Revealing the African Presence: Allegory of Africa

"In the 1600s, the focus of European attention shifted toward the Americas and Asia, while ever-increasing demands for cheap labor, especially in the American colonies, meant that slavery became specifically associated with black Africans as it had not been in the past. With familiarity, the exotic otherness of "Africa," her "astonishing novelty" so vividly highlighted in Martin de Vos's 1589 Allegory of Africa and its accompanying poem, becomes simply the "other" and more commonly subject to exploitation."

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, pg. 10

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