Black Mediterranean: Artistic Encounters and Counter-narratives
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02 Dec
04 Dec
2025
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Aesthetics, Criticism and Theory (ACT)
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Avinoam Shalem
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Image: Cantino Planisphere, 1502, ink and pigment on vellum, 102 x 218 cm (Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena)
This series of three lectures discuss issues concerning the results of the Getty-supported project Black Mediterranean: Artistic Encounters and Counter-narratives – a joint project between Avinoam Shalem, Columbia University NY, and Alina Payne, Harvard University and director of Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. This educational project critically revisits the histories and historiographies of the Mediterranean. The long story of world civilization—for which the Mediterranean was, and still is, a hub—has usually been woven by quasi-horizontal and parallel vectors that move alternately between East and West. Incorporating into this field the African continent, this project moves beyond the west-east patterns that shaped and controlled the writing of Mediterranean art history.
Black Mediterranean places the sea as the medial space for artistic interactions, but adds to it the north-south longitudinal meridians. The project is a corrective methodological tool that aims to include forgotten narratives and to revisit historiographies of racial subordination. It provides a forum for art historians to address overlooked Afro-Mediterranean chronicles, and is a call for a new critical humanism that revisits Mediterranean histories to offer better insights into past empires and colonial affairs.
This series of lectures consists of a critical introduction and two further lectures, which focus on two case studies forming two major moments in the long-entwined histories of the Mediterranean and Africa.
Lecture 1: Introduction: Between Black and Brown Africa; For a critical Re-Writing of Mediterranean Histories
Lecture 2: The Habsburgs in Tunis (1535-1574) and the New Mediterranean Order
Lecture 3: The Red Corridor and the Suez Canal: Histories of Global Commercial Desires
Online Public Seminar Series on ZOOM
P.S: The Zoom link to join the lecture will be shared 24 hours prior to the talk.
Duration -
December 2, 3, 4, 2025
Timing: Lecture: 6:30 - 8:30 pm IST
Fees
Rs. 3,000 (For student discounts registrations kindly email info@jp-india.org)
Registrations will open on 15-Oct-2025
Avinoam Shalem
Avinoam Shalem is the Riggio Professor of the arts of Islam at the Columbia University in the city of New York. Prior to his appointment, Shalem held the professorship of the history of the arts of Islam at the University of Munich and taught at the universities of Tel Aviv, Edinburgh, Heidelberg (Hochschule für jüdische Studien), Bamberg, Luzern and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006, Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Center in 2009; and Lester K. Little Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2016. Between 2007-2015, he held the Max-Planck Associate Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. His main field of interest is in medieval artistic interactions in the Mediterranean basin, medieval aesthetic and the historiography of the field of art history. He has published over 100 articles in academic magazines and books and is the author of several books. Among his recent publications: The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation (with Christiane J. Gruber): Die mittelalterliche Olifante (2 vols); and Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing In and Beyond the Lands of Islam (with Olga Bush). He co-curated the exhibition The Future of Tradition: The Tradition of Future in Haus der Kunst, Munich (2010) and is currently directing the research projects When Nature Becomes Ideology: Palestine after 1947. His recent publication (published in August 2017), The Chasuble of Thomas Becket: A Biography (Munich, Hirmer Publishing House).