Public Programs @ The Institute

Series: Conversations in Modern European Art

Africaneries, or, Stylistic Dismemberment

Wednesday, April 22, 2026, 6:00pm

Anne Lafont , art historian and professor at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris (EHESS)

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The European Enlightenment invented a new exoticism from within the Rococo tradition. Informed by the craftsmanship, lines, and colors of the Far East, European artisans appropriated motifs, imitated them, and revived them in contexts of refined metropolitan luxury. A geography of taste thus emerged—one might even speak of a qualitative hierarchy of stylistic skills operating at the peripheries of European empires, which served as major suppliers of materials and decorative schemes for the applied arts in eighteenth-century Delft, Meissen, London, and Paris. At the heart of this cultural economy of sophisticated objects, one motif stands out: miniaturized and, in most cases, objectified Black figures. These are what I propose to call Africaneries—artworks whose cultural roots and formal qualities dissolved in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, which accelerated the social and cultural death of Africans. My central question is this: how was the thread severed that once connected so-called African fetishes to the material culture of Black people in the Americas and, ultimately, to the decorative objects known as “ au Nègre ” in imperial Europe? In this experimental study, I attempt to restore the connections between these various objects of the early modern Black Atlantic.

Anne Lafont is an art historian and professor at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris (EHESS). She is interested in material culture and aesthetics of the Black Atlantic and researches notion of African art in historiography. In 2019, she published a book entitled L'art et la Race. L'Africain (tout) contre l'œil des Lumières (to be published in English by the Getty Institute in 2027: Art and race. The African (up) against the Enlightenment’s Eye) and participated in the exhibition: Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse (Musée d'Orsay). In the academic year 2021-2022, she was Clark Professor in Williamstown (USA) and was awarded the Iris Foundation Award by the Bard Graduate Center for outstanding mid-career scholar. With François-Xavier Fauvelle, she co-edited the book L'Afrique et le monde. Histoires renouées de la préhistoire au XXIe siècle (La découverte, 2022). Her latest book is a collection of articles published in Brazil: A Arte dos mundos negros: historia, teoria, critica (Bazar do Tempo, 2023). She is now researching circulations of African objects in early modern Europe at the time of slavery as their presence and reception gave grounding to the conceptualization of fetishism in Western humanities (to be published in 2027). Another book in the making addresses how the Black Lives Matter movement specifically impacted the politics of French Heritage.