Output details

'Africa and the Slave Trade' and 'The Slave Colonies'

Contribution and context: Ford made a substantial contribution to The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. He co-authored two chapters: chapter 5 ‚Africa and the Slave Trade’ and Chapter 6 ‚The Slave Colonies’.The Image of the Black in Western Art series was initiated by the Menil Foundation in the 1960s to provide scholarly volumes showing the presence of persons of African descent in western art from antiquity to the present day and was revived in 2005 under the auspices of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University (with the 18th century volume published in 2010).

Research imperatives and process: Given that England, France and Holland were the most prominent slave-owning nations in the period, Ford’s research plays an essential part in the longer historical narrative of appropriative and abusive encounters dealt with in the volume as a whole. In addition to the wide-ranging and synthetic analysis of the representational means employed by painters (and endorsed by patrons) for the picturing of Africans in terms of the imprinted ideologies of science, politics, and law, Ford also investigates the specific ideological conditions that underpin the representation of race in the painting of Dutch Africa, including discussions of the print market for images and the slave trade debate. Ford’s research presented here relates to his wider interests in markets, ideologies and the production of images in the early modern period, especially the Low Countries.