Black and Gold: Transmutations of Metal and Modernity

For centuries, Africa has been the center of the global trade in gold. Synonymous with wealth and power in African cultures, this precious metal was also central to the emergence of Europe’s colonial empires and the contemporary world made in their wake. Black and gold have thus always been conjoined and yet set in opposition: blackness as negation, gold as universal standard of value. Black & Gold is a genealogy of this seeming contradiction—a global history of value told through episodes ...