Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World

Black Bodies, White Gold is a masterfully executed historical study that explores the cotton crop's association with Blackness in the Atlantic World. Anna Arabindan-Kesson's unique contribution to this historical study is remediating archival loss by constructing historical narrative from artworks that articulate historical knowledge on the social meanings of cotton. In analyzing the select artworks in the book, Arabindan-Kesson deploys a cultural anthropology–inspired methodology of “thick description” which entails examining the “symbolic meanings of cotton in relation to ideas and the physical associations and resonances of the material itself” (p. 24). Arabindan-Kesson emphasizes that drawing on contemporary artworks does not make the study “an illustrated history of cotton” but rather the choice of this methodological approach provides a mode of historical analysis that allows us to think about the deep connections between objects and people. For scholars of immigration history, Arabindan-Kesson's methodological approach is particularly instructive because it highlights a potentially rewarding avenue for studying human migrations by tracing the mobility of commodities. After all, where commodities go, humans follow.The book comprises four chapters situated in different locations across the Atlantic world. In the first chapter, Arabindan-Kesson dialogues with Lubaina Himid's multimedia artwork installation Cotton.com to examine the production of “negro cloth” and the multiple ways in which it shaped the lives of lives and labors of Black and white people in antebellum America. Arabindan-Kesson draws on the multicolored and textured canvas pieces in Himid's art installation to highlight the mobility of cotton, from plantations in the southern United States during the antebellum era to textile factories in England. Global demand for the cotton crop necessitated the need for slave labor on plantations. Arabindan-Kesson's astute analysis of cotton's global movement is an important reminder that human mobility has historically been equally shaped by the mobility of important commodities such as cotton.The second chapter is situated in Manchester, England, and here the author uses the paintings of Agostino Brunias (1730–1776) and Eyre Crowe (1824–1910) to trace the production of patterned cloth for African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean communities in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. The artworks analyzed here reveal that the production of cotton shaped various world geographies. Arguably one of the most significant imprints of the cotton crop was in the way in which it forcefully extracted and commodified the lives and labor of Black people. Arabindan-Kesson's analyses of artistic mediums here allow us to feel the acutely distressing experiences of Black people whose labor ensured cotton's global importance.In the third chapter, Arabindan-Kesson examines the representation of the Black sharecropper in the aftermath of emancipation and the end of the American Civil War in printed mediums by the artist Hank Willis Thomas and painted artworks of Edgar Degas and Winslow Homer. Degas's painting A Cotton Office in New Orleans,1873 depicts suit-clad men in an office engaged in various activities relating to the sale of cotton, such as checking the prices of cotton on the stock market, assessing the quality of cotton, and recording the quantity of cotton. And Homer's painting The Cotton Pickers, 1876 portrays two Black women picking cotton on a vast cotton field. These two artworks emphasize the centrality of Black labor to the economic order in antebellum America and Blackness as a site of extraction.The last chapter of the book brings the study to a full circle by returning to late nineteenth-century Africa at the discontinuation of the transatlantic slave trade and the beginning of the European scramble and partition of Africa. In this chapter, Arabindan-Kesson draws on the 2003 artwork of British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare to explore the historical connections between West Africa and the global cotton trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Yinka Shonibare's artwork is composed of fourteen headless, life-size fiberglass mannequins seated around a table and clothed in Dutch wax-printed cotton. Aptly named Scramble for Africa, the artwork reinforces the African continent's importance beyond a location for procuring slaves for plantations in the Americas. Africa also served as an important market for the sale of cotton cloth. Wax-printed cotton cloth was in huge demand by colonial African consumers because of its association with sophistication and modernity.Black Bodies, White Gold is an insightful contribution to the field of historical studies. For scholars of immigration history, Arabindan-Kesson's highlight of the relationality of commodity mobility to human migrations is noteworthy. By understanding that objects carry much deeper meanings, historical narratives on human movements can benefit from new questions. For graduate students, Black Bodies, White Gold is an instructive text that enhances an understanding of historical methodology. Graduate students will appreciate the analytic potential of material objects in historical knowledge production. Arabindan-Kesson deserves full praise for a masterful execution of remediating archival loss by interrogating the deeper messages of art mediums.