In the 21st century, art-historical studies of race have shifted from iconography to visuality. For example, and building on path breaking projects to document how Black people are represented in art, scholars now posit racialization and representation as co-constitutive: exploring how visual regimes produce Blackness, and how racialized and minoritized subjects generate counter regimes. In this talk, I attempt a parallel shift in perspective on an iconographic topic: the representation of ‘Night’ in Byzantine art. Beginning ca. 800, Byzantine artists distinguished personifications of ‘Night’ from ‘Day’ in part by skin color: darker tones for the former, lighter tones for the latter. Their paintings can hardly be considered as representations of Black people. However, the iconographic distinction was articulated to a theological equation of Blackness with visual impairment, which acquired saliency in late and post-Byzantine art through the racialization of Muslims as Black.Intersections of Identity: Expression, Exchange, and Hybridity Lecture Series with Benjamin Anderson

This lecture begins at 7pm CST.