A book written for art historians that throws vitriol is a risky venture. But causing a sensation has to precede a serious polemic: after all, when the sticks and stones have been launched on their trajectory, is it beyond scholarship to care about where, and how, they fall? Pinder’s anthology, Race-ing Art History, aims to capture and shake up, to “read critically”, “the complexity of the representation of race in the discipline of art history, a discourse in which terms like ‘primitive’ or ‘oriental’ have been synonymous with ‘naïve,’ ‘uncivilized,’ and ‘pure'” (p. 1).      To untangle my opening analogy, the trajectory in view is Pinder’s accusation that art historians have always shown “admiration mired in terms of racial bias and condescension” for art by “people of color”, and should now wake up and recognise the racism that has inherently shaped their discipline. Students of cultural studies, literary theory or anthropology might well ask why this ambivalent complex of hatred and desire should appear so specific to art history: what can the self-reflections of art historians contribute to the vigorous discourses on race already being examined elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences? To address the fallout of Pinder’s critical attack (the ‘where’ and the ‘how’ critical projectiles will fall) means asking how art historians can respond in ways that their colleagues in adjacent disciplines haven’t or can’t.

For all its vitriol, some may feel that Pinder’s book has not been conceived with the latter goal in view, and that it signals absences and grave inadequacies in art historiography, without supplying any alternatives. This is not to devalue the content of its essays by other thinkers, twenty-one of them in all, reprinted from other sources. They offer a compelling record of how intellectual attention to art, history and the visual has largely kept a silence on the centrality of race and ethnicity as unspoken, normative constructs. Included in this volume are essayists of the 1980s and early 1990s who set an agenda for art criticism, curating and documentation to wake up to its “racial bias” (Cornel West, Rasheed Araeen, Okwui Enwezor, Bell Hooks), supported by a critical look at artists’ profiles, analysis of individual works, debate about race and art historical contextualization, and problems over the collecting and display of visual culture in ‘othered’ spaces (Robert Linsley on Wifredo Lam, Judith Wilson on Sargent Johnson, Patricia Leighton on Picasso, Jean Fisher on Native American Art, James Clifford on the tribal and the modern).

The later sections of the book comprised of contributions by these authors complement one another very well, productively (dis)affirming one another’s claims, giving a fair sample of some of the most challenging thought on twentieth century auto-critiques in and around art history. The earlier sections are less substantial, trying to account for European and North American visual practices in just ten short essays, covering the wide historical span from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Part One ‘From Antiquity to the Middle Ages’ was especially brief, without a concrete connection between its eye-catching title ‘Black Athenas, Semitic Devils, and Black Magi’ and the three essays by John R. Clarke (on sexuality in Roman Art, with cursory comments on race), Diane Wolfthal (on the uses made of imagery in a Yiddish Book of Customs) and Jean Devisse (excerpted from his 1979 essay on the iconography of St. Maurice). Part Two includes much-anthologized essays from two decades ago by Sander Gilman on the Hottentot, Linda Nochlin on painting and orientalism, Albert Boime on the transatlantic slave trade and painting, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau on Gauguin. Drawing on canonical imagery within Francophone and Anglophone contexts, the remaining excerpts come from less seminal writings: Reina Lewis writing on Henriette Browne and ‘the Female Orientalist Gaze’, which goes well with Nochlin’s; J. Gray Sweeney’s exploration of racism, nationalism and nostalgia around the emblematic case-study of the Cowboy Artists of America, anticipating Jean Fisher’s piece on Jimmie Durham and late 1980s practice; and Michael Hatt on U.S. figurative sculpture, extending the book’s frequent concern with gender toward black masculinities.

Those more attuned than I am to debates on theory may choose to question Pinder’s conception of the historicity of art works. I at least felt concerned about her ambitious goals for promoting a progressive attitude to art historical analysis when her own methodological interests are in fact quite orthodox. A line in the introduction reads: “Each essay explores the significance of the visuality of race in a work of art and what this element indicates about the work’s producer, audience, and historical context”. This is the sort of statement that usually comes from a historian who treats any given art work as an indication or evidence of a history (and not partly constitutive of it). It suggests that art and context are distinct entities rather than mutually formed and forming, however much disarticulated or in tension with one another. But more concerning is that it openly assumes race to be “in” a work of art, rather than the political, psychic, sexual or social fiction that the work of art enables and entails. With such leanings it was a wonder that the editor found affinities in the hermeneutic attitude and staunchly post-consensus politics of the West, the other post-structuralists Clifford and Fisher, and many more of the contributors. Indeed, the editorial introduction keeps quiet about the critical significance of these methodological differences instead of exploring how they are in fact integral to what various authors conceive to be the relevance of race and difference to the work of art history. Whether it is worth paying attention to the disparity between the theoretical complexion of Pinder’s own writings (the introduction and conclusion to this book) and the anthologized essays is open to question. Nevertheless, the volume adheres fairly consistently to a vision of the absence-presence of race and difference in the histories of visuality, and the critical implications of race for art.

It is obvious with such specific aims, however, that Pinder should need to acknowledge what she has not tried to do. Three caveats and apologies appear in paragraph six of her introduction. She admits “a focus on race as a black/white issue”; declares that “these essays fail to move outside a binary conception of domination” (with “dominators” on one side, and “dominated” on the other); and owns up to a “short-sightedness” due to “the limitations and prejudices of English-language scholarship”. I should like to tackle these three in reverse order.

I know from trying to introduce curriculum changes in art history toward less-studied contexts in Africa, Asia, much of the Americas, and their diasporas, that those opposing change, or reluctant to it, often allege that language competence is the main limitation met with by teachers, researchers and students seeking to expand the range of their studies. This reason for not developing new curricula and research interests seems dubious to me, as if learning languages is something that art historians are unaccustomed to, and that there are no valuable contributions made in English to some distinctly non-English topics. A good example with similarly pedagogical priorities to Pinder’s is Catherine King’s Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, made up of studies on art, architecture and design of Ming China, Mughal India, modern Nigeria, contemporary South Africa, Kenya etc., every one of its essays written in English. Having seen how effectively King’s book explores some truly cross-cultural topics, and given the growing library in English of impressive studies on art and visual culture from every continent, Pinder’s “short-sightedness”, “limitations and prejudice” seem unforgivable.

The problem of ‘binarism’ on the issue of domination is more interesting. Pinder concentrates on the relations between discourses of power and race, and for her race and ethnicity are best explored through attention to issues of representation (“more social and political constructs than the results of any biological factors”, p.1). Yet whilst maintaining a focus on representation she omits some more challenging conceptions of how race and visuality interact historically, largely independently of the perspectives typical of cultural studies and cultural theory. In contrast to Pinder, art historians continue to approach art in comparative contexts, aware of their racial and ethnic differences, yet choosing to explore topics beyond the domain of representation issues.  For the contemporary Caribbean and other diasporic artists I work with, race is not a critical theoretical theme so much as a matter of embodiment that belongs to the everyday and the corporeal, substantiated in the texture, poetry and politics of their objects and performances. As a partnership, the implications between race and representation may generate lots of interest for critical theorists, but art historians and students of visual and material culture continue to examine paths of inquiry which show matters of representation to be simply one area of analysis. Disappointingly, they are paths which have been excised from Pinder’s anthology.

Such an apology about her book’s overwhelming focus on racial difference in terms of black/white-ness, connects with preoccupations about representation that are at the heart of race relations’ debates in the United States. Following these, Pinder is intent on persuading art history professionals to take up issues around black-white relations in a larger push to end racism, and her book is perhaps the first to do so in such explicit terms. My objection to this obvious bias toward African American perspectives and priorities is that art history is not solely comprised of conceptions of cultural otherness – and race – concerned with blackness (meaning, for Pinder, Africa and its Diaspora). Some sense of a further kind of otherness at stake in visual analysis supplied in Robert Linsley’s essay on Wifredo Lam, in the chapter “Modernism and its ‘Primitive’ legacy”, which explores work by the celebrated Cuban-born painter against the background of the “ecology of race relations” in Martinique during 1941. His ecology metaphor is more apt than Linsley recognises perhaps, since Lam exploited vegetal motifs and the confusion of plant forms and body parts, to define what it was to be, as Suzanne Cézaire described the Martinican, “a plant-man”, “trampled but evergreen, dead but being reborn, the plant free, silent and proud” (p.293). One of twenty-eight color-plates, this volume reproduces in color Lam’s The Jungle, of 1942-3, illustrating that aspect of his essay.

That relations of domination in Martinique and in the wider Caribbean have never been “black-white” is hinted at by Lam’s own mixed Chinese, African and mulatto blood. Indeed, the disparities of access to social, cultural, economic and other forms of capital in the region have often implicated skin and hair coloring, as well as physiognomy (rather than race as such) in vying for importance among explanations of social experience in Caribbean history. This has happened in the face of an adverse objectification and “commodification of ethnicity”, the reifying of ethnic differences, which has often assisted “in the allocation of places in the division of labour”, but with far-reaching repercussions for processes of symbolization in general. If indeed, the visual means and social outcomes of racial and ethnic reifications should concern art historians, then we ought to ask whether thinkers preoccupied with black and white relations of the provincially North American kind are not simply resonating some already massively commodified differences. Pinder would have lessened this risk by including more examples like Linsley’s, as well as Judith Wilson’s description of plural “ethnocultural configurations” in a region of modernism (California) where “because local demographics frequently supplied them with neighbors of Asian-Pacific origin, African Americans in the Bay Area were less apt than other blacks in the United States to view the world in binaristic, black-white terms” (p. 309). The situation in Pinder’s home-country, where it is not unusual to consider one’s race, ethnicity and culture as each equating to the same thing (“‘race’ here will also refer to ‘ethnicity’ in most instances”, p. 1, she writes), does not map easily onto the spectrum of mixes that are a global norm, nor the lines being erased between ostensibly discrete identities in the U.S. itself. I would have welcomed, therefore, as a starting point, rather than in a concluding essay by the editor, further treatment of visual examples relevant to “the terms biracial, mixed-race, multi-ethnic, racial hybridity, and multicultural” (p. 392), concepts that appear to shift away from classical racial divisions and oppositions onto more comparative, globally relevant ground.

As much as Pinder’s complaint of art historical myopia is supportable, I feel unsure about whether her book will be adequate to persuade art historians to face up to the issue of our disciplinary inclusions. To “race” art history, if we are to use her coinage, would require being less preoccupied with the tenor of domestic, U.S. concerns about black and white relations, and more intent on enacting an anti-racist discipline through a broad constituency of studies about diverse regions, frameworks, histories and discontents. The obstacles to anti-racism are already too many, figured in our reluctance to be culturally comparative and to resist the allure of provincial ethnocentrisms, intellectual, political and aesthetic: the apparently safe ground on which much art historical inquiry rests. That this happens at virtually every level of our work – from peer review of research, to appointments and planning curricula – gives the lie to John R. Clarke’s assertion, writing on sexuality and “black Africans” in Roman Art, that we are “in an era that advocates study of ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity” (p.16).

References: 

King, Catherine ed,. 1999 ‘Views of Difference: Different Views of Art’, New Haven and London: Yale University Press and The Open University

I am thinking, for example, of Clunas, C. (1991, 1996, 1997, 2004) on consumption and materiality in Ming China; Pinney, C. (1997, 2001, 2004) on cultural phenomenology and visual efficacy in Europe and South Asia; Fisher, J. (1994, 1997, 2003) on the critical poetics of Diaspora throughout the globe;                      Tribe, T. (2000, 2004) on sacred and aesthetic experience in Latin America and northeastern Africa, and Picton, P. (1999, 2001, 2005) on pleasure, play and transculturation in west and southern Africa, and Britain.

Yelvington, Kevin A. 1993 ‘Trinidad Ethnicity,’ London: Macmillan and the University of Warwick, p. 10.