Essay response should be at least 1 page for each prompt 1) In the assigned readings, Kenneth L. Ames, “Death in the Dining Room,” from Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992) and Debora Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism,” in West 86th, vol. 18, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2011), nineteenth-century sideboards and Art Nouveau architecture and design can and should be interpreted as nonverbal texts insisting upon a contemporary re-examination. Historian Kenneth Ames conveys to the reader the notion that these hulking examples of Victorian furniture, aka sideboards, strike us today as peculiar— as symbols of “alimentary imperialism” and as sort of quasi altars to the dominance of humankind over beast. In art historian Debora Silverman’s article, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness,” we read about a different version of imperialism or colonialism and the conjectured complicity of artist and architects in the aesthetic promotion of the gains of national conquest. In your own words, describe the message these “nonverbal texts,” as embodied in sideboards and Art Nouveau design, projected to viewers and consumers in the past. What do both Ames and Silverman argue these objects and designs represented and or symbolized? Do you agree or disagree with their claims and why?