Columbia University's Department of Art History and Archaeology recently received a major grant from the Getty Foundation for the multiyear project Black Mediterranean/Mediterraneo Nero—Artistic Encounters and Counter-narratives/Incontri Artistici e Contronarrazioni, part of the Getty's Connecting Art Histories initiative.
Black Mediterranean is a joint project between Avinoam Shalem, the Riggio Professor of Art History, Arts of Islam, and Alina Payne, the Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, and the director of Villa I Tatti, Harvard's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy.
The project's mission is to reconsider the histories and historiographies of the Mediterranean, paying particular attention to African influences on Mediterranean cultures. The project encompasses the significant centers and routes between Europe and Africa along the Mediterranean coasts while exploring routes and crossroads connecting central Africa to the Mediterranean within three main zones: east, central, and west Africa.
The Black Mediterranean is a corrective methodological tool that aims to include forgotten narratives and revisit historiographies of racial subordination. It provides a forum for art historians to address overlooked Afro-Mediterranean chronicles. It calls for a new critical humanism that revisits Mediterranean histories to offer better insights into past empires and colonial affairs. By reexamining these accounts, we can reframe Western hegemonic, epistemic control of the past.
