Plantation Imaginaries: Art and Medicine in the Colonial World

Anna Arabindon Kesson (Princeton University)

Kesson’s lecture discusses the representation of plantations in nineteenth-century British colonial art. It explores the importance of these spaces as sites where medical and artistic knowledge could be produced and considers how contemporary artists work with these histories to imagine new forms of care for each other and the environments in which we live. This Syracuse Symposium event is hosted by African American Studies and Art and Music Histories.

This event is part of the Syracuse University Humanities Center’s 20th annual Syracuse Symposium, focused on a “Landscapes” theme for 2023-2024.

---

About the presenter…

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Born in Sri Lanka, she practiced as a Registered Nurse before completing her PhD in African American Studies and Art History. Her research and teaching focus on African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, medicine, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century. Her first book is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021). Her second single authored monograph focusing on plantation landscapes and medicine is also under contract with Duke University Press. She was the 2022-23 Terra Foundation Rome Prize Fellow, and is the Senior Research Fellow of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the director of the digital humanities project Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism.

Learn more