Making Race in Early American Art and Maps - Andrew Gu
What is race? How does a person come to see intelligence, virtue, or faith written on another person's skin? The answers lie in the fact that human beings need to learn how to think in terms of race. The maps of early American colonization let us glimpse ideas formed during a collision of continents, when human beings from opposite sides of the Atlantic first attempted to understand—and exploit—one another. Their caricatures and convenient omissions paint a picture not of clear racial categories but of a world in which Europeans and Americans alike constructed ”race” using gender, lifestyle, and other categories of difference. This exhibit was initially created for the California Map Society 2024 summer conference on June 29, 2024. You can follow the exhibit story used for the CMS presentation by clicking the green circle with a 1 above this description.
