Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination

Ideas of blackness and racial difference have deep roots in European culture, stretching further back than the slave trade and 19th-century imperialism. This text exposes this history through an archaelogy of the racial imagination, exploring the work of both black and white artists and writers. Adam Lively shows how racist beliefs in innate intellectual and moral difference developed from the classificatory sciences of the 18th century, and Enlightenment model stemming from older, biblical divisions of mankind into tribes.