Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century: Aesthetics, White Supremacy

By P. A. Mullins

This book will explore several critical connections between Black African objects and white Western aesthetics and artwork in the United States from the late 1800s until 1939. Drawing from primary source materials and various scholarship in the field (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, museum studied, art history, cultural studies), the book provides an analysis of the threads of white supremacy which run through early scholarship and understandings of Black African object within the United States and how scholars use the objects to reinforce narratives of “primitive” Black Africa and civilized, advanced white Europe and the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839989377

Book preview

Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century

Black Africa and the US Art World in the Early 20th Century

Aesthetics, White Supremacy

P. A. Mullins

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2024

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© P. A. Mullins 2024

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

2023942101

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-936-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-936-X (Hbk)

Cover credit: Designed by Malcolm Treasure

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Preface

1. The Enlightenment and White Supremacy

2. Objects, Sensation, Truth

3. Black African Aesthetics

4. Appropriating Black Africa

5. Black African Art?

6. Collecting Black Africa, Exhibiting White Supremacy

7. Ancestral Contact: Victorian Phantasmagoria, Artists, and Black Africa

8. Diasporic Nostalgia: The Harlem Renaissance and Black African Objects

9. Blackness after the Renaissance

10. Twenty-First-Century Colonialism

Index

PREFACE

This text focuses on Black Africa, that is, West, Central, and Southern Africa, areas on the continent where the population predominantly has dark-pigmented skin. I am interested in racism in the context of the US, and Black Africa is strongly connected to the US through the enslavement of Black Africans that started in the US in the 1600s. Africa is a large continent, and the area encompassing Black Africa is also large and includes hundreds of cultures and languages. Yet there are cultural similarities because trade networks spread through Black Africa well before European colonisation. Nevertheless, these cultures differ, and the scope of this study cannot accommodate a detailed look into each African culture referenced. Therefore, I focus broadly on Black Africa, but the reader should keep in mind that Black Africa is not a monolithic culture but has distinct cultures and geography.

White supremacy is referenced throughout this text. I am not using the term polemically, but I am pointing to an ideological stance that most white people agree with. White supremacy simply means that you think that white people are better, more advanced, more civilised, and naturally more intelligent. (How else could you advance or create civilisation?) This does not mean that white supremacists are Nazis who want to kill or enslave non-whites. White supremacists are often convinced their imagination is based on historical facts and often science. My overarching aim is to show how white supremacy is commonplace in the US by examining the history of Black African objects in the US, western aesthetics, art, and the US art world in the early 1900s.

The text uses a capital T in truth to signal that this refers to the philosophical concept of a universal and infinite truth that encompasses all times and places.

In this text, certain words are dealt with in non-standard ways to draw attention to the normalisation of racism and dehumanisation of Black people. Some words are used for precision over standard use. Black is capitalised throughout the text when referring to Black people.

The N-word is referenced in quoted material only and is written as Ni[…]er(s). USians is used instead of American(s) and US instead of America because referring to the United States as ‘America’ is imprecise as there are two large continents with a small strip joining them, which are all part of the Americas.

In this text, the designations for dates before the first century are given as BCE (before the common era in the western Christianised calendar) and CE (the common era of the western Christianised calendar).

Plastic art is used to label objects that exist in the physical world and are manipulated by artists for expressive purposes, which can be installed in galleries and living rooms. Plastic art is, therefore, distinguished from music, theatre, and literature.

Chapter 1

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND WHITE SUPREMACY

This book follows my first, Misrepresenting Black Africa in US Museums (Mullins, 2019), which looked at how Black African objects first came into the US in the late 1800s. Looking at what happened when Black African objects became part of the US art world in the early 1900s. We will explore several dimensions concerning Black African objects and white western aesthetics, and the interpretation and appropriation of these objects by western artists for public consumption after WWI. The chapters trace how western intellectuals understood Black African objects. The objective is to explore how both Black and white collectors and artists regard Black African objects in the US in the early 1900s up to the present day.

To ground the preceding chapters, it is essential to understand what beauty means in a white western context. This requires some understanding of western philosophy, the history of colonialism, and the history of Europe. This book will argue that the theft of Black African objects by white western Europeans has had a lasting effect on white western art, Black artists, and the conception of Black Africa that remains today. Furthermore, the white western understanding of Black Africa that pervades in western discourse, media, and art is a profoundly distorted understanding. Finally, to understand Black African objects or art, one must know the history of the continent that is not white mythology centred around primitivism, the area the objects or art come from, but the history of the people the artists or artesian lives within and the language of the artist or artesian who created the work.

To do this, we will do several things. (1) Explore white western aesthetic ideas and contrast them with Black African aesthetic ideas. (2) Explore the history of the use of Black African objects by white western collectors, and artists, in and around the Harlem Renaissance. (3) Explore the history of the influence of white western aesthetics on Black collectors, artists, and groups in and around the Harlem Renaissance. (4) Explore how Black African aesthetics became a white mythology, which impacts aesthetics beyond the art world through advertising, commercial popularisation with the Black Power movement, and today with films such as Black Panther and videos starring Beyonce.

As noted by Ajume Wingo,¹ western aesthetic thought is concerned with several ideas, forms, content, and meanings which are to be contemplated by the singular, detached observer. This echoes the western notion that universal Truth(s) exist, but humans cannot discover them by objective observation alone (objectivity here means non-emotional, not biased by personal desires). Kant laid the ground for these ideas not only in his work on aesthetics² but also in his work on morality. For Kant, morality was not separate from aesthetics but instead was a key component; objectivity and detached emotions were needed to look at art, as well as to be a moral agent, and art must also have a moral component in that it must be rooted in universal Truth(s). Truth is only absolute for Kant if it is categorical and infinite, meaning it will remain true forever and ever, no matter the circumstances, time, place, or people involved.

Black African aesthetics, however, are grounded not in the desire to reveal a universal Truth through detached observation. Rather, these aesthetics, like morality, are concerned with social relationships, circumstances, time, place, and the people involved. Successful art must move people emotionally, socially, as well as intellectually.³ Art is not static but an active experience that incorporates much more than the material of the art and the individual artist and viewer. There is no universal Truth(s) because Black African aesthetics and morality recognise that there is no universal Truth(s). Humans cannot view life, morality, and art objectively. One is always informed by the entirety of one’s experiences when one views the world. Also, truth is not infinite; what is true now may not be seen as True in the future. Circumstance determines truth, not an infinite, unchanging law.

How, then, can western viewers understand Black African art from a western perspective? How can Black African objects and art inspire western artists from a western perspective? For centuries, US museums misrepresented Black Africa through racist exhibitions and displays that were rooted in western perspectives. What is the influence of this misrepresentation on how westerners, both Black and white people, take up Black African aesthetics, objects, and art concerning the creation of art leading up to and throughout the Harlem Renaissance? How are social issues in the US (specifically white supremacy) merged with the understanding and use of Black African objects and art as inspiration? These are the questions this book seeks to explore.

One cannot answer these questions from within one scholarly field. This book, therefore, draws from theories of history, philosophy, art, anthropology, science, sociology, and race both from the west and from non-western sources. Before we begin, reviewing some relevant issues concerning the overlap of race and western ideas about civilisation, progress, and science is helpful. Western aesthetics developed in the 1700s and is part of the new sciences emerging during the Enlightenment intended to add to the understanding of everything in existence.

Logic and Reason over Nature

‘Enlightenment understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.’⁴

The idea of a ‘civilised’ society is grounded in the Enlightenment’s modernistic ideals. Before the Enlightenment, humanity was not a quality ascribed to everyone. In the scholastic age, access to humanity was granted by the Church or the Divine Rights of Kings. One was a human at the pleasure of the Church and the mercy of the King. The seventeenth century ushered in a new era of sociopolitical imaginings. These imaginings mediated a shift from society’s pseudo-theological and religious foundation to embrace a new way of thinking that advocated sociological and anthropological formations as the basis of society.⁵

To excavate the treatment of Black African objects, art, and aesthetics in white western ideology and spaces requires some knowledge of western ideology and philosophy in terms of aesthetics and race. As western philosophy conjured ideas about art and aesthetics, significant changes occurred in Europe. The eighteenth century saw the decline of the Roman Catholic Church’s power both because of the earlier Protestant movement and the increasing rise of capitalism fuelled by mechanical/technical innovations connected to science.

The eighteenth century is also the time of peak European Colonisation of Black Africa and the same period in which white westerners are refining their definition and inventing evidence of race in the human species. Aesthetics as a theoretical problem shifted the focus from beauty (since no valid universal, timeless values could ever be known or worked out). The idea that beauty is unable to be understood at all times and places, in the same way, meant that beauty was not an acceptable path to take when trying to understand aesthetics.⁶ The rise of industry and the turn towards science means the science of sensation becomes an issue in theories about art.

Western philosophy became concerned with aesthetics simultaneously; Europe was undergoing the phenomenon of the Enlightenment. So to grasp the currents affecting art and aesthetics, we need to look briefly at the Enlightenment Project, especially the links between Enlightenment ideology and white supremacy. For all the triumphs of progress and civilisation, the Enlightenment project is fundamentally about power and control, especially over nature. The best way to control, and the way ordained by the god of Abraham, was through the tools uniquely available to humans. White western philosophers used logic, and the ability to reason, as a demarcation point that separated humans from all other living things.

However, embedded in the ideals of the Enlightenment is the logical deduction that white cishet (men born male and follow social norms for male appearance and roles), Christian males were the only actual humanoid creatures capable of logic and reason. This view was backed up biblically in the Genesis story, in which the Abrahamic god gives Adam power over the world of plants and animals, and logically as explorers provided evidence of the primitive state of the world compared to Europe. The surge of industry, technology, and western science during the Age of Enlightenment needed fuel, which meant more natural resources than were available in Europe. ‘Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.’⁷ As industry and the sciences rose in prominence, so too did European colonial practices of stealing resources, including humans, from the places they claimed to have ‘discovered.’

In many ways, the enlightenment project becomes over and, above all else, the project of classification and order. Those who controlled knowledge – universities, churches, and governments – took great pains to show through logic and reason that there was an order to the universe (natural or theological). For white western elites, the key to mastery of the universe was to map the order into discrete segments that could fit together to learn how everything in the universe exists and for manipulation purposes. As Foucault points out in his work, the Enlightenment becomes a project of putting things into their proper categories. Math became the language of serious inquiry into the nature of things because it allowed precisely detailed categorisation and could be used to calculate probable future outcomes (experimentation and verification).

In the authority of universal concepts, the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals. From now on, matter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties. For Enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.⁸

The standard of calculability in human classification relied on European, white, cishet, non-disabled, Christian males as the ultimate possibility of human evolution. The Enlightenment centring on the white western male is not merely a move of self-aggrandisement but a move that white men employ to place all other humanoid creatures in a subordinate position. Since white men were the apex of humanity, they were allowed to use and abuse others who were physically, intellectually, and bodily inferior subhumans. Women, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, non-Christians, queer, and non-white people were dominated by white men with no religious authority or legal system to protect them. All subhumans were subjects, things, and objects who were only allowed the agency white men granted them. The white, cishet, non-disabled, Christian male thus used Enlightenment ideology (evolutional theory, science, and theology) to exploit the world and place them at the centre of universal control over that world.

It was during the Enlightenment that white men created themselves as a category. The plundering of the world needed to be justified; for a while, white men felt that god gave them power, god also gave them reason. To colonise, they needed to give themselves logical rules (laws) and biblical support for what was the obviously abusive and harmful treatment of the almost humans. What this meant for Black Africans, who were stolen in the millions and enslaved on plantations in non-European New World locations and Africa, is that they soon became the model for the lowest form of humanity. An entire group of creatures that looked similar to humans but were, according to science, missing links that never advanced out of the Stone Age or fully evolved beyond being primates.

While Europeans (and eventually US citizens) plundered, Black African objects were kept as souvenirs of exotic adventures and traded as objects of curiosity. Many of these objects ended up in western museums and were claimed as inspirational by western artists. These objects, however, when first encountered, were reasoned to not belong to what westerners would call art, in part because the objects departed drastically from western styles and art mediums but also because white western experts placed the objects under that category of artefact.

Logically, these Black African objects were seen by white intellectuals as not fitting into any of the categories of art because the objects were not made by white male humans but were the creation of illogical animals or children. Much of what grounded the views of western art theorists was a reflection of the western philosophy of the time. The object of art was part of a world of objects that philosophy sought to understand in a logical framework. Thus, the early philosophers of aesthetics were driven by metaphysical and ontological considerations that attempted to describe human experience in a logical scientific system. In other words, when philosophers examine art, they feel compelled first to map out how humans experience objects via sensation and the mind and what this explains about human ideas about beauty and, thus, art. All of the assumptions of philosophers of aesthetics used white, cishet, Christian males as the measure of human characteristics needed for creating and understanding art (or anything else).

Enlightened Ideas about Identity

As the influential white Europeans explored the outside world, they soon found that not all people looked alike, dressed alike, used the same language, or had the same standards of beauty and morality. As white Europeans explored the outside world, they also intermingled and had offspring with people who were not white and did not speak European languages. As Europe conquered the world, Europeans amassed vast sums of wealth, which required management and legal regulation. Questions about what to do with the estates of dead white Europeans with non-white sexual partners and children became a problem. Justification of the treatment of non-white enslaved people also increasingly became a problem as the Enlightenment ushered in ideas about human rights, civility, and reason over brutality. White Europeans created race as part of the colonialisation of Black Africa to solve these problems.

The growth of the European empire fuelled the Enlightenment project and ushered in a machine for understanding the world called the scientific method. Science became one more tool for dominance. The western obsession with knowledge was an attempt by white westerners to fulfil the mythology of white, cishet, non-disabled, Christian male humans as the apex of all life in the universe. Science was and is a way to control the world. As Foucault remarks, the science that grew out of the Enlightenment relied heavily on classification systems that were both binary and hierarchical and significantly visual.⁹

When colonial Europeans encountered indigenous people, they launched studies to understand who these people were and why they looked and sounded so different. The visual difference between Europeans and Black Africans inevitably needed an explanation, and science would pave the way to creating race. When Europeans encountered Black Africans, they took notes and measurements with drawings and photographs. Scholars developed theories using Darwin’s model to show how Black Africans were not human but rather the missing link between humans and their primate cousins. Scores of travel accounts, fiction novels, and, eventually, science journals were filled with stories to prove this point. Much of the collected evidence was inaccurate and sometimes faked (pictures of Black Africans dressed in ceremonial attire or half-naked when they had already adopted western dress). For the most part, the Europeans did not bother to learn the language of the people they studied, and so they did not bother to learn the culture and history of Black Africans.

Instead, white Europeans anointed themselves as the best example of a human and claimed that they were neutral scientific observers who just reported what they observed. Thus, white westerners create race as a category of science that is linked to the need to differentiate between who is human and who is not. Science took up the Christian idea that humans are the best example of life in the universe; the Christan god gave them the earth and all things on the earth to dominate. Scientists used evolution and the rise of capitalism as justification for the enslavement of Black Africans. Another reason that proved Black Africans were inferior was their lack of ‘technology,’ i.e. guns. White scholars classified Black Africans as Stone Age people who could never ‘evolve’ into white Europeans. Skin colour, hair texture, and skeletal structure became visual signs of who counted as human and who did not. Racial phenotypes were not purely scientific but part of the control and dominance of non-white Europeans. Christians leapt upon the ideas of race to ease their consciousness regarding the enslavement of Black Africans and the subsequent treatment of Black African descendants after legal enslavement ended. Christians would argue that white skin was a sign of being human and fully entitled to human rights. Black skin was a sign of not being human, not having a soul, not being more than an animal, and so not being entitled to any human rights.

It should not be surprising that as the triangular trade of enslaved Black Africans gained popularity, white European scientists began thinking about how they could breed humans to increase desirable physical and mental characteristics ideal for enslavement and plantation work.

Bory’s and Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s proposals were reactions to the problems that arose from the imperial struggle for Saint–Domingue and the social tensions inherent in slave colonies, but they were not merely this. They were also responses to the possibilities opened up by recent scientific developments in metropolitan France, particularly in relation to animal breeding. Scientific research had revealed two important things: that the transformative effects of climate on animal bodies could be compounded and accelerated through sexual reproduction, and that humans might be able to control this process through the systematic selection of mates.¹⁰

Ideas about genetics, breeding, morality, intelligence, and humanity during the Enlightenment set the stage for colonial conquest and the control of non-white bodies. In the US, the science of Eugenics influenced ideas about the natural animalistic child nature of non-whites as well as leading to the launch of programmes of sterilisation and slaughter to rid the world of these inferior specimens that might pollute the ideal white European gene pool and weaken the control over the rest. White supremacy is a consistent Enlightenment ideological underpinning.

Race is a system of categorisation in which whiteness is the sign of intelligence, morals, and the worthiness of rights and dignity. Scholars contrasted whiteness with Blackness, a sign of stupidity, amorality, and the worthiness of abuse and death. White scholars linked the visual racial signs to ideas in philosophy concerning the identity of material things in the world. White thinkers took Plato’s ideas about universal infinite forms that never change in any way and extended western thought into ideas about race. The colour of your skin was proof of your humanness or lack of humanness, and this identity is universal, infinite, and never changes in any way. In other words, your skin colour became the mark of your essence (in philosophy and science) or your soul (in Christianity).

The Limit of Whiteness

As white European men developed categories of race, they used Enlightenment classification systems, which were driven by binary logic and hierarchical telelogic ends. Binary logic reduces the world into positions of opposites so that what something is, is known through what it is not. Take the variables b and c. Whatever b is, it has to be different from what c is, or they would be in the same category. So the way in which b is understood is the opposite of how c is understood. So when we define concepts such as male, reason, and cishet, we place them opposite to the concepts of female, emotion, and queer. To flush out our understanding of the known (normative standard), we rely on the ability to put different things into separate categories of marked difference. Also, white European theorists during the Enlightenment endeavoured to map all the categories into an order representing a natural hierarchy from the least to the most advanced intellectual, moral, and worthy.

Whether nature or god had ordained that the entire universe followed an order where the most advanced, the best that humans could ever evolve into was a white, cishet, non-disabled, Christian male; thus, white men put themselves at the endpoint of human and universal life development, with all other life being failed attempts at evolution. ‘During the Age of Enlightenment, philosopher–scientists set their sights on the sources of human progress. Their immediate purpose was to apply a scientific method to human history to trace a natural human growth which began in savagery, passed through the intermediate stage of barbarism, and then moved up to civilisation.’¹¹

The continued contact with enslaved people meant that the division between men (cishet, white, and non-disabled Christian) and animals became a more urgent concern. White people thought the difference between white and Black people needed to be maintained as the possibilities of mixed offspring increased with continued contact. Increasingly, those with Black skin (very dark pigmentation, brown eyes), kinky hair, and broad noses became representatives of the most animal-like humanoid as they were the furthest visually from white Europeans and the ones being enslaved by white Europeans, so that scholars could place humanity into an evolutionary categorisation with the darkest skin at the very bottom (barely human at all) and the palest skin at the top, and all degrees from dark to pale in order of darkness.

Cultural War

As the Enlightenment developed, white people spent a great deal of time proving the inferiority of Black Africans. First-hand travel accounts, colonial records, missionary records, and anthropologists crafted a mythology of Black Africa that buttressed the mythology of the superiority of white, cishet, non-disabled, Christian men. Objects, clothing, and utensils were evidence of the natural inferiority of Black Africans. White Europeans described Black Africa as a wild place devoid of history and culture. White people distributed images of Black Africa through academic papers, news articles, drama, art, and literature throughout Europe to prove their point. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness served as a cautionary tale of exposure to Black Africa. Conrad travelled to the Congo and used his experiences to shape the novel.

What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that, for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, he was so self–conscious about what he did. Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow’s adventures: it is also a dramatisation of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions, telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place.¹²

White westerners initially think of Black African objects as curiosities or anthropological artefacts because they are influenced by the Enlightenment concept of primitivism and civilisation and the need to spread civilisation throughout the world. Underlying the propaganda of the civilising mission is the firm base of white supremacy. As the fight over and in Black Africa between various white Europeans fermented, so did tension and issues within Europe. Monarchies were collapsing. The working classes formed, diseases killed many, and the masses were poor and illiterate. The notion of who should count as rights-bearing citizens and who should be in charge of laws was contested amongst the elite. No longer did the Divine right of kings or the Divine right of the Pope determine the rules and categories of societies. As Europe regrouped and the United States separated, culture became a territory that white people could claim in the nation’s name, a territory whose borders held back the illiterate, poor, and non-white.

While culture might seem like a trivial subject, culture is what makes a society a society. Culture is how people live their day-to-day life; how they talk, what and how they eat, how they think about god and the afterlife, how they dress, what they read, what they watch, and what they think is good or bad is all part of culture. As white Europeans explored the world in search of natural resources, they also launched a plan to spread their culture. Colonialism was not typically a matter of sending troops to hold down locals under martial law for years and years at a time. Instead, white Europeans worked to make alliances with ambitious locals and to spread their culture to make locals easier to control.

‘For culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. […] In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies.’¹³ To justify their actions, white Europeans imagined they were benevolent for bestowing these near animals with the most excellent culture ever. Europeans showed off their engineering and industrial skills to impress the locals with the superiority of white European culture.

When we consider the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial epoch, we realise that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality.¹⁴

Europeans claimed that Black Africa had no culture, as culture was something only full humans could produce. Edward Said traces the connections between European imperialism and culture in his work Culture and Imperialism.¹⁵ While Franz Fanon tends to pit the old ‘traditional’ cultures of the African Continent against the attacking white western culture, Said cautions against looking at any culture since the 1800s as existing in a pure state free of any foreign influence. For Black Africans to revert to culture before contact with non-Black Africans, one would have to reach back hundreds of years, and any ‘traditional’ or cultural practices post-contact would have some changes occur. ‘Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more foreign elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude.’¹⁶

In the case of those colonised by white Europeans, many took up, at least superficially, the culture of the oppressors. White Europeans, through force, via schools, and in exchange for food and goods, encouraged Black Africans to emulate the white people. So the culture of the oppressed