Final Blog

In my previous blog posts, I have talked about how Ottoman empire did not discriminate between races and how every single person was offered roughly the same opportunities to succeed, at least in the military. Furthermore, I talked about how Ottoman Military would not be able to practice discrimination practices because how spread the country was. I also highlighted that in the artwork I presented in my previous posts Caucasian man was possibly less prestigious or respected than an African man because of his clothes or his weapon. Therefore, the point that I was trying to make was that Ottoman Empire was not in a position to discriminate between people because its location created an environment in which black and white men were force to live together, which means that they learned how live together, and knowing that there were dark skinned humans did not threaten ottoman civilians. In this blog post, I will try to examine my peers works and try to highlight similarities that were important to me.


After reading all of the posts that my peers have produced, one thing is clear; almost all of the artwork created during colonization era conveyed the conflicting cultural and physical differences Europeans and Africans had through military conflict and/or international trade. Almost all of the posts reveal that Europeans who traveled to Africa during the era of colonization were surprised by the existence of men that were complete opposite to European appearance.  Furthermore, most of my peers posts revolved around how European people treated or viewed Africans. Given that slave trade was common in colonized world, it is safe to assume that lot of the Africans were not treated fairly by the Europeans. However, as my peers' post convey, there are vast amount of friendly and/or forced but good interaction between Europeans and Africans. During colonization, African countries and European nations traded among each other. Such activities made Europeans interested in people that were complete opposite to them. Artistic work that was produced in colonized world represented the cultural implications that trading with African nations had. In Portrait of the Duchess of Portsmouth (1682), the artist tries to convey the relationship between the royalty white European woman, and an African slave. However, contrary to the opposite believes it is in a friendly manner. All of the posts highlight that African culture had significant effects on the European culture at the time because European people were interested in different cultures. On the other hand, my personal take away from the posts is that European people felt threatened by the African culture and the people and that is the reason that European people tried to suppress or degrade African communities. As Cecelia pointed out in her third post, trade was a big factor in cultural exchange between African and European nations. If we dig deep and try to read between the lines of every post, we see that there is cultural interaction between African and European people mostly because of the trade that they were involved in. Furthermore, almost in every post, I can see that there were certain amounts of surprise element among European people. African art, shapes or the African way of presenting themselves was very strange to European cultures, which lead them to take these artworks or habits back to their own country to present it as a gift of their bravery to explore far away lands. In Portrait of a Man in Armor with Two Pages, we can see that African male is holding an armor for the European soldier and he is doing it with a great pride. This picture is a representation that there were certain admiration elements within European people towards African societies. In his post, Shane talks about how the artist of the work paid great attention to portraying this exotic African male in the picture, and Shane also highlights that the older European man in the picture put lot of effort into the process to make sure that African child was under his official employ not his slave.


All in all, all of my peers’ posts talked about the cultural interaction between African and European communities. Further, these interactions were conducted in a way that European people were in charge. However, all of my peers pointed out that there was a certain amount of sympathy towards the African culture among Europeans, and despite the atrocities that happened because of unfortunate circumstances, African culture, and art greatly affected the European artistic style as well as daily life.