Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World by Anna Arabindan-Kesson (review)

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• Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World by Anna Arabindan-Kesson
• Zay Dale

Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World. By Anna Arabindan-Kesson. Duke University Press, 2021. 320 pp.

In Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World, Anna Arabindan-Kesson attends closely to the role of cotton and Blackness in aesthetic and commodity traditions in the United States and globally. Arabindan-Kesson makes it clear that her work is not after a diachronic study of cotton and history; rather, she is concerned with the “visual and material associations between Blackness and cotton” (6). In this well-written, lavishly illustrated, and thoroughly researched book, Arabindan-Kesson develops an approach to art and Blackness that begins in textiles. What emerges from Arabindan-Kesson’s work is a new study of art, history, and literature through Black bodies and white cotton via attention to the visual modality of reducing “Black lives to raw material” (18), a modality in which cotton, Blackness, and history are all violently intertwined.

The aesthetic nature of cotton in art forms the central thesis of the book. In the art in which cotton is depicted, Arabindan-Kesson identifies a belief that there exists a certain fugitive space in the threads of cotton: according to this belief, in the viewing, touching, and feeling of cotton, one can recognize its “speculative vision” (21). Each of the four chapters and the coda incorporate this [End Page 153] notion of speculative vision to understand the networks of commerce and Blackness and the ways that Blackness comes to exist through artworks that posit it as a speculative vision of resistance inhabiting the cotton they depict. The first chapter, “Circuits of Cotton,” looks at contemporary artist Lubaina Himid, particularly her artwork Cotton.com (2002), to examine the way Himid not only looks back at history in her work but also looks back upon past and present blindness to exploitation and questions how we can “not see this history” (32). By beginning with this contemporary artist and working back to nineteenth-century art and history, Arabindan-Kesson establishes this reduction of fiber to flesh, thereby building a relationship between Black bodies and textiles; but she also shows the eradication of Black handwork so that Blackness cannot be tied to aesthetics of textiles (38). Arabindan-Kesson guides the reader through the artwork while underscoring the importance of cotton’s role in the draping of the body: clothing for the Black body begins, in the US, not in clothing as artistic expression but clothing as “uniform” (46). Black wearers of this uniform were meant to be seen as deprived of an individual body. The clothes given to them were not fit for their bodies or made with the environment in mind—especially with regard to the heat of the south. This constant state of confinement in a poorly fitting, uniform, cotton drapery shows how cotton not only “shape[d] their daily routine” but also “conditioned their existence” as beings (55). Arabindan-Kesson, however, ends this section by showing us how, from quilt-making to self-styling, enslaved people radically resisted the experience of the mandatory draping of uniforms. More importantly, cotton, because it touches white bodies through the weaving of cotton cloth by Black hands, has the “radical spatial” effect of existing everywhere all at once (61), escaping the confinement imposed upon the Black bodies that produced it. As such, from the hand-picked cotton to the textile factories, Black hands and Blackness can be found ubiquitously.

While the first chapter of this book is concerned mostly with cotton in the US, the second chapter spreads the involvement of cotton to Britain. During the nineteenth century, Black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet traveled throughout Britain giving lectures that detailed the “relationship between the price of cotton in Britain and the value of slaves in America” (69). Indeed, Garnet envisions a Black metaphysical [End Page 154] spirit, if you will, that remains attached to the cotton picked by Black bodies. The material Black bodies, as transitory entities, create a Black spirit and resulting cultural cosmopolitan that Arabindan-Kesson will pick up...