ReSignifications interprets the "Blackamoor" trope in Western culture. This tradition of decorative art emerged at the intersection of cross-cultural encounters shaped by centuries of migration, exchange, conquest, servitude, and exile. ReSignifications links classical and popular representations of African bodies in European art, culture, and history. It moderates and subverts artistic conventions by using the works of contemporary artists from Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean to engage in dialogue with the broad historical array of ornamental representations of African bodies.
Echoes of pasts, inscriptions of presence: resignifying the blackamoors / Awarn Amkpa -- The voice of silent servants: villa la pietra's blackamoors in context / Ellyn Toscano -- Blackamoors and more / Robert Holmes -- Suggestions by a Florentine connoisseur: Museo Stefano Bardini in Florence / Antonella Nesi -- Visual sources of the 'blackamoor' statue / Paul Kaplan -- A fifteenth century flesh and blood black slave at villa la pietra: a human precursor of the acton blackamoors / Kate Lowe -- La pietra poems / Ulrich Baer -- The blackamoor as voyager: resignifications in transit from old worlds to estevanico, Abraham Lincoln, Bayou ballads, and William Attaway / Gunja SenGupta -- Gestures / Deborah Willis -- The specter of the blackamoor: figuring Africa and the orient / Ella Shohat -- A blackamoor's progress: the ornamental black body in European furniture / Adrienne L. Childs -- Fred Wilson's black venezia: fictitious histories and the notion of truth / Salah M. Hassan -- Beyond the black Venus: colonial sexual politics and contemporary visual practices / Sandra Ponzanesi -- Moor and Medusa: in the footsteps of Othello / Shaul Bassi -- Of moors' head: and other Sicilian decorations / Alessandra Di Maio -- The 'buratto' of the Bargello museum / Mahnaz Yousefzadeh -- Gilded / Maaza Mengiste -- Here comes the black bogeyman / Pap Khouma -- The bilbolbul case or the need for decolonizing Italy / Igiaba Scego -- Punt Rap / Ubah Cristina Ali Farah.