Photo illustration by Mark Riechers. Original images by Eugenio Mazzone and Jaël Vallée (CC0).
Kenyan literary scholar Simon Gikandi has spent decades studying what he calls "the unconscious" of books and paintings — the cultural artifacts of the past. He says you can’t understand the rise of European culture — or for that matter, the formation of the modern world — without also knowing how European thinkers demonized Africans and the very idea of "blackness."