Full 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. 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.
Contents
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
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