Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America

Patton, Pamela A.

doi:10.1163/9789004302150

Cited by 4 publications

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“…10 Early efforts include studies of Mexican casta paintings as well as Emanoel Araújo's tireless efforts to center Black objects and narratives in Brazilian museum collections and displays. 11 Exhibition catalogues increasingly acknowledge the contribution of Black artists and African visual culture (Sullivan 2006;Bagneris 2013), and edited collections have added valuable breadth to the study and representation of race in this period (Patton 2015). Among the significant works produced is the re-edition of The image of the Black in Western art (Bindman and Gates, 2010), which will soon be joined by a companion volume dedicated to Latin America.…”

Section: Historiographic Currentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

Santner¹,

Melling

2021

Colonial Latin American Review

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As she lay dying in Lima's convent of La Trinidad in 1696, Tomasa Fernández Montejo, a black-veiled nun, made arrangements for the fates of the two enslaved women in her possession. 1 María Gregoria, a mulata aged four years, was granted liberty; Ysabel María, de casta conga, on the other hand, would be given to the two-year-old child Fernández Montejo was raising in her cell, for the remainder of the child's life. But before Ysabel could be 'free of all subjection and bondage,' she would have one final mistress: an image of the Virgin of Carmen housed in the convent's choir. Ysabel would be required to leave the convent for the streets of Lima to earn jornal until she amassed 300 pesos. These earnings were to be rendered to the nun in charge of the image, and used for the celebration of feast days. Most stunningly, any children that Ysabel might have during her years of servitude would be enslaved to the image as well.More than a century later, in March of 1812, José Antonio Aponte y Ulabarra, a free Black man working as a cabinet-maker and sculptor in Havana, was brought to trial to answer charges that he had incited a series of slave rebellions that had erupted at nearby sugar plantations. Central to the accusation levied against Aponte was a remarkable 'Book of Paintings' that he had created, a hybrid of painting and collage depicting imagined and historical landscapes populated with figures of mythology and biblical history, classical gods, and most significantly, swashbuckling figures of Black history along with Black saints, cardinals, priests, pilgrims, nuns, and battling Black armies. Aponte also included depictions of himself and his forebears and used the book as a didactic tool to instruct members of his community about a telling of history that centered and celebrated Africans and their descendants as protagonists. Though Aponte's 'Book of Paintings' has been lost, the trial record of his three-day interrogation has left us Aponte's ekphrasis of the images he created. After his testimony, Aponte was condemned to death and his body was made a grisly public display.The fates of Ysabel María and José Antonio Aponte demonstrate the often-fraught relationship between Afrodescendants and visually potent objects which could variously and simultaneously be tools of oppression and vehicles for the articulation of subjectivity. Ysabel María's story illustrates the brutal fact that religious statues were conferred with greater agency than human beings. As scholars we long to know how Ysabel María regarded the Virgin to whom she was in bondage, a position that may have come with a certain amount of prestige and latitude. Aponte's 'Book of Paintings' not only visualized Black sovereignty and presented it as a historical fact to Black habaneros, it also

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Section: Historiographic Currentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

Santner¹,

Melling

2021

Colonial Latin American Review

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“…After centuries of interaction among people of varying ancestry in Latin America, by the eighteenth century in an attempt to prevent further genetic co-mingling, rigid rules emerged that governed coupling practices. However, in the balance, the reality was that people of mixed backgrounds had, by then, become the majority, making painters, trades people, clergy, missionaries, and most government functionaries neither Spanish nor castizo, and not born in Spain (for a more fulsome discussion, see Patton (2015); also worthwhile is the critique of mestizo and other racial categories offered in Rappaport (2014)). As a result, the manufacture of goods such as paint, or the erection of a façade or retable, involved the hands of people possessing multiple and sometimes intersecting identities who were more often than not part of a marginalized majority.…”

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confidence: 99%

Latin American Art, Visual and Material Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Introduction

Beck

Robin

2021

Arts

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Colonial Carpenters: Construction, Race, and Agency in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the 16th and 17th Centuries

Mamani Fuentes

2023

Arts

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This article examines colonial documents to shed light on the presence of non-white carpenters in the carpentry trade during the first two centuries of Spanish colonial rule in Peru. It first offers a general definition of carpentry work during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then explores the specific environments in which Indigenous, black, and mixed-race carpenters carried out their activities. Through this analysis, it becomes evident that the agency of non-white individuals and groups in the carpentry trade was shaped by the diverse labor systems that predominated in colonial society.

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Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

Latin American Art, Visual and Material Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Introduction

Colonial Carpenters: Construction, Race, and Agency in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the 16th and 17th Centuries

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