Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World by Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Visualizing Empire: Africa, Europe, and the Politics of Representation edited by Rebecca Peabody, Steven Nelson, and Dominic Thomas Unavailable

This review brings together two books published in 2021 that share a focus on the material cultures of imperialism. Both enrich the growing corpus of art historical scholarship that deconstructs the images of Africa, Africans, and Africa-descendent people that supported the cultures of European and North American imperialism. Both take capacious approaches to the fields of art history and visual culture, bringing together a wide array of visual expressions, from landscape painting and architectural sculpture to board games, dioramas, and cloth swatches. Anna Arabindan-Kesson's Black Bodies, White Gold, a monograph, explores Euro-American images of Blackness in Anglophone Atlantic cultures of the nineteenth century, particularly in the context of US chattel slavery and the cotton economy. Her wide-ranging investigation is structured around contemporary artworks that interrogate these histories. Visualizing Empire, an edited volume, examines ephemera as a vehicle for the dissemination of French constructions of the nation's African colonies...