Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History (HESCAH) Lecture

April 19, 2023 | 6pm | Harn Museum of Art, Chandler Auditorium

The lecture will focus on material culture, meaning objects in use and representations of an exceptional community: the Signares, mixed-race women from Saint-Louis du Sénégal and the island of Gorée, who, through their matrimonial alliances with European merchants, formed an elite in 1800. Their local political power and economic strength on a transcontinental scale were accompanied by a number of practices related to the accumulation of material goods, sartorial ostentation, opulent jewelry, and architectural overkill. The multicultural identity of these ‘Afropean’ women, to borrow an effective concept from Novelist Leonora Miano, was embedded in their ostentatious self-fashioning which invites consideration in light of contemporary theory of Parure by European art writers. Thinking of them together, Afropean Fashionistas and European theorists, might be another way to build the Black Atlantic.

Organized by the Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History Committee of the School of Art + Art History in cooperation with the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art.