ABSTRACT
This book brings together a signifi cant body of scholarly work into a collection that focuses critical attention upon the representation of the black female subject in historical western art. All of the chapters, produced between 1995 and 2009, refl ect both my engagement with the fi eld of Race and Representation as well as my abiding interest in the study of Trans Atlantic Slavery, Postcolonial Studies and Black Diaspora Studies. But the book is primarily Art Historical, based upon a New Art History approach that emphasizes the relevance of the social context of artistic production and representation as inseparable from issues of artistic identity and the material and aesthetic properties of an art object. As such, this book, like my research generally, has been profoundly infl uenced by social, black feminist, white feminist, queer and postcolonial Art Histories as well as critical theory and critical race theory, especially engagements with Marxism, psychoanalysis and discourse theory.
