Oliver Wunsch, The Aesthetic Redemption of the Black Body in Eighteenth-Century France Art History 48:1
In his essay, Oliver Wunsch adeptly demonstrates “how the differing goals of artists and philosophers yielded divergent forms of engagement with Blackness”. Wunsch argues that the aesthetic aims of painters, focused on producing ‘visual pleasure’, introduce a disjuncture between a social discourse that would at times marginalize or demean Black subjects and the formal qualities involved in capturing Blackness. Wunsch calls this phenomenon the ‘aesthetic redemption’ of the Black body. Wunsch wonderfully captures of the uniqueness of painting as a discursive field.
“Wunsch’s article, which complicates ‘the dichotomy of artistic humanisation and stereotypical objectification’ in curatorial assessments of eighteenth-century portraits of Black subjects, is valuable (essential?) reading for anyone interested in visual art, aesthetic theory, natural philosophy, historiography, and exhibition curation.”
Honorable Mention:
Jacob Myers, “Keeping the Rat-Book: Marly and Visceral Histories of Jamaican Agriculture.”(Early American Literature, Volume 60, Number 1, 2025, pp. 21-41)