People of Color in European Art History


  1. tobinlaughing wrote...

    I asked for an anecdote, and you gave me something much more considered and intelligent. Thanks for answering my question!

    Sadly, I’m not “allowed” to post anecdotes.

    As you might have noticed, even this level of analysis is still “not supported enough” for some people. Nary a word may slip past my keyboard unless I have ten white male authors to back it up, as we have seen. Anecdotal evidence remains the privilege of the likes of astrokid248, as seen here:

    astrokid248 said [response to this post]:

    Where the hell are you going that people are getting harassed out of SCA and ren faires? I’ve been to a lot of southern ones and that’s never happened in my experience.

    Which, unless I hunt down some obscure Ivy League study about the rates of racist harassment at Renfaires and SCA events, will stand as the gospel truth until someone with a lot of money and patience proves with “science” that racism and racist harassment exists. And that we’re not just all somehow “choosing” to be harassed by picking especially racist places to exist in public, or whatever the heck astrokid the blog buzzard is implying with that.

    But honestly and truly, I enjoyed answering your question, and hope to continue to answer people’s question for as long as possible.

  2. mirrorrmirrorr wrote...

    I now have a great desire to hear the more accurate side of women's history. I've never believed the traditional story us in school ("women became second-class citizens cuz all they did was make babies & pleasure men, while men did everything else, but hey here some ancient cultures that did give women some rights! Not as much rights as women have now, because now women are equal to men! right? riiight?"). But your the first person with expertise in history to tell me otherwise! [ 1 / 2 ]

    [ 2 / 2 ] I know it’s not entirely relevant to this blog, but could you at least point me and others in the right direction? I’m sure there’s others who’d be interested in the subject…
    Interdisciplinary Gender Studies was actually the gateway drug to my current ~esoteric specialty~, which I’m sure comes as a shock to absolutely no one. It was probably around ‘09-‘10 that I first kind of coalesced the concept of “retroactive erasure” as pertains to the erasure of the participation and achievement of women specifically in European Medieval Art.
    Basically I was doing research, like ya do, and I came across this book written in the early 1900s that mentioned a particular piece I was researching. Basically this woman had not only signed a manuscript she’d been particularly hired to illustrate, she’d illustrated herself holding the book on the last page. What the author of the early 1900s book had to say about it was that there was no reason to “assume” she had written the book or done the illuminations, because “it was too masterly for someone not a trained artist to have done”. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that quote, ha.
    If I’m ever feeling particularly ballsy I might one day share some of my old lectures from then I happen to have video of. I dunno, this was before I got so used to public speaking I feel literally nothing when I get up in front of a crowd anymore, and the word “um” has been completely abolished from my vocabulary.
    The problem was is that I found too much replication of the same kind of erasure, marginalization, dismissal, and devaluation in Gender Studies that I was finding in other disciplines, pretty pervasively towards people and women of color. And do not even get me started on the history of American feminism and how that intersects with disability. Not even remotely enough horrified reaction images for that.
    There are a lot of resources out there in regard to Gender studies +Medieval or really any European era, the problem is that the pickings for women of color + world history can be pretty slim, unless you’ve got something specific in mind already. It really depends on what you’re looking for. You can find anything from snarkticles on cracked.com, to hardcover-only 200 dollar humanities textbooks, TPBs that will run you almost as much, subpar pop-History hot off the vanity press, Eurocentric love letters to the Christian history of Anorexia Nervosa, vaguely historical dramatized biographies of women artists and Elizabeth I, like….your question is so very general that I really don’t feel comfortable picking a direction to point you in.
    As for tumblr, wocinsolidarity has a list of tumblrs for people of color, including of course, blogs for women of color, activists, and I think some history-related resources. I feel kind of bad sometimes when I’m practically saying “you need to narrow your thesis” when people ask me for resources, but there’s just so much out there on everything, sometimes it’s difficult to choose some kind of comprehensive primer when everything’s so flawed. Here’s a “Best of 2013” I did on women of color in history with a whole bunch of links and hopefully some leads that might interest you. If you are looking for something specific that interests you or make any cool discoveries, send me a message and I’ll do my best.