'Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art' by David Dabydeen

[annwfyn]

I came across this book quite randomly, whilst hunting for something totally different in my university library, so it was a bit of a surprise. It is an academic text, so it's a tad on the dry side, but it is really interesting and it ties in very well to one of my longstanding interests, which is the history of race as a social construct

Comments

[kethlenda]

This sounds really interesting--I'll have to look it up!

[rydra_wong]

Ooh. You may know this already, but Dabydeen's also a novelist and poet, as well as an academic; one of his novels (A Harlot's Progress) is set in the 18th-century London and riffs on a character from one of Hogarth's pictures.

It would be fascinating to see how it relates to this book.

[annwfyn]

~nods~ I knew he was a novelist - it's one of the reasons I knew his name and grabbed this book when I saw it. I really would like to get hold of 'A Harlot's Progress', but it's not shown up on bookmooch yet. I may just crack and buy it at some point soon, or see if I can order it from my local library.

Progress!

[snipervolk]

PoC in art history is really interesting to me.

It's sort of funny how Rembrandt used to go to the Jewish quarters of Amsterdam to dig up models for his Biblical paintings, and four hundred years later in Hollywood movies they're played by white guys with a tan.

[holyschist]

Oooh, that sounds really interesting.

[vegablack62]

I fascinated by how certain aspects of social life can get worse rather than better. We tend to think the world moves forward on an upward slope toward greater tolerance. Just as the society becomes less class conscious and working people begin to get more education and freedom society becomes more racist.

I'm always interested in nonfiction. I think I have heard of the author.

[annwfyn]

It's something that surprised me, and sort of depresses me. It makes me wonder what kind of intolerance will rise up when racism finally begins to fade away (which I really hope it will). Because the more I read about it, the more it seems that humanity is not very good at not creating various forms of 'us' and 'them'.

[vegablack62]

Yes that seems to be the most basic quality in humans the desire to create a group that every one is allowed to exploit and ridicule. I see it even in fantasy movies and literature, where old racist and antisemitic canards are dug up and applied to some non-human rubber creature from another planet, as if the writer/director needed someone to apply them to and picked the nonhuman since they could no longer apply it to a human. Why use them at all? In some realistic movies nasty statements are applied to poor white people "trailer trash" as if no one could go through a movie without denigrating someone.