“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
~ Audre Lorde ~
Consider Paul Gilroy’s seminal book, “The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness.”
This series engages the 19th-century process of platinum palladium prints to depict contemporary African Americans' re-examination of photography and its intersection of history and the ways the medium was used to perpetuate racist stereotypes concerning Black bodies as inherently dishonest, childlike, and lacking intelligence—used to deny black representation and disseminated the idea of racial inferiority.
Decolonized Aesthetics is a series that merges the history of our unpaid labor and the economic engine of cotton to reposition Black bodies, not as stereotypes and the propagandist idea of racial inferiority but as a reinterpretation of having agency and control of our own labor. It considers the roots and routes of the Atlantic slave trade and its creolization, creating a fusion of multi-cultures by reconstructing the narrative and positioning Black bodies not as property and labor but rather as a creolized people of agency and privilege of labor ownership through the purview of the Black Atlantic world.
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