Books /Fondamenta /Venezia africana

Paul Kaplan

Shaul Bassi

Venezia africana

"African Venice" is the first guidebook to the extensive historical and contemporary African presence in the City of the Lagoons. A set of ten walking tours highlight images of Black people in Venetian art from the Middle Ages to the present, the afterlife of Shakespeare’s Othello, the painful local legacies of slavery and Italian colonialism, as well as the remarkable visibility of African and Afro-descendant artists artists at the Venice Biennale.

These tours are enriched by more than twenty essays, poems and reflections, which celebrate, question and reimagine Venice’s Black past and present. From medieval and Renaissance paintings and sculpture to contemporary artworks, from early modern documents to postcolonial voices, "African Venice" will show you the city as you have never seen it.

Biographical notes

Paul Kaplan is professor of art history at Purchase College, SUNY.

Author of The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (1985) and a major contributor to The Image of the Black in Western Art series at Harvard University Press (2010-2012), he was a Project Scholar for Speak of Me as I Am by Fred Wilson, an installation from the American Pavilion of the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Shaul Bassi è professore di letteratura inglese all’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia.
Le sue pubblicazioni includono Shakespeare in Venice. Luoghi, personaggi e incanti di una città che va in scena (con Alberto Toso Fei, 2007), Turbo Road. Il Kenya, i suoi scrittori, un bambino (2023) e Venezia e l’Antropocene (co-curatela, wetlands 2022). È co-fondatore del festival letterario internazionale Incroci di civiltà.

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