Black Bodies, White Gold

In Black Bodies, White Gold Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production.She traces the emergence of a speculative vision that informs perceptions of Blackness in which artistic renderings of cotton-as both commodity and material-became inexorably tied to the monetary value of Black bodies.From the production and representation of “negro cloth”-the textile worn by enslaved plantation workers-to depictions of Black sharecroppers in photographs and paintings, Arabindan-Kesson demonstrates that visuality was the mechanism through which Blackness and cotton became equated as resources for extraction.In addition to interrogating the work of nineteenth-cen