The Black Image in 19th Century Latin America

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Abstract

This workshop will convene an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on the nineteenth-century, a defining period in the construction and circulation of the Black image in Latin America. It witnessed the emergence of re-calibrated social hierarchies thanks largely to the official rejection of colonial caste terminology and the frequently drawn out process towards the abolition of slavery. This period also produced paradigmatic visual representations rooted in a typology of Black subjects as subservient, immoral, exotic and picturesque. These stereotypes, as seen through the romantic and ethnographic gaze of both foreign and local artists, would go on to have a lasting currency through their widespread repetition and circulation via popular media. At the same time, Afro-Latin Americans contested these images with the aid of new visual technologies such as photography, which opened up the portraiture genre to the masses and were collectively bolstered by the rise of the Black press.

Sub Track

• Pre-conferences

Session Organizer

• Helen M Melling, Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Studies, London

Chair

• Carrie Gibson, Independent Scholar

Presenters

• Maria de Lourdes Ghidoli

• Lea N Geler, Universidad de Buenos Aires/CONICET

• Bruno Pinheiro

• Jerome C Branche, University of Pittsburgh

• Beatriz E Balanta, Southern Methodist University