Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Description

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 examines an understudied visual language used to portray Latin Americans in mid-19th to early 20th-century Parisian popular visual media. It charts how the term "Latinize" was introduced to connect France's early 19th-century endeavors to create Latin America-an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language speaking Spanish and Portuguese Americas-to its perception of the people who lived there. Elites who traveled to Paris from their newly independent nations in the 1840s were denigrated in visual media, rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, brushed onto images of Latin Americans of European descent, mitigated their ability to claim the privileges of their ancestral heritage; whitened skin, among other codes, imposed on depictions of Black Latin Americans denied their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Black people from the Caribbean, and African Americans. In addition to identifying 19th-century Latinizing codes, this book focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890 and 1933 through three case studies: the depictions of popular Cuban circus entertainer Chocolat; representations of Panamanian World Bantamweight Champion boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown; and paintings of Black Uruguayans created by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925 and 1933.

Lyneise E. Williams is Associate Professor of Art History at UNC Chapel Hill, USA.

Lyneise E. Williams makes an insightful contribution to the limited art historical scholarship on the representation of Black Latin Americans in Parisian visual media. * Early Popular Visual Culture * Lyneise E. Williams uses the city of Paris to analyze the evolution of the Western representation of Afro-Latinos, who became more and more present in the French landscape at the end of the 19th century because of the colonies in African and the Caribbean, among others. The author analyzes how this presence was received and studies the influence of the latter on the vision that Westerners had of foreigners, returning to the figures of Alfonso Teofilo Brown, Pedro Figari and Rafael Padilla. The complex subjects of race and representation are addressed here by the through an approach that is both historical and contemporary, making it possible to understand the discrimination observed in Parisian visual culture, in art, but also in the business world, with communication tools loaded with socially accepted racism. * Critique d'art * Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 is intellectually ambitious, providing a clear, readable, and well-researched view of a subject almost completely missing from the art historical literature on Parisian modernism: the representation of Black Latin Americans. This book thus crucially adds to a vital literature within modernism studies that considers the relationship of French culture-roughly the center of the art world in the modernist period-to colonized Africa and the African Diaspora. Williams takes up complex subjects of race and racial categories with elegance and clarity, and her acute discussions of particular works anchor these more general discussions in visual immediacy. Starting with a highly engaging consideration of representations of Latinized Blackness, she establishes a clear baseline of assumptions about this hybrid group-and Latin Americans in general-in French popular culture and modernist art. -- Patricia Leighten, Professor Emerita, Duke University, USA