Description: Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other hegemonic regimes through tropicalist representation.
Review Quotes: "From Alexander von Humboldt to Wangechi Mutu, art historian Samantha A. Noël has tracked the allure of 'tropical aesthetics' landscapes, regalia, and choreographies that betray modernism's debt to the equatorial realm and its treasures. Black artists especially have had to contend with these sensibilities, responding to their appeals for diaspora camaraderie and struggling with the challenges they pose to a postfolkloric contemporaneity. This tension--along with Professor Noël's deft, critical purview--commends this important study."--Richard J. Powell, author of "Going There: Black Visual Satire"