Let’s bring blacks home! exhibition catalog
Publication accompanying the exhibition Let’s bring blacks home! Colonial Imagination and Forms of Graphic Approach of Black People in Africa (1880–1968), shown in 2020 at Centre Cultural La Nau, Universitat de València.
The exhibition is “an exercise in cultural criticism that reviews the topics hatched throughout the European colonial domination of Black people in Africa. [It] brings together a selection of 400 objects, photographs, posters and documentation – many of them unpublished – that served to cement popular racism since the end of the 19th century. […] A special focus has been given to the Spanish case, specifically to the black towns, popularly known as “human zoos”. The exhibition shows how Spain joined the fashion of the hurtful ethnic exhibitions with cases such as the Ashanti Village in Madrid and Barcelona in 1897, the Senegalese Village in the Tibidabo in Barcelona in 1913, the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville in 1929, or the one that is perhaps the least known, that of the native Fang of Guinea at the Valencia Sample Fair in 1942, during the Franco regime and World War II, when in the rest of Europe they had practically disappeared.” – dxi [translated]
