World’. Being, well… Black, and interested in art, I felt an obligation to go. I’m glad I did.
The exhibition has a huge range of pieces – from Ivorian sculpture of a Blolo Bla (Spirit Partner) to Barkley L Hendricks’ 2010 oil and acrylic painting of a Black woman in a stark white dress, engaging us from three angles titled, “Octobers gone… Goodnight.”
The exhibition complements a course offered at Harvard this year. The main point of the course asks the question “What would be lost without an understanding of art of the Black world?” But another question about that question was troubling me.
What exactly was the ‘Black world’ that they were referring to?
I guess the range of artefacts presented was its own lunge towards an answer. Each artist or object depicted seemed to share some ‘Blackness’, but what continuity in socially-constructed ideas of Blackness could there be between Dawoud Bey’s photo of A Man on The Way to the Cleaners and Edward Mitchell Bannister’s landscape of a Cove at Sunset?
Galleries rarely curate exhibitions on the ‘Art of the White World’. Or, actually, they do – all the time – but don’t explicitly say as much.
However, when it comes to Blackness, it is assumed that this must be a central component of our work. The Black artist’s art must be somehow connected to his ‘Blackness’; a connective tissue we don’t attribute to white artists, or at least not in the same way.
In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work on ‘Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference’ he calls it Provincializing Europe. Essentially he critiques the universalisation of narratives about the creation of modern capitalist Europe, highlighting the fact that the stories Europe tells about itself have made themselves globally normative.
Regions like Africa, Latin America and Asia are consistently required to reevaluate and identify themselves in relation to whiteness, Europeanness, and Western colonial-modernity.
The only reason we can talk about ‘the art of the Black world’ is because for so long the ‘art of the world’ was just that of the ‘white’ world, itself an exclusionary racial identity whose borders defined who was a part of civilisation, and who wasn’t.
This is not to condemn Harvard Art Museums and its work. I enjoyed the exhibition, in fact, I wish there had been more to see. But I didn’t enjoy picking apart the assumptions lying beneath the surface of the exhibition’s premise (and all ‘Western’ art, maybe?).
Near the end of the exhibition, you get to a photo by Malick Sidibé. It is untitled, of a young couple dancing. He is loose – framed in silhouette, head down and concentrated on the steps like there is a poem on his feet he has been asked to read. His right leg is lifted – suspended in dynamic motion.
She seems more reserved, her eyes captured mid-glance, as we too are caught in the glancing space between the camera’s gaze and the light it plays with.
I catch a breath as I look closer at the Black and white photo. The inner world of their dance together, the simplicity of the clothes. It reminds me of pictures I saw of my own parents growing up.
Seeing your parents, young, childfree, before they were married or had even met each other, can be a jarring experience. You reckon with the fact of their selfhood, that they had a self before you existed. I catch a breath and wonder at this photo – they could almost be my parents, too.
And then I think: maybe– and this is a big maybe– what unites Black people, what makes the ‘Black world’ – is a common understanding of potentiality, of possibility.
We could have been born into a different time, and different place and, because of the way the world is, and sees us, have had to suffer at the hands of another’s oppressors at any given moment.
Otherwise, why is it, looking at Trent Bozeman’s Heroes (Then and Now), depicting bastions of African American history, do I feel so deeply moved, so proud – a part of the struggle, as a Black-British woman raised in modern London?
Maybe it is because I know that in another life, through an accident of birth, I may have ended up in their position. If I was born in 1750, instead of 2002, my name might have ended up on a legacies of slavery report at Harvard, and not on the list of its incoming 2024 students.
There is a ‘Sarah’ listed in Harvard Divinity School’s Reckoning with Slavery exhibition. She had been owned by Lieutenant Governor Thomas Oliver, documented in 1783. My tongue swelled in my throat when I saw it.
To forge a life under struggle is to know its precarity. To know that this life could be another life just as easily, under better or worse conditions than these.
You never know where you might end up, in the Black world.
“the stories Europe tells about itself have made themselves globally normative.
Regions like Africa, Latin America and Asia are consistently required to reevaluate and identify themselves in relation to whiteness, Europeanness, and Western colonial-modernity.” — this says so much, yet I’m actually lost for words. All I know is this resonates deeply. Thank you for sharing this!