Look Again: Empire
Author: Afua Hirsch
Publisher: TATE
Print Length: 47 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Essay
Area: The United Kingdom (UK)
Topic: Imperialism, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, History, Art & Design, Cultural Heritage / Legacy, Slavery, Racism, Ownership
Look Again is a series of short books, opening up the conversation about British art over the last 500 years, and exploring what art has to tell us about our lives today.
A vital exploration of how Britain’s empire has shaped its art, by one of the UK’s most influential voices.
In twenty-first century Britain, the legacy of ‘empire’ is highly contested. Its histories of war, conquest and slavery are difficult and painful to address but its legacy continues to shape our present, and future. In Empire, award-winning author and broadcaster Afua Hirsch explores the ways in which Britain’s imperial history and its national collection of art interact, and how artists from Britain and around the world have responded to the events, tragedies and experiences of the British Empire. Featuring an array of historic and contemporary works, Empire raises questions about ownership and authorship, and asks how the value and meanings of artworks have changed through history and what they still mean to us today.
Table of Contents
Text and image-based book with no chapters.
Quotes:
“Race is, ironically, perhaps the most cruelly impressive invention of European empires.”
“Race does not exist in biology. There are greater genetic differences within ethnic groups than exist between them. Race is, ironically, perhaps the most perhaps the most cruelly impressive invention of European empires. It was required to justify stealing, murdering, enslaving and conquering, in the face of the very Christian and civilised values those empires espouses. It continues to shape our thinking about the identities of ourselves and others. The true ‘secret’ of England’s greatness, to return to Barker’s famous painting, is not any wisdom contained in the Bible that Queen Victoria is depicted presenting to a grateful African native. The secret to England’s greatness was the wholesale adoption of a theory of racial hierarchy that places Africans at the bottom and English at the top — the foundation on which the empire was built.
How could this not produce ludicrous and painful visual legacies?“
Afua Hirsch is an award-winning writer, author, TV presenter, documentary maker, and former barrister. At a young age, she had to make sense of the ways in which people racialised her – a mixed-race, black girl with an African name and a middle class upbringing – while at the same time claiming that they “did not see race”. She has worked as a Social Affairs Editor for Sky News and covering West Africa for the Guardian Newspaper.
Source: https://www.afuahirsch.com/
More from Afua Hirsch in this library, click here.