Ex Tenebris Black Fugitivity, Archival Whitewashing, and the (Re)imagination of Andromeda

Abstract

What happened to Black Andromeda? Why did Renaissance and post-Renaissance artists consistently portray Andromeda as a white woman despite Greco-Roman textual sources affirming her Ethiopian heritage? In what ways does reclaiming Andromeda’s Black roots incite contemporary conversations about representation and racial justice in art, iconography, and literature?

Drawing from Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial psychoanalytical theories in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), this paper interrogates the erasure of Andromeda’s Ethiopian identity in Western visual and literary traditions, tracing the transformation of a mythological Black princess into an archetype of European whiteness. From mapping the disregarded classical myths of Andromeda “from darkest Ethiopia,” as posited by mythographers such as Ovid, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder, the paper emphasizes how Andromeda’s African heritage was systematically erased and reduced to a "fugitive" element in both historical and contemporary artistic representations. By interrogating how Western archives, museums, and galleries perpetuate historical amnesia and racist ideologies by erasing non-white presences, it becomes imperative to challenge the ways in which gendered and racialized bodies may be marginalized, visually silenced, or rendered invisible altogether. Although this process gives rise to (pre-)modern modes of ethnic cleansing and erasure, equally important are the acts of resistance that emerge in the reception of such art and whitening phenomena. Accompanying the analysis is an original portrait drawn by L. Usanova that reimagines, re-edits, and reclaims Andromeda’s racial background according to her original mythos and literary-historical narrative. While the artwork aims to ‘do the practical work’ of uncovering the ‘white mask’ and participating in feminist (re-)editing praxes, the piece also serves as a direct intervention against Andromeda’s racial and aesthetic erasure by visually claiming a past, present, and future that asserts otherwise.