From automata to maps, pre-modern objects in museums and archives can indicate much about how writers and artists used racial difference to make judgements about religion, politics, society, and beauty. The contributors to Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World explore a range of sources through this “racial matrix,” where varied categories of difference and identity become wrapped up in notions of “phenotype” (xvii). Based on the exhibition “Seeing Race Before Race” that opened at Chicago's Newberry Library in September 2023, this volume serves as both exhibition catalogue and review of the field. Examining how “race and racial thinking are represented in the visual culture of premodern times,” it presents a “starting point for fresh and ambitious conversations” at the intersection of Critical Race and Indigenous studies, art history, performance studies, and book history (xi).
In bringing together historic objects and Critical Race and Indigenous studies, editors and co-curators Noémie Ndiaye and Lia Markey set out to show how early modern symbols and ideas transferred through visual media continue to affect social and political concerns into the twenty-first century. Reading through the book's case studies and collaborative conversations, I was reminded of the 2016 court case that frames Anna Arabindan-Kesson's Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (2019), where an employee at Yale University was arrested—though charges were ultimately dropped—for shattering a window in the dining hall at Calhoun College. This was a targeted act of protest: Corey Menafee, who had been employed by the university for nearly a decade, could no longer bear working in a dining hall whose window, created in the 1930s, presented a sanitized depiction of two enslaved figures working in a cotton field. In Seeing Race Before Race, Ndiaye and Markey in some ways invite readers to think about the keeping and display of medieval and early modern artworks as equally politically-charged, and as equally deserving of critical questioning regarding the terms of their making and the troubling histories they might display or conceal.
The three main sections—“Figuring,” “Mapping,” and “Performing”—examine how various practices and techniques were used to construct ideas about race, with short catalogue entries on everything from costume books to playing cards. High-resolution images help readers participate in the act of decoding these images. In Diego Valadés’ 1579 etching, purportedly depicting the “inhuman sacrifices” performed in Mexico, other details emerge, including scenes of fishing, cultivation, and play. Regional plants and vegetables that were important to Indigenous lifeways and to European conceptions of Central American environments, including maize, cacao, and cactuses, appear oversized and out of scale at the bottom of the image, suggesting their importance to the visual landscape (205).
The accompanying foreword, introduction, essays, interview, glossary, and bibliography present the reader with many ways into this interdisciplinary material. The catalogue covers a vast number of sources and issues, offering an overview of topics including decolonizing the archive, the preservation of disappearing languages, religious representation, dispossession, Black figures at the Met Museum, Ottoman Turkish calligraphy, Islamophobia, race and theatrical productions, complexion and concepts of beauty, and others. The essays and additional materials bring out topics that are understandably too large to be covered extensively within the remit of the book, serving instead as small but effective case studies (for example, exploring how galleries might move beyond “Black art in a white space,” 132). More work remains to be done on how objects were created, interpreted, and used—where materials were sourced, the trajectories of individuals and communities who made these resources available, the hands of those who contributed to their making and use—but the book successfully offers frameworks and provocations that will help make this kind of work possible. The closing interview between Kim F. Hall, Scott Manning Stevens, and L. Lehua Yim confronts the challenges of representation in the academy and discusses the value and importance of community in forging new ways of thinking. How might “other types of histories or response to histories or futures or even the past” extend beyond white settler colonialism, and what implications does this have for premodern scholarship (227)?
As outlined in the preface, one of the key purposes of Seeing Race before Race is to illuminate how race “can be seen, literally, in vast visual archives spanning centuries, and it must be seen too, if we want to understand the long-lasting effects of that social construct across time and space” (xvi). Many challenges remain, from the language proficiency required to interpret many of these multilingual sources, to how transoceanic collaborations with various knowledge-holders might be achieved in ethical, reparative ways, especially at a time when the humanities continue to face drastic funding cuts and the loss of entire departments and research centers. In this context, this book is not only a catalogue and survey of the field but a robust call to action, and stands as evidence of the value of those institutions and communities that do spotlight approaches that make the field of premodern studies more capacious and multilayered.
