Mackenzie Tor is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Missouri whose research focuses on Black intellectual history and political culture in the long nineteenth-century United States. Her work has been supported by institutions such as the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Antiquarian Society, the New England Fellowship Consortium, and the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture. Mackenzie is also interested in art and literary history and, in addition, serves as a Production Assistant for the forthcoming documentary film The Age of All Women: The Becoming of Younousse Seye.
On February 1, 1974, the Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil published a shocking headline: “Younousse’s Slashed Painting: A Simple Matter of Scissors.” According to the article, Senegalese artist Younousse Seye (b. 1940) discovered that her painting Mame Coumba Bang (n.d.) had been vandalized as she guided Ethiopian visitors around the second Salon des artistes sénégalais at…
