1st Edition
Early Modern Architecture and Whiteness Power by Design
Framing whiteness as a sensorial quality connate with ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, and ontological hierarchies, this edited volume examines how the category of whiteness shaped architectural theories and practices across the early modern period.
What was architecture’s role in race-making, constructions of whiteness, and processes of othering more generally? How was whiteness architecturally questioned, reinforced, conceptualized, practiced, and materialized? And how did whiteness intersect with categories such as class, nation, gender, beauty, hygiene, and health? In examining these questions, this volume explores the ways in which premodern critical race studies allow us to reimagine the boundaries and possibilities of architectural research, design, and practice.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in architectural history, art history, early modern studies, and the history of race.
Foreword
Charles L. Davis II
Introduction
Dijana O. Apostolski and Aaron White
Part 1 Constructing the Racialized Body
1. St. Francis/San Francesco: White, Incorrupt, Divine
Rebecca M. Howard
2. The Man of Swarthy Complexion: From Bernini’s Biographies to the (De)construction of Color
Fiona Sit
3. "The Dead Body of a Moor": Michelangelo, Anatomy, and Racecraft in Sixteenth-Century Rome
Dijana O. Apostolski
4. "To Blanch an Aethiop": Inigo Jones, Queen Anna, and the Staging of Whiteness
Aaron White
Part 2 Constructing the Racialized Body-Politic
5. Whitewashing Legibility: Property Surveys and the Logic of Colonial Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century Senegal
Dwight Carey
6. Muiscas and Moriscos from within the Spanish Grid: Privileged Mixed-Blood Settlers in the Foundational Records of Villa de Leyva (Colombia, 1572–1582) and Campillo de Arenas (Spain, 1508–1539)
Manuel Sánchez García
7. The Appropriation of Mexican Indigenous Material Culture: Architecture, Urban Design, and Antiquarianism in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, Spain, and Italy
Juan Luis Burke
8. The Whiteness of Antiquity and Salvation: Tullio Lombardo, Gianmaria Falconetto, and the Saint Anthony Chapel in Padua
Maria Teresa Sambin de Norcen
Afterword
Itohan Osayimwese
Biography
Dijana O. Apostolski is an architectural historian studying premodern histories of architectural design in relation to histories of the body, materials, and matter. She is a lecturer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Aaron White is an architectural historian studying premodern architecture in its relation to empire. He is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University.
