Huey Copeland

This book examines the negress—a key figure within Western artistic production—in order to newly interpret the practices that have both shaped the visual predication of black femininity and constituted modern aesthetic form from the nineteenth century to the present. While several scholars have commented on the significance of racial and sexual difference for avant-garde innovation and others have begun to explore the visual history of black womanhood, this project moves between and beyond these discourses to actively theorize the role that figurations of African and African diasporic femininity have played in art-making of the last two centuries. In so doing, it will wend its way through a range of periods and practitioners in narrating a racially integrated, gender-balanced, and transnational history of modern art.