We like to keep history as we’ve learned it in a headlock, to make sure it doesn’t shift or change. They turn the world into a fixed field of safe-spots and blanks, an us-them weave of gates and fences. One of the many — many — benefits of much-maligned “wokeness” has been its message to relax the hold, toss the charts or, better, revise them: explore blanks, rethink fences. It’s thanks to this more free-breathing approach to history, including art history, that we’re getting a challenger of an exhibition like “Africa & Byzantium,” which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this Sunday. At the same time, as its title suggests, the show confuses — in a good way — certain expectations about who made what, and what came from where.

Source: The North Africa Journal November 16, 2023 14:57 UTC