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. The term ‘Latinize’ is introduced to connect France’s early 19th-century endeavors to create “Latin America,” an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language based Spanish and Portuguese Americas, to its perception of this population.
Latin-American elites traveler to Paris in the 1840s from their newly independent nations were denigrated in representations rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, etched 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 turn-of-the-20th-century Black Latin Americans in Paris tempered their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Blacks from the Caribbean, and African Americans.
After identifying mid-to-late 19th-century Latinizing codes, the study focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890-1933 in 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 executed by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925-1933.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction The Term “Latin American” Why Paris? Much More Than Primitivism Reduced to Latin Americans Parisian Figurations of Blackness from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century Overview of the Study Chapter 1: Playing Up Blackness and Indianness; Downplaying Europeanness Editing Francisco Laso: Racializing Spanish and Portuguese Americans Performing Rastaquerismo Justified by Anthropology: Quatrefages, Hamy, and the Casta Paintings Latin American Self-Representation The Shifting Rastaquouère Maintaining Anthropological Interpretations in the Early Twentieth Century Conclusion Chapter 2: Chocolat the Clown: Not Just Black Chocolat and Footit: Partners in Contrast The Auguste Chocolat The Give and Take of Chocolat and Footit Chocolat and Footit at the Nouveau Cirque Chocolat as Brand Image Beneath the Surface Chocolat as Mixed Animal Chocolat the Contaminant Impure Chocolat(e) Chocolat, That Special Ingredient: The Racially Mixed Object of Desire Complicating Notions of Minstrelsy Lip Interventions Representations Through Clothing Sexualizing Black Dandies Assimilating the Latin Beyond the Circus Chocolat, Object of Gay Desire Chocolat and the Elite and the Virile Conclusion Chapter 3: Alfonso Teofilo Brown: Agency and Impositions of Blackness and Europeanness Sport and the Imagined Ideal Male Body Black Boxers in Turn-of-the-Century France Gangly Brown The Purity and Hybridity of Gangly Brown Brown the Gentleman Images of Black Difference Brown the Philanthropist Conclusion Chapter 4: Figari’s Blacks: Negotiating French and Southern Cone Blackness Figari and Paris Contested Whiteness and the Black Body Conceptualizing Regional Identity Through the Anthropological Gaze Candombe as Framing Device Gender and Race in Candombe Objects as Markers Figari as “Naïf” Painter Increasing Latin American Presence in Paris Perceptions of Black Uruguayans Figari’s Evolution in Paris Contradictions and Contrasts between Figari’s Paintings and Written Work Conclusion Coda Select Bibliography
Lyneise E. Williams is Associate Professor of Art History at UNC Chapel Hill, USA.
Reviews for Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932
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 *
