A series of features guest-curated by Mike Phillips for the British Library Online Gallery.
Popular versions of history have all too often airbrushed out the contribution of non-Europeans to Western arts and sciences. In recent years, however, scholars have begun to challenge the idea that race or ethnicity is a barrier which can stop individuals from participating in any culture they choose. In Europe this has encouraged a new drive to explore and understand the hidden or ignored contribution of people of African descent to the mainstream of European culture and society.
The figures featured in Black Europeans – Alexander Pushkin, Alexandre Dumas, George Polgreen Bridgetower, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and John Archer – all have a mixed European and African ancestry. Although they were fully conscious of their mixed backgrounds, they also regarded themselves as part of a European nation, and thought of their work as a contribution to their own sector of the culture of Europe and the world. And they were all figures whose public image and whose activities have been generally accepted (both by their contemporaries and by later generations) to be an important part of Europe’s cultural heritage – to the point where most people ignore, or have forgotten about, the ‘black’ element of their identity and its significance in their lives and work. [George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor are profiled at AfriClassical.com]
Online GalleryBlack Europeans
British Library
George Bridgetower
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Black History
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