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Reconfiguring African trade beads: the most beautiful, bountiful and marginalised sculptural legacy to have survived the middle passage

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posted on 2023-06-09, 05:28 authored by Marcus Wood
The greatest cultural historian of beads Lydia Sciama dramatically instructs us that: ‘One cannot over-emphasise the importance of glass beads in the European colonization of a vast portion of the inhabited world.’ True words, and yet beads have been and continue to be shamefully and wilfully neglected within international slavery studies. Beads, whether of African, Asian or European manufacture remain peripheral, scarcely studied and hardly seen, let alone recognised as a unifying cultural entity within slavery studies, and indeed within the officially sanctioned sites for the memory of slavery. This chapter teaches us that how a culture now moves around beads and memory can tell you a lot about its creative health, its perceptual vigour, its aesthetic virtue, its artistic democracy, and its ability to understand slave aesthetics and art.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Publisher

Liverpool University Press

Issue

9

Volume

9

Page range

248-273

Pages

304.0

Book title

Visualising slavery: art across the African diaspora

Place of publication

Liverpool

ISBN

9781781382677

Series

Liverpool studies in international slavery

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Centre for Gender Studies Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Hannah Durkin, Celeste-Marie Bernier

Legacy Posted Date

2017-03-15

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