Every year in November until I was twelve or so, I remember being told by my teachers of the original Thanksgiving feast: ethnic groups indigenous to the Americas gathered with various ethnicless European pilgrims to celebrate the harvest, an allegory of the future of our “great nation.” This story began with Christopher Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Americas in 1492 and then bounded ballerina-like over two hundred years of history to the American Revolution and the birth of one of the greatest nations to ever exist. The Europeans, via Columbus’s famed discovery, were the victors: they brought guns, germs, tea, and Christianity to a continent of faceless, nameless natives who offered in return corn, squash, and beaver pelts. This was my image of American history, the narrative façade of my youth—that is, until I watched the documentary series Hidden Colors as a thirteen-year-old.

The documentary, which is not without its own problems, recounts the story of the colonization of America through the positionality of enslaved black Africans. This is where I learned that Europe was not always a world power, that Columbus was Italian, that different groups indigenous to the Americas fought for their lands, and that black Africans may have a history with Europeans that predated slavery. After watching it I read anything about the history of race that I could get my hands on: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-education of the Negro, and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery were among the first, but many others followed. Although I am sure there is much I didn’t understand, what I did understand was that America was the bad guy.

I have come to understand that much of Hidden Colors is mumbo-jumbo. Nevertheless, it is the foundation on which I now build my research. The documentary radicalized me in two ways: it exposed me to a history of Africa and the Americas that predated colonial exploitation, and it exposed me to a subset of radical black thought that created a narrative of a “Moorish Europe.” This latter narrative is a misinterpretation. A premodern Moorish Europe as they describe it did not exist. But Hidden Colors remains at the forefront of my mind as, now in academia, I explore the depictions of black Africans by artists, authors, explorers, and theologians from the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It remains there because it served as a corrective to the earlier narrative I was given of American history as a child and because it falls into some of the same traps as the history it sought to correct.

How do we correct a rewriting of history that constructs a form of European benevolence excluding the history of slavery and genocide, while also correcting a form of black radical thought that rewrites the history of Africa, Asia, and Europe to create a mythical origin for black liberation? Is there an entry point into our contemporary issues of racial capitalism, anti-blackness, and colonialism that does not begin with Columbus’s journey to America?

A tonic can be found in studying the image of the African in late medieval and early modern literatures and artworks from the Low Countries. It may sound like I am simply proposing another pathway of understanding race, capitalism, and colonialism through a Eurocentric lens, but what I am suggesting is that our answers to the above questions lie in Europe before “European” as an identity existed. The different functions of the African within European consciousness may illuminate a more complex, if no less problematic, understanding of the history of race—one that does not shy away from its various contradictions, its often nonsensical understanding of itself, and its non-linear development.

Reframing the Colonial Narrative in Early Modern Europe

The development of artwork in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was closely linked to political and religious conflict, economic development and land cultivation, and colonial expansion. In the sixteenth century the northern provinces of the Duchy of Burgundy (northwestern continental Europe), now known as the Netherlands, fought for their freedom from the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, and cities outside Antwerp, like Amsterdam, became major economic centres. By the late seventeenth century those northern provinces had colonies in Brazil, present-day New York, Indonesia, and Southeast Africa, and they also controlled parts of the West African slave trade. At the same time, as Protestantism was gaining influence among merchants and princely powers, artistic subject matter within the Low Countries was undergoing a process according to which it was no longer intrinsically tethered to religious or classical subject matter. Both theologians and artists were seeking ways to make sense of the role images played in everyday life and worship as iconoclasm and religious censorship became a reality. The image of the African in the art of this period evolved alongside these various changes.

Before looking at that evolution, however, we must address the standard historical narratives of this period.

As children we learn of Mediterranean Europe’s growing economic and political importance in the New World through Columbus’s voyages (which were sponsored by the Spanish Crown) and Spanish and Portuguese conquests. We might also learn that power in the Mediterranean changed, and Italy’s role was kept marginal after the sixteenth century, which would affect the diffusion of artistic traditions within and outside Europe. We are introduced to Britain through the American Revolution; Dutch involvement in the colonial world is often reduced to sending “pilgrims” to the New Netherlands; and the French are relegated to the maple trees of Canada and the brothels of Louisiana.

This kind of education, while understandable when introducing younger students to more complex topics, often fails to provide a context for understanding, as adults, the complex global economic system in Europe that arose with modern capitalism. It is not just Europeans’ interconnectedness on their own continent that grew but their connections with places outside the Christian and Muslim world—namely, the Kingdom of Benin, Kongo Kingdom, Ethiopia, India, and the Americas. This hyperfocus on European conquest begins with the subjugation of the different indigenous nations and ends with the construction of an immutable racial caste system that is still with us today.

That narrative, while compelling and terrifying, is not quite accurate. European colonizers (composed of soldiers, explorers, traders, and missionaries) met nations, in West Africa in particular, that had the means to defend themselves against military aggression because of their advanced ironwork and the inability of Europeans to traverse further inland. Europeans also met nations that possessed skilled artisans (whether it was working iron, ivory, or weaving textiles) and found already-established trade routes that connected parts of West, central, and North Africa. Europeans initially came to the continent of Africa as mutual trade partners with an ardent, albeit very prejudiced, desire to minister to the black “heathen” and accumulate capital. Outside a few coastal towns, European conquest in West and central Africa was made possible only by the increased exportation of enslaved Africans and as the use of guns and heavy artillery became standard military practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Increased successful conquest emboldened racist thought and white supremacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which became deeply ingrained in Europe’s political and social imagination and obscured the earlier, more complex history. When one retells a grossly inaccurate narrative, one that centres on Europe’s conquering power, it reproduces the fantasy that the inhabitants of Africa were backward savages who easily succumbed to a more advanced European authority.

The African as a Non-religious Subject

The Low Countries, specifically the Netherlands, were active participants in European colonial expansion. It is from the rise of this global market (colonization and capitalism were central for its rapid expansion) that places outside Mediterranean Europe like Antwerp and Amsterdam not only became important centres for trade and commerce in the sixteenth century but also cultivated a style of art that was fully realized through the effervescence of the classical traditions. Before the formation of the Dutch Republic in the latter half of the sixteenth century, it was the socioeconomic connections of the Low Countries within the Burgundian-Habsburg “Netherlands” that shaped Antwerp’s (and other cities within the Low Countries) role within the global system. The Low Countries’ connections with Spanish, Portuguese, and English traders would aid in facilitating economic connections between the growing commercial centres in western Europe with southern Europe. So by 1610 it would not have been a surprise to find a French engraving with text that had been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, and Spanish and disseminated across much of Europe. This global market, which Antwerp and Amsterdam were central to, also traded in Turkish rugs, Benin bronzes, tomatoes, and syphilis. It also meant that black Africans—in the form of students from the newly Christian Kingdom of Kongo or enslaved Africans who accompanied traders—would become a more common sight in the Low Countries.

Just as intercontinental and colonial trade in the sixteenth century progressed, the artistic landscape was undergoing shifts as well. The Reformation and the Council of Trent (1545–63) created formal and informal guidelines surrounding the subject matter of art. Artistic genres were thus moving from being almost exclusively religious or classical in nature to assuming various non-religious textures. Both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had major ramifications for the Low Countries, because while Calvinism flourished, so did Catholicism and various other forms of Protestantism, which gave the Low Countries a distinct flavour of religious pluralism. Various non-religious genres arose out of this religious pluralism: still life, landscape painting, tronies (a form of portraiture intended to capture an expression of the subject), bourgeois portraiture, and maritime painting. At the same time, religious and classical scenes were being reshaped and fashioned in new and interesting ways.

In the face of both iconoclasm and counter-reform efforts, artists living in the Low Countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were forced to discern what constituted a permissible subject. This had profound effects on the image of the African. The Reformation would give rise to an African subject who could have a role in religious, classical, and everyday artistic scenes. This non-religious genre flourished in Reformation Europe. Many things that would have lacked the approval of artists invested in the classical tradition became central ways for artists in the Low Countries to explore the cultural identity of the newly formed Nederland. The African became an integral part of many of these genres.

From the late fifteenth century onward Renaissance artists had sought to capture the exactness of the African subject, which meant that many depictions of the African required head studies, consulting various prints, or having a real African to sit. This did not end the depiction of the African with stereotypical or generic (West) African features; however, it did mean the African was no longer limited to being a youthful black magus or draped in arabesque garments. The Mannerist style of the sixteenth century differed from that of traditionally trained Renaissance artists as it attempted to capture the “manner,” or the essence, of the subject. Mannerist artists often attempted to capture the manner of beauty of the African, opting for poetic interpretations of physical appearance. The traditionally Renaissance artist, by contrast, would attempt to capture the exactness of the African: the chestnut undertone of taupe-coloured skin, the curve of a receding hairline, the correct shape of the hips. The Mannerist would interpret the manner of the skin tone, rendering the subject’s skin walnut brown with russet undertones, and would opt, for example, to add a headdress to cover a receding hairline and use the motion of a figure within space to draw attention away from the hips.

Bartholomeus Spranger’s Adoration, although relatively tame when compared with the abundance of dress in examples painted by the Antwerp and Fontainebleau Mannerist schools, is a perfect representation of the Mannerist style. Spranger’s work is a beautiful example of painting the manner of the African instead of the exactness of whatever subject matter the artist possessed. Although it is unlikely that he observed a real African before he attempted to capture this manner, the movement, bright colors, and “prototypicality” of the figure showcase some of the essential aspects of Mannerists artworks.

Furthermore, as the Baroque was ushered in over the course of the seventeenth century, the various depictions of the African within art in the Low Countries often reflect how the subject matter altered in response to the region’s political and religious climate. The northern provinces, which formed the Dutch Republic, gained independence even as a bloody, eighty-year-long war with the Habsburg Empire raged from 1566 to 1648. Within the northern provinces, the African subject generally took on a relatively “humble” role within relatively “humble” scenes. They were servants within portraits of the expanding bourgeoisie, or they were the subject of various (proto-)ethnographic studies that could include portraits, tronies, guides to “African dress,” and other observations. Within southern provinces, which were still subject to Spanish control, the African subject—while still being depicted in tronies, as servants, and in various other roles—took on the same grandiosity of Mannerist and Baroque artworks elsewhere in Europe.

This, in effect, created two large categorical renderings of the African subject, which had various subtypes, within the Low Countries: they could take on the humbleness of the artworks in the northern provinces, or they could share in the extravagance of the Baroque in the southern provinces. The African’s immediate presence resulted in artists using different techniques when rendering their features. Although Peter Paul Rubens’s Venus of the Night, when compared with Titian’s Venus with a Mirror, is simple and lacks the extravagant robes and excessive jewelry otherwise associated with Venus, its vibrant colours and graceful strokes are nevertheless characteristic of many Baroque scenes in the southern provinces. The browns in the black attendant’s skin shimmer and glint with a luminance, even if she is pushed into the shadows and those browns and yellow undertones are used only to further illuminate the strikingly beautiful Venus.

Flesh and Fiction, or, The Artistic Renderings of Blackness

Maerten van Heemskerck’s The Triumphal Procession of Bacchus, painted early in the sixteenth century, is an excellent example of the rich African presence in early modern art in the Low Countries as genres expanded. Heemskerck’s Procession is so unique because, unlike Rubens’s Venus, it seems aware of its (dis)placement within the larger artistic tradition. Heemskerck associates black Africans not with any of the pre-set religious roles assigned to them but with Bacchus, the earliest surviving version to do so. By the seventeenth century the African association within Bacchic scenes in the Low Countries was frequent. What’s more, Heemskerck’s Africans are not functioning as venerable subjects; they participate in a classic scene where they normally would not have appeared. Heemskerck’s Africans lead the procession; neither are they background figures serving to enhance the oddness of the scene, nor does their blackness point to the theological complexity of interpreting colour. Their blackness simply is.

The African, no longer depicted purely as a religious subject, became real; they took on flesh for the first time in the Western consciousness.  This is not to say that Africa and the African did not hold an important place in the European theological imagination before the sixteenth century, but it is to say their role in the social imagination of Europe changed drastically after becoming an integral part of the material life in Europe. What’s more, the birth of the non-religious subject within the Low Countries, while not abandoning beauty, acknowledges that it can only be sought (and experienced) in relative ways. It is only natural, then, that the African became a way to explore the beauty of people made in the image of God, while also allowing artists to explore the relative beauty between Europeans and Africans (even if black was often categorized as an aberration that required justification and defending since white—fairness—was the default).

The innovation of the African as a non-religious subject—not yet limited to a form of exotic Orientalism but no longer restricted to a role that fulfills religious eschatology—forced the Western artist to reconcile opposites. The African’s increasing association with slavery in the seventeenth century had to be reconciled with the realness, the materiality, of Africans whom white European artists had encountered and known. The black subject was clothed in the flesh of artistic variation as the Dutch and Flemish worked out the role of real Africans in their social lives. For instance, the African could become Pieter Brueghel’s peasants, mythic subjects supporting a drunken Silenus; or they could be “accessories” who act as a garnish, illuminating the beauty and wealth of the white subject. Anthony van Dyck’s Anthony Gage with Two Men is a wonderful example of this ambivalence. The painting shows Anthony Gage (an Englishman, presumably on the left), who haggles with an art dealer for a sculpture; he is accompanied by an African (slave or servant?) who is hidden by the shadows, comically pointing to the item in question as if the deal is closed. The interesting mix of a comic gesture and the uncertainty of the status of the African gives modern viewers a glimpse into a society that is having difficulty finding the distinction between real and imagined roles of Africans.

Africans became a popular addition to many of these non-religious artistic subjects. Their countries (although often categorized as far-flung and exotic), their new roles within European society, their black skin against the shadows were readily integrated into the new traditions that began near the end of the Renaissance and were further explored during the Baroque. The African was both flesh and fiction, both manner and matter, a seductive shadow that pulled the eyes of the viewer to details otherwise ignored.  The complicated roles of real Africans in Low Countries further testify to this paradox where the black exists between both paradigms.

The African occupied a golden space within art from the so-called golden age of the Netherlands, but the African’s function within early modern art in the Low Countries is as idealistic and as fleeting as the vision they cultivated of themselves. As they became increasingly associated with slavery, the African’s role within European society began to embody that of a shadow; their roles as slaves, stable hands, or gondoliers were indispensable, but this indispensability was precarious at best. As time went on, the African functioned more and more as an accessory to the white subject, as a way for artists to show off their technique; pushed into shadow, the complicated reality they embodied was smoothed over and served rather to illuminate the centrality of whiteness.

The “golden age” of the African’s complexity in artwork from the Low Countries waned as the seventeenth century ended and as European racial thought became more centralized. The complexity of the image of the African would be swallowed whole, not only by treatises that justified African inferiority and slavery during the Enlightenment, but also by artwork that erased this complexity. This is the contradiction inherent in the enslavement of people made in the image of God—the justification of the subhuman position of the African meant artists must efface any images contrary to slavery. The African became like a ghost, or more acutely an unwanted guest, consistently complicating the reality of their roles within the Low Countries and the pictorial representations of them.

Embracing Complexity

I grew up in a neighbourhood on the west side of Chicago called Austin. My neighbours were black, the store owners were either Korean, Chinese, or Middle Eastern, and most of my grammar-school teachers were white. I grew up poor: my family has always received government aid and still does; I shopped at the thrift store; my caregivers worked forty-plus hours per week; I shared a room with three of my sisters. I did not know why I always had to do without, why I couldn’t always have nice clothes, why I didn’t have my own space. I knew, even at twelve, that nobody should have to endure what I did. The rich kids in Oak Park (a neighbouring suburb) didn’t have to, so why should I? Why was life so hard if this country was the land of the free and the home of the brave?

It was a façade. I could sense that even as a child. I knew it when the teachers went on strike because they didn’t have enough supplies. I knew it when Chicago shut down fifty public schools, forcing me into chaotic new situations with unfamiliar students. How would twelve-year-old Dontay have been affected if a teacher had told me, “The story of this continent is one that is stranger than fiction. It is a brutal history that is a by-product of a history that twists and turns like a river”? But what twelve-year-old Dontay felt was never put into that larger context. I was told only that the “freedom” this country allowed also meant I had the freedom to choose not to be angry, not to take these things personally.

I proposed at the outset that a study of the different functions of the African within premodern art from the Low Countries might serve as a tonic to the disparate and short-sighted narratives of race at play in my upbringing. But that’s not quite accurate. While the exploration of the African’s role in artworks in the Low Countries can help situate blackness relative to the longue durée study of the history of blackness and race, there is much yet to reconstruct in terms of the Dutch role in premodern race-making. As I’ve learned that blackness is a phenomenological, ontological, and trans-historical category that cannot be reduced solely to colonialist dynamics, I have also been unable to deny how pivotal Dutch colonial enterprise in Africa and the Americas has been in its construction. The reassurance I expected while watching Hidden Colors or reading Alexander Crummell would not be found in reconstructing a mythical origin of my people’s history in Europe, nor in viewing the origin of my Africanness as inseparable from European colonialism. This reassurance can only be realized by one’s understanding of the complex origins of European racial thought, then the subsequent deconstruction of the economic and socio-cultural systems that further perpetuate those beliefs.

Can there be a sole origin of European racial thought? No. But by looking at its effects we may be able to discover characteristics that are essential for its maintenance and, by extension, better situate harmful constructions of blackness in the present. What Hidden Colors and works like it look for is a way to counteract an essential effect of European racial thought: the dislocation of the black body. Dislocation is at the centre of being black in the Americas; we exist as interlopers between various worlds, between various histories.  This reality means we are tethered not just to slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism but also to the rich histories of West and central Africa, which predate direct European intervention. Works like Hidden Colors attempt to erase this quality, this double-consciousness. They are an attempt to circumnavigate the nasty parts of history by creating myths like the “civilizing Moors.”

As I have explored the Dutch Empire’s role in colonial expansion, I have embraced the endeavour to (re-)subjectivize the African subject. I have inhabited a dual dream: I dream of the Dutch forts on the Guinea Coast, the Africans who traded with them, who were stolen by them, who married them, and who were killed by them. I dream also of their lives before the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the Germans forced their way to the Guinea Coast. This tension between the historical complexity of pre-colonial West and central Africa and its history during and after colonization is so often missing. The black in America must sit between both realities, both of which are greatly affected by the Dutch Empire and its construction of blackness as both flesh and fiction.