In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noel investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other white-dominant regimes through tropicalist representation. With depictions of tropical scenery and landscapes situated throughout the African diaspora, performances staged in tropical settings, and bodily expressions of tropicality during Carnival, artists such as Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Josephine Baker, and Maya Angelou developed what Noel calls "tropical aesthetics"-using art to name and reclaim spaces of Black sovereignty. As a unifying element in the Caribbean modern art movement and the Harlem Renaissance, tropical aesthetics became a way for visual artists and performers to express their sense of belonging to and rootedness in a place. Tropical aesthetics, Noel contends, became central to these artists' identities and creative processes while enabling them to craft alternative Black diasporic histories. In outlining the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the artistic and cultural practices of Black modernist art, Noel recasts understandings of African diasporic art.

About the Author
Samantha A. Noel is Assistant Professor in Art History at Wayne State University.

Reviews
"From Alexander von Humboldt to Wangechi Mutu, art historian Samantha A. Noel has tracked the allure of 'tropical aesthetics': landscapes, regalia, and choreographies that betray modernism's debt to the equatorial realm and its treasures. Black artists especially have had to contend with these sensibilities, responding to their appeals for diaspora camaraderie and struggling with the challenges they pose to a postfolkloric contemporaneity. This tension-along with Professor Noel's deft, critical purview-commends this important study." -- Richard J. Powell, author of * Going There: Black Visual Satire *
"Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism impressively explores how artists and performers throughout the twentieth century used visual tropes of the tropics to advance different ways of knowing and imagining modernity, modernism, primitivism, imperialism, nature, the environment, decolonization, and the 'Black speculative.' From the artwork of Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Wangechi Mutu, and Edouard Duval-Carrie to the performances of Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker, and the jamette women of Trinidad Carnival, the book newly calls attention to the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the practice of Black internationalization." -- Krista Thompson, author of * Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478011408
Author Samantha A. Noel
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 386g