Participating in a contemporary movement for the renewal of the humanities through an environmental perspective, Samantha Noël’s book offers a new approach to thinking about nature in art history from the viewpoint of Black modernisms. Investigating artworks, performances, and other creative manifestations developed in cultural practices in the Caribbean and tropical locations in the United States in the early twentieth century, the author elaborates the concept of tropical aesthetics. Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism defines an art that evokes tropicality in order to examine the relationship between Black Atlantic peoples and the lands they inhabited and labored on during colonial eras. Presented as a geographical empowerment, tropical aesthetics reify social geographies, creating spaces of memory for enslaved ancestors and Afro-descendants, engendering a sense of belonging.
The theoretical approach inaugurated by Noël responds to and confronts racialized discourses that historically associate, pejoratively, tropical nature with Black people. Her investigation begins...
University of California Press