Gagliardi and Biro accurately recognize language as an important site of change in the presentation and discussion of African arts with a historical bent. Toward the end of the essay, they make the point that, “Once we recognize that our determinations of style reflect our evaluations of form, then we must also revise our language to signal to our audiences that the style of a particular object may or may not reflect anything about who made it, for whom, or why” (2019: 4).

This is an important point to emphasize, i.e., that the work of signaling, or even addressing more strongly than merely signaling, to audiences that the naming conventions used by art markets and museum displays carry with them histories of epistemic violence. The work of questioning and undoing these categories and the violence out of which they emerge is far from over. The work of scholarly...

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