Visualizing Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, 16th-19th centuries Court Room (1st Floor), Senate House, London, 29-30 May 2018

Recent years have witnessed a rich wave of scholarship examining representations of Blackness in the visual cultures of the Atlantic world. This avenue of enquiry is particularly germane to Latin America and the Caribbean, home to the world’s largest African diasporic populations. Whilst the theme of black people’s invisibility is deeply inscribed in both the history and scholarship of the region, the study of visual and material culture presents new avenues for understanding both the complexities of the black experience, and the ways in which notions of Blackness and peoples of African descent have indelibly shaped the cultures and societies of Latin America and the Caribbean. We use Blackness in its broadest sense, encompassing its hegemonic configuration as a signifier of difference, its articulation as a largely fluid category across Latin America and the Caribbean, and its transformative capacity through acts of agency, self-fashioning and political and cultural resistance.

This conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working across the fields of visual and material culture, art history, cultural studies and history to explore the multiplicity of meanings ascribed to Blackness across the region; from early modern, colonial conceptions rooted in lineage and bloodlines, to the pseudo-scientific construction of race as an immutable, material and biological ‘fact’ in the 19th century. The aim is to explore the myriad ways in which Blackness is configured and remade, through representations of Afro-descendants in the visual arts, and the production and use of material culture in black self-fashioning and collective identities.

Convenors: Helen Melling (ILAS) & Kathryn Santner (ILAS)

Sponsored by the Institute of Latin American Studies and the Cassal Trust

Andrés Sánchez Galque.Los tres mulatos de Esmeraldas, Quito, 1599

Tuesday 29th May 2018

1000 – 1015: Registration

1015 – 1130: Panel 1: Mapping Regions

• Roberto Conduru (Southern Methodist University), (Re)Creating Afro-Brazilian through quilombos and its maps

• Nancy Appelbaum (SUNY, Binghamton), Visualizing black granadinos in the 1850s: The Chorographic Commission of Colombia

• Jennifer Jolly (Ithaca College), Rethinking Mexico's Racialized Geography: Seeing Afro-Mexicans in Michoacan

1130 – 1145: Coffee break

1145 – 1315: Keynote: Alejandro de la Fuente (Harvard University)

1315 – 1400: Lunch

1400 – 1530: Panel 2: Independence & Nation Building

• Luisa Arrieta (University of Connecticut), Painting the Ideal Citizen: Blackness and Nation-building in Colombia's National Museum, 1880-1886.

• Carrie Gibson (Independent scholar), Imagining black republics: Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico c. 1898-1915

• Paul Clammer (Independent scholar), Henry Christophe's State Coach: Conspicuous consumption in the Kingdom of Haiti.

• Alejandro Gomez (Universite Paris III), The "horrors" of St. Domingue: Images, Narratives, and Translations

1530 – 1545: Coffee break

1545 – 1700: Panel 3: Black Invisibility

• Claudia Garay Molina (UNAM), From caste to class: The oblivion of the black population in nineteenth-century Mexican art

• Helen Melling (ILAS), Colonial Legacies and Black Citizenship in 19th Century Peruvian Photography

• Juan Manuel Ramírez Velázquez (Washington University in St. Louis), [Re]Construyendo el ideal colonial español a través del teatro bufo cubano del siglo XIX

1700 – 1705: Break

1705 – 1820: Panel 4: Portraiture

• Beatriz E. Balanta (Southern Methodist University), Making of a Paper Hero: Portraiture and Blackness in Mid-Nineteenth Century Brazil

• Sonia Labrador-Rodríguez (New College of Florida), The Body in the Image: Slavery in Printed Discourse in Cuba

• María de Lourdes Ghidoli (GEALA Intitutio Ravignani-UBA), Afro-Porteñoa, 1881: Biographies and portraits between progress and affection

1820: Reception

Wednesday 30th May 2018

1000 – 1115: Panel 5: Colonial Subjects and Subjectivity

• Elena FitzPatrick Sifford (Louisiana State University), "Among the Spaniards Came Blacks": Mexican Manuscripts and the First Images of Africans in the Americas

• Ana María Silva (University of Michigan), Threatening Fortunes: Women of African Descent, Their Property, and the Inquisition of Cartagena

• Angélica María Sánchez Barona (Harvard University), Alterity, Scientific Racism and Pigments: Coloring Black Women in Nueva Granada, 18th Century

1115 – 1130: Coffee

1130 – 1245: Keynote: Tamara J. Walker (University of Toronto)

1245 – 1345: Lunch

1345 – 1500: Panel 6: Religious Culture

• Larissa Brewer-Garcia (University of Chicago), Visualizing the Mulato Saint: Hierarchy and Holiness in the Engravings of Martín de Porres

• Ximena Gomez (University of Michigan), Collecting and agency in Lima's Confraternity of La Antigua

• Jennifer Baez (Florida State University), Black Bodies on Record for the Altagracia Cult of Hispaniola

Closing Remarks

Registration, including lunch and refreshments:

• General - £30 • Student - £15