Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

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 connected that past to the possibility of Black self-rule in the future, a deeply threatening undertaking in colonial Cuba. For colonial Afrodescendants, both free and in bondage, visual objects could operate much as they did for the wider colonial populace, inspiring devotion, transmitting knowledge, spreading propaganda, but the stakes were undeniably higher for subaltern groups who were themselves rarely deemed ‘visualizable’ in conventional art forms. Images could impose the imperial gaze and enforce some of the most devastating consequences of colonialism: for Ysabel and her children, enslavement, and for Aponte, execution.

Aponte remains an emblematic figure for ‘Visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America’ (and indeed the subject of one of its essays). His ‘Book of Paintings’ invites us to consider the man behind it, his intellectual preoccupations, political ambitions, religious affiliations, and philosophical leanings; in short, the text demonstrates the intensely complicated subjectivity of a category of colonial Latin Americans long confined to the margins of written history. In the wake of a wave of scholarship increasingly concerned with free and enslaved Afrodescendants as historical actors and agents, Aponte prompts us to imagine how this work might advance by considering the visual, the material, and the ephemeral. How, for example, can scholarship on colonial Latin American visual culture shift attention to ‘a more elusive archive,’ one that includes Afro-Latin American material culture and ways of seeing (Wood 2013, 19)? How can we best attend to the myriad issues of recovery, loss, and the visual denigration of Afrodescendant personhood implicit in this work? How can scholars be committed to recovering and foregrounding Black subjectivities while also remaining attentive to the ways that Blackness was encoded and imposed by non-Black actors?² Some essays respond to these calls directly, engaging with lost objects both domestic and sacred, prompting us to consider alternate ways of conceptualizing their creation and mobilization. Others probe the matter of visibility, examining works which challenge portraiture’s dominant conventions of white representation and legibility, and the role of Blackness, whiteness, and Creole self-fashioning in religious portraits.

Historiographic currents

The contributions in this special issue build on an efflorescence of wider scholarship within history and (Afro-)Latin American studies since the 1990s. Much of the work produced in the last three decades has sought to recover the agency of Africans and their descendants within structures of slavery, racial hierarchies and colonial institutions.³ A broadening of sources, inspired in part by the efforts of ethnographers and ethnohistorians, and the use of methodological tools like microhistory, have allowed scholars to weave narratives around individuals and communities ‘within but not entirely defined by slavery’ (O’Toole 2013).⁴

Likewise, an increased focus on cultural forms has given rise to a surge of scholarship demonstrating the survival and reconfiguration of African kinship networks, musical forms, and religious beliefs in the Americas.⁵ Efforts to identify Black subjectivities have also resulted in explorations of social identities, networks, and spaces, as well as alternate forms of political organization.⁶ Research on the interaction of race and gender has also made significant contributions to our understanding of family, affect, and interpersonal relationships within and across race in the slave societies of the Americas.⁷ Another strand of scholarship within historical and literary studies has sought to uncover African-inflected ways of knowing and the contributions of Africans and their descendants to colonial networks of knowledge.⁸

While visual culture has often supplemented historical and literary studies, often as evidence of life under colonialism, fewer works have taken art history and the visual as central categories of analysis. At the same time, scholarship on race within Latin American art history has often focused on questions of indigeneity and the survival of indigenous visual idioms, artistic techniques, and cultural practices.⁹ In spite of their omission from scholarly narratives, artists and artisans of African descent predominated in the societies of the colonial Iberian Americas, particularly in Brazil and Cuba.

While visual studies remain thin in comparison to historical works, recent years have borne witness to a burgeoning raft of art historical scholarship on Africans and their descendants in Latin America and the Atlantic world more broadly.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.

Accompanying these landmark publications are numerous digital humanities projects and museum exhibitions dedicated to Afro-Atlantic histories, and visual and material cultures.¹² At the same time, calls and efforts to decolonize galleries, museums, and curatorial practice have grown louder, emphasizing the need to move beyond ‘inclusion’ towards a fundamental reconfiguration of art history and its institutions. Amid these conversations, museums are reckoning with the legacies of colonialism and slavery that enable their existence. New practices of display seek to lay bare these connections through wall text and exhibitions have begun to offer polyphonous interpretations by curators, academics, contemporary artists and activists rather than single ‘official’ narratives.¹³ Other displays have responded directly to the loss and erasure of Black historical figures from the visual archive; hanging an empty frame to represent a lost portrait or commissioning imagined portraits from contemporary artists.¹⁴ In addition to serving as meditations on absence, these creative inclusions allow formerly invisible subjects to be incorporated into historical narratives from which they had been previously omitted (Pedrosa et al. 2018, 244). Through efforts such as these, art history may come to transcend its position as ‘the most powerful and enduring apparatus of imperialism and colonization’ (idem, 32).

In spite of these efforts, the legacy of colonial visuality endures in the majority of scholarship which ‘still suggests that the Black body was the most stigmatized visual ‘type’ in viceregal societies, associating it with captivity, servitude, monstrosity, barbaric idolatry, and sin’ (Brewer-García 2015, 123). The subordination of Black figures in colonial Latin American artworks—when they appear at all—therefore makes the value of such objects for understanding the lives of Africans and their descendants necessarily fraught (Copeland and Thompson 2011; Walker 2017b). As Saidiya Hartman (1997) observed, in the case of enslaved persons, archival traces constitute ‘scenes of subjection’ and therefore demand cautious and critical engagement. The visual subjection and erasure of Afrodescendants is compounded by the dual challenges of archival lacunae and the loss of visual and material culture produced by Africans and their descendants, including ritual objects and artifacts produced and used to cope with enslavement. Unlike the decorative arts of Asia, African objects were never imported to the Americas as luxury goods, and have left less conspicuous imprints on Latin American material culture (Sullivan 2006). Nevertheless, the prevalence of Afrodescendant artists and craftsmen in colonial societies means that traditional African techniques and aesthetics necessarily contributed to the form and function of colonial visual and material objects, though not always in ways that are readily identifiable (de la Fuente 2018). Scholars cannot, however, be satisfied in examining only those objects that present as recognizably ‘hybrid’ or African-inflected (Dean and Leibsohn 2003). To do so calls into question what are recognized as ‘African’ characteristics and runs the risk of essentialism in searching for these traces in colonial visual culture.

In confronting these challenges, art historians have turned to methods advanced by those such as Hartman to overcome the limits of the colonial archive, in which we include the corpus of visual objects depicting Black and non-Black subjects alike. These strategies involve more creative and speculative readings of evidence from often fragmentary documents and nonextant objects to produce histories ‘with and against the archive’ (Hartman 1997; 2008) and analyses of artworks that go ‘over and against the artist’s intentions and procedures’ (Lara 2002). New methodologies and the identification of additional sources may in turn enable us to more readily identify the influence of African visual idioms and artistic techniques on the production of elite and popular art forms (Conduru 2012, 357–58). In alignment with Atlantic history and diaspora studies, art historians are increasingly attending to the cultural, religious, and artistic traditions of the West African groups from which Latin America’s Black populations originated.¹⁵

Comparative frameworks have also proved fruitful, as in Marcus Wood’s examination of North American and Brazilian visual culture (2013), enabling scholars of visual and material culture to make use of the relatively expansive body of scholarship on the United States. Examining depictions of Black figures by members of Latin America’s indigenous groups may also serve as a means of accessing subaltern perspectives on race and identity.¹⁶ Others like Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011) are interrogating the nature of colonial visual regimes and their discontents, both within the Spanish empire and across the Atlantic World more broadly. Scholars searching for subaltern visual strategies, employed not simply in artistic creation but in the process of viewing itself, have offered new ways to conceptualize these relationships; among them is what Matthew Rarey terms ‘counterwitnessing’ (‘a willingly rebellious act of spectatorship that actively undermines the ways in which one has been trained to look’ [2015, 72]), and investigating its use as a political and visual strategy.

Religion and material culture

Religion has been one of the most productive means of interrogating the relationship between visual culture and race. Recent publications on black-skinned Madonnas and Christs throughout the Hispanic world (Favrot Peterson 2012; 2014; FitzPatrick Sifford 2014) have successfully countered and complicated the notion of Black skin as necessarily stigmatized.¹⁷ Other scholars have used images of Black saints and the Black magus to interrogate how concepts of Blackness and sanctity were rendered visually and rhetorically, most recently Rowe (2019).¹⁸ These studies simultaneously demonstrate how Blackness was constituted from without by hagiographies and evidence how Black saints were mobilized by Afrodescendant and white creole populations, subjects addressed in this issue by both Brewer-García and Valerio.

Research on Black ritual practice, including magical, medicinal, and religious practices, has revealed the plurality of traditions practitioners engaged with, which included not only Bantu, Aja-Fon, or Yoruba elements but also Indigenous, Catholic, and Islamic practices (Bristol 2007; Villa-Flores 2005; Sweet 2011; Spaulding 2019).¹⁹ Greater awareness of this interplay has informed recent scholarship on corporate religious groups like confraternities which increasingly addresses visual and performative aspects (Fromont 2014; 2019). This work coincides with an acknowledgement of and attention to the long history and distinct traditions of African Catholicism, which long predated the slave trade, and its influence on devotion in the Americas (Fromont 2014; 2019). As noted by Erin Rowe, recognizing the participation of Africans and their descendants in the ‘co-creation’ of colonial Latin American devotional culture enables a reconsideration of the development of early modern global Catholicism (2019).

At the same time, growing interest in domestic contexts may help illuminate the nature of individual religious expression and the relationships of Afrodescendants to sacred art. Of particular interest to art historians have been sculptural works (including santos) and their connections to orishas/orixás, voduns, minkisi, and other spirit entities (Soulodre-La France 2008; see also Gómez, this issue). Other scholars have examined the ex-votos (Bercht et al. 1989), saint stones (Sansi-Roca 2005), graphic writing (Martínez-Ruiz 2013) and domestic altars and oratories (Thompson 1993; Gutierrez and Ávila 1999) used by Afro-Brazilians in their religious and ritual practices.

Studies of material culture, including these ritual objects, therefore have the potential to uncover Afrodescendant subjectivities in ways that examination of more elite visual forms cannot. A significant strand of this scholarship has focused on clothing worn by Afrodescendants as a strategic cultural practice mobilized to claim status and take advantage of the manifestly visual nature of colonial racial categories (Lara 1997; Earle 2003; Walker 2017a). Scholars are now turning their attention directly to the textiles and jewelry worn by men and women of African descent to examine the continuities of African forms and patterns in the New World (Lody 1988; 2004). A notable example lies in mandingas, fabric ritual pouches containing a variety of spiritually charged materials worn by Afrobrazilian men and women. While Buono (2015) suggests that these objects have been overlooked in scholarship because of their hidden ‘artistic’ elements, Rarey (2018, 21) argues that the very qualities of ‘indecipherability and visual banality […] were their core aesthetic strategies’ and were deployed by their wearers as a response to violence and shifting colonial conditions. Like African trade beads, mandingas have unique African and Islamic valences that combine with Catholic signification to produce meaning (Lody 2004) that is both overt and concealed. The aesthetic density (syndesis) of these objects relies on layered references and meanings only fully evident to the individuals creating and mobilizing them.²⁰ Sensitive readings of ritual objects and their use are critical in transcending narratives found in colonial archives intended to record and punish deviance, exposing processes of transculturation, and giving insights into the sensibilities and preoccupations of the figures who used them.

In spite of their potential to reveal subjectivity, few ritual and decorative objects have survived; indeed, many were intended to be ephemeral. One answer to this loss and fragmentation has been to frame the study of material culture from a contemporary vantage point to examine a continuous history of use, whether African trade beads (Wood 2016) or Afro-Brazilian ex-votos. Doing so can shed light on, for example, the degree of collaboration between an artisan and a client in the creation of a milagre (ex-voto) (Bercht et al. 1989, 20), transforming the way we consider artistic agency. Gómez’s essay in this issue takes up this methodological tack by examining the production and mobilization of modern statues from Senegal and Guinea-Bissau for clues about engagement with early Afro-limeño confraternal art.

Likewise, sustained engagement with notarial documents and creative re-readings of other records may offer another means to uncover the possessions and preoccupations of individuals of African descent in the Americas. Silva’s essay plumbs the less-studied confiscation records of a famous Inquisition case to uncover the material and financial holdings of women of African descent in Cartagena. Historical archaeologists like Ross Jamieson (2004) argue for the use of multiple strands of evidence to reveal social relations, material culture, and consumption patterns.²¹ Linking individuals or corporate groups to artistic and material objects is one of the most direct means of uncovering subjectivity. Doing so may also help us address the long-overlooked matter of Black artistic collecting and patronage in the Americas, a topic taken on here by Valerio and Gómez in their examination of Afro-Brazilian and -Peruvian confraternities.

While many of these strategies are familiar to historians accustomed to tracing scant impressions left in colonial sources, art history has been slower to adopt these tactics, particularly the embrace of the speculative. In a discipline concerned primarily with the visible and tangible, reckoning with loss and absence—and recognizing the limits of our powers of recovery—are paramount in shaping methodologies and approaches that aim to center Black subjectivities and ways of seeing.

African and Afrodescendant artists

The fact that artists and artisans of African descent predominated throughout the Americas may offer promise for future archival discoveries. Though countless figures and their outputs remain beyond our power to unearth from the written record, linking Afrodescendant artists to specific objects is a necessary step to understanding the nature of artistic production in the colonial period. A larger body of identified Afrodescendant artists may allow us to uncover African visual idioms and artistic techniques as well as examine artistic networks, patronage practices, self-fashioning and the politics of racial passing. Our recovery efforts are hindered by various factors, including the fact that works were often left unsigned, particularly murals. While various anonymous works such as Lima’s Señor de los Milagros and many murals decorating the streets of Havana have been historically attributed to African or Afrodescendant painters, we must be careful not to elide the categories of ‘popular’ and ‘of color’ (Fischer 2004, 61, 70).

Another obstacle lies in the fact that Afrodescendant artistic efforts were often curtailed or denigrated by creole elites. Deans-Smith (2009), Fischer (2004), and Niell (2012) have analyzed the exclusionary activities of guilds and artistic academies in Mexico City and Havana, as well as the racialized nature of artistic taste to favor academic art. The suppressive efforts by academicians also hinder scholarly endeavors to recover the names and objects produced by Afrodescendant artists as they were excluded from official institutions and their record-keeping practices (Fischer 2004, 69–70). Though two of Mexico City’s most prominent artists, Juan Correa (1647–1717) and his student José de Ibarra (1685–1756), were African-descended, Ibarra was actively involved in the attempt to exclude the untrained and non-Spaniards from practicing painting (Deans-Smith 2009). The connection between Blackness and artistic labor was so commonly made that the very act of sculpting was linked to racial prejudice and enslavement (Rarey 2015, 97), a sentiment echoed in various nineteenth-century treatises insisting that painting had become ‘vile’ for white Cubans, who could not practice it for fear of contact with the island’s Black population (Fischer 2004, 73–75). It is perhaps unsurprising that both Ibarra and Cuban painter Vicente Escobar’s racial designations shifted to ‘Spanish’ over the course of their careers, which Niell reads as a recognition of artistic accomplishment (2012). An awareness of prominent artists’ racial shifts during their careers may help us better understand the stakes of practicing art for Africans and their descendants.

Conversely, it may limit or skew our understanding of Afrodescendant artistic production to primarily focus our energies on those figures who can be named and uncovered from the archive; narratives of colonial Peruvian art history, for example, have tended to rely on a handful of artists who can be unequivocally identified.²² An emphasis on individual artists may also serve to replicate hierarchies of value that have long plagued art history if figures like the acclaimed Black limeño architects ‘el negro Acosta’ and Luis de Lagama are overlooked in favor of those producing sculptures and paintings (see Harth-Terré and Abanto 1961).

Several prominent Afrodescendant artists have gained more study, which has revealed the social critiques and subversive gazes present in their work; reappraisals of the two most famous Afro-Caribbean artists, Cuba’s Vicente de Escobar (1762–1834) by Rodríguez (2012) and Puerto Rico’s José de Campeche y Jordán (1751–1809) by Mirzoeff highlight these figures’ subaltern strategies and ‘colonial double vision’ (2011, 118). While many of colonial Brazil’s most celebrated artists were Black and mulato, including Manuel da Cunha (1737–1809), Antônio Francisco Lisboa (known as Aleijadinho, 1738–1814), Valentim da Fonseca e Silva (known as Mestre Valentim, c. 1745–1813), and Leandro Joaquim (d. 1798), their study has lagged somewhat in comparison to other African-descent artists.²³ Several of these figures worked across a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, architecture, urban and landscape design, and some of them, like Valentim, received artistic training in the academies of Europe and enjoyed wide acclaim during their lifetimes.

Nevertheless, the personal lives of these figures often complicate our interpretations of their work, such as Aleijadinho, the freed son of an enslaved woman and a Portuguese architect, who himself came to own enslaved people (Tribe 1996). Scholars have read sculptures of torture and martyrdom by Aleijadinho and Xavier das Chagas as satiric in nature, linking the Roman soldiers torturing Christ to the agents of Portuguese imperialism and enslavement (Wood 2013). For Rarey (2015), Chagas’s sculpture of the flagellated Christ (c. 1750) counterwitnesses the spectacle of public slave whippings that took place across the plaza in Salvador from the Carmelite convent where it was housed. As such, these sculptures by Black artists are interpreted not simply as religious commissions but as commentaries on and denunciations of Brazilian slave society.

Portraiture and ethnographic images

Portraiture is a particularly compelling avenue for scholarship because portraits confer subjectivity to and dignity on their sitters, ‘by producing the visual fiction of an individualized and autonomous self,’ through the meaning encoded in the face (Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal 2013, 4–5). Africans and their descendants, defined by colonial society through the economic potential of their bodies, were denied individuation in representation and depicted instead as types or members of a group (Farago 2017). Portraiture remained a fundamentally white, elite genre until well into the nineteenth century, when it became more widely accessible as a means of self-representation that actively affirmed Afrodescendant subjectivities and identities. A critical effort lies in Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal’s (2013) collection that appraises notable images across the Atlantic world to reconcile the seeming incompatibility of the hypervisible body of the enslaved with the representational logic of portraiture. Nevertheless, there remains a great need for the identification and study of further Black portrait subjects, a subject which Lugo-Ortiz returns to in her essay in this issue in her evaluation of Aponte and the genre of portraiture in colonial Cuba.

Rare surviving portraits and self-portraits of African-descent artists allow glimpses of the kinds of self-fashioning and negotiation engaged in by these figures. A portrait of Ibarra by Miguel Contreras presents the artist as a thoroughly dignified profesor of the noble art of painting, indexing Ibarra’s mixed-race ancestry only through a slightly darker skin tone than found in Ibarra’s own portraits of Mexico’s elite. As is found in other colonial portraits of Black sitters, Ibarra’s race is deliberately underplayed and his Afrodescendant traits are suppressed in favor of presenting him as an idealized creole intellectual. While possibly a copy after a now-lost self-portrait, the image nevertheless suggests a careful and self-conscious crafting of the artist’s image through his dress, attributes, and positioning: it also highlights the higher standing of lighter-skinned Afrodescendants and reminding that status rested on an ability to assimilate and conform to white creole culture.²⁴

Portraits were not always made to exalt or ennoble, however; in 1693, Juana ‘La Virreina’, a free Black woman who had founded the maroon community of Matudere, had her portrait painted while she sat imprisoned in the Cartagena jail. The image was commissioned by the governor, Martín de Cevallos y Lazerda, ‘for the novelty’ and later hung in his official residence. As Landers notes, ‘Juana may well have recognized that the artist was enacting a secondary capture and that she was a trophy being put on display’ (2013, 8). The potential of portraits to serve as products of the imperial desire to control, name, and categorize is likewise suggested in assessments of Albert Eckhout’s ethnographic portraits (discussed below) and in Lugo-Ortiz’s essay in this issue. This tendency links them also to the broader tradition of casta painting, and its taxonomic impulses (see Bleichmar 2012).

Other images sit at the boundary between what Farago terms the portrait and the particular, with the latter depicting distinct features without necessarily representing an individualized self (2017). These include the small handful of Black attendant figures in Latin American painting, including Campeche’s Ex voto con la Sagrada Familia (1778–1780), depicting a nun and three enslaved people.²⁵ Such images function less as portraits than as indexes of the donors’ identities as wealthy creoles, in the process erasing the identities of the Black figures themselves (Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal 2013, 4). This visual tradition, popular also in traveler-artists’ renderings of elite women with their Black servants, continued through the photographic era in portraits of infants with their Black wetnurses and continues to inform visual practices to this day (Walker 2017b; Cleveland 2019). In a similar vein, scholars have pointed to the medicalized gaze that could characterize images of individual Black bodies (see Lugo-Ortiz, this volume; Pavez 2012; Katzew 2015; Farago 2017).

Among the largest corpus of images of Afrodescendants available are the ethnographic images produced by European artists and travelers during the colonial period and later by costumbrista artists during the nineteenth century. Artists working in the service of European powers produced images that often elided the brutality of slavery to create idealized visions of fecund territories free of racial tensions, making the need for readings ‘against the grain’ even more vital. The work of Frans Post (1612–1680) and Albert Eckhout (c. 1610–1665) has become ubiquitous in our imaginaries of early modern Brazil. Some later images by Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768–1848) and Johann Mortiz Rugendas (1802–1858) have gained such a wide currency through their reproduction in numerous studies of slavery that they are at risk of becoming a ‘visual cliche’ (Wood 2013, 37). Critical reevaluations of these painters are emerging alongside investigations into the art of other traveler-artists like Thomas Ender (1793–1875), François-Auguste Biard (1799–1882), Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (1755–1830).²⁶

Though highly mediated, scholars have turned to these images frequently as they are some of the only known surviving visual depictions of Black life and cultural practices. Scholars have been careful to point out the limits of these sources, which tell us less about the lived experiences of Afrodescendants than they do of the desires and anxieties of colonial societies or the spatial imaginations of European travelers (Lara 2002; Buono 2007; Schwarcz 2018). Others have suggested, à la Hartman, that using these images has the potential to reproduce the racial power dynamics of transatlantic slavery (Rarey 2015). Nevertheless, in absence of other visual records, these highly complex and layered images are ‘irreplaceable documents,’ provided that they are treated with the critical attention they require (Fromont 2019). Productive research has emerged when ethnographic images are treated as sites of investigation unto themselves rather than as mere illustrations, as have been the watercolors of Carlos Julião or later illustrations by Debret and Rugendas.²⁷ Multidisciplinary approaches over a broad time frame can be brought to bear on some of these images, as in the case of Rugendas’s emblematic depiction of Afro-Christian festivals in Brazil, which can be productively studied alongside written records (Fromont 2019).

We would argue that, although the focus of this journal is Latin America’s colonial period, the post-independence nineteenth century must be brought into greater conversation with the colonial era in order to fully understand the relationship of Blackness and the visual, not least as slavery across much of the region endured well beyond the wars of independence. In fact, the nineteenth century witnessed a substantial growth of slavery in Brazil, and an even more staggering acceleration in Cuba. Some studies like Ghidoli’s of Afro-Argentines (2016) have taken on wider temporal spans to draw explicit links between colonial depictions of Black subjects and the evolution of those tropes over time. It was during the nineteenth century that paradigmatic visual representations of Blackness were established, with deeply embedded colonial roots and lasting legacies on national imaginations. These include the image of the ‘smoking habanera’ and the proliferation of stereotypical images of the Cuban mulata via cigarette packaging, which were responsible for the production and dissemination of a nascent national identity.²⁸ And yet after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, Afro-Brazilian art became more overt in its references to African art forms and cosmologies (Sullivan 2006, 40). The protracted process towards emancipation is therefore crucial in terms of how we approach and interpret the continuum of visual objects from the sixteenth–nineteenth centuries. As Copeland and Thompson point out, mistaken scholarly attributions of post-emancipation images to the period of slavery indicate the ‘continuities between captivity and emancipation for subjects on the ground and create[ ] new representational possibilities for the figuration of history’ beyond strict periodization (2011, 11).

Our issue

The essays assembled here range across time and space to explore various avenues of inquiry and methodologies that future scholarship might pursue. Silva’s contribution recounts the confrontation between Black women and the inquisition in seventeenth-century Cartagena, which erupted over the economic holdings and personal sumptuary display of formerly enslaved women. Silva employs the lesser-studied confiscation records from these faith trials in order to examine both the material possessions and real estate of these women, and how the Inquisition reshaped property ownership amongst a dynamic community of free people of African descent. In doing so, Silva reveals that some of these women had accumulated significant property, shedding light on the social and material worlds that they inhabited and their central role in local micro-economies.

Gómez and Valerio discuss the role of confraternities in the creation and deployment of Black identities in Lima and Brazil, attending to the devotions and practices that allowed for the expression of African and Afrodescendant Catholicism, citizenship, patronage, and taste. Gómez’s essay examines how caboverde members of a Black confraternity in Lima engaged with a no longer extant polychrome statue of the Virgin of Copacabana. By placing the confraternity’s sculpture into visual dialogue with the art and ritual culture of Greater Senegambia, Gómez compellingly argues that the caboverde members adopted and subverted colonial religious imagery in ways that connected them to their West African visual and religious heritage. Her essay shows that seemingly European objects also served as ‘spaces for correlation’ for Africans and their descendants, and in doing so brings to light some of the ‘other hybridities’ that Dean and Leibsohn have called for art historians to explore (2003).

Valerio shifts our attention to the monuments erected by Afro-Brazilian confraternities in the eighteenth century. Through an examination of two churches in Salvador, Bahia, and Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Valerio considers the ways in which Afro-Brazilian confraternities both drew on and transformed European artistic trends and Catholic iconography, and in doing so contributed to colonial Brazil’s artistic patrimony. Valerio argues that these churches are a lasting testament to the agency exerted by Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods, and are a crucial expression of the devotion, socio-economic status, and corporate identity of these sodalities.

Turning to a different intersection of Blackness and Catholicism, Brewer-García evaluates the portrayal of Martín de Porres in three seventeenth-century engravings featured in printed editions of Bernardo de Medina’s hagiography of the Dominican friar who went on to be beatified and finally canonized in the twentieth century. She analyzes how each of these engravings portrays the (future) saint for different audiences, focusing in particular on the visual construction of Porres as a New World iteration of Saint Martin of Tours. Brewer-García argues that this strategy effectively negotiates and ‘contains’ Porres’s Blackness by relegating it to an allegorical and temporary state, in order to propagate veneration among elite creole society.

Finally, Lugo-Ortiz returns to Jose Antonio Aponte’s ‘Book of Paintings’ and his descriptions of the portraits it contained to consider how these works problematized the norms of the genre. By examining their relationship to the shifting nature of Black portraiture in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cuba, Lugo-Ortiz reveals how Aponte’s use of portraits fundamentally challenged the genre’s dominant conventions of representation and legibility. She argues that portraiture constitutes the primary means through which Aponte’s Afro-centric history is articulated, allowing heroic, dignified Black protagonists and rulers to emerge above and beyond the visual paradigms of Black redemption and abandonment which prevailed at the time.

While ranging across time and space, these five essays feature only some of the approaches currently employed in attending to Afrodescendants and the visual; other frameworks like Afrocentrism and Afro-Latinidad may soon be brought to bear on the colonial era. Likewise, future exhibitions in Latin America, Europe, and the United States may bring Afrodescendant narratives more broadly into circulation. While the field is nascent and much work remains, a stream of scholarly initiatives seeks to build on the critical foundations laid by scholars and curators and showcase a growing body of significant scholarship on Afro-Latin American art.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the panelists and commentators who participated in the 2018 symposium out of which this special issue grew, and whose contributions shaped and inspired the thinking in this essay and the issue as a whole.

We would like to extend our gratitude to Dana Leibsohn for her support and comments, Matthew Rarey for his thoughtful reading of our Introduction, the anonymous readers for CLAR, and the Institute of Latin America Studies at the School of Advanced Studies, London for co-sponsoring the symposium in 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Santner

Kathryn Santner is the Thoma Scholar for the Art of the Spanish Americas at the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. An art historian by training, her research focuses on themes of gender, race, and religion in the early modern Andes and Philippines, with particular respect to women’s monastic foundations. She is currently at work on a book on the convent of Santa Catalina de Sena, in Arequipa, Peru. Prior to her appointment at the Thoma Foundation, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

Helen Melling

Helen Melling is an independent scholar of visual culture, whose research focuses on representations of the African diaspora in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Peru. She is a contributor to The Image of the Black in Latin America and the Caribbean. She was previously a Stipendiary Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania.

Notes

1 Archivo General de la Nación, Lima, Peru, Fondos Notariales, Francisco Sánchez Becerra, prot. 1714, ff. 126r–28r, 24 January 1696.

2 ‘Blackness’ in the special issue encompasses its hegemonic configuration as a signifier of difference; its articulation as a fluid category or spectrum across colonial Latin America; and its transformative capacity through acts of agency, self-fashioning and political and cultural resistance. For a useful discussion of the complexities of Blackness in colonial Spanish America, and the ‘politics of blackening’ as enshrined in the casta system, see Bryant, O’Toole, and Vinson 2012.

3 It remains outside our word limit to fully delineate this historiography, and throughout this essay only selected citations are given. For an extended historiography see McKinley 2016.

4 Bryant, O’Toole, and Vinson 2012; McKnight and Garofalo 2009; see also digital sources like the Slave Societies Digital Archive. Examples of microhistories include Ferreira 2012; Candido 2013.

5 See Thornton 1998; Sweet 2003; Bennett 2005; 2011.

6 On secular social spaces like pulperías and theaters see Borucki 2015; 2017; 2018; on confraternities, see Kiddy 2002; 2007; von Germeten 2002; Fromont 2014. On political organization, see Restall 2005; 2009; and on maroon communities, see Landers 2006; 2013, among others.

7 See Hünefeldt 1994; van Deusen 2004; 2007; 2010; 2012; Premo 2013; 2018; Velázquez Gutiérrez 2006; McKinley 2016; Terrazas Williams 2018.

8 These include medical and scientific knowledge (Jouve Martín 2014; Gómez 2017) and religious knowledge through practices like mysticism (van Deusen 2004; 2007) and divination (Villa-Flores 2005).

9 For a recent historiography, see Villaseñor Black 2015.

10 On the Atlantic world, see for example Wood 2000; Quilley and Kriz 2003; Kriz 2008; Bagneris 2018.

11 See García Saíz 1989; Carrera 2003; Katzew 2004; Araújo 1988; 1997; 2015.

12 Digital projects include ‘Slavery images: a visual record of the African slave trade’ and ‘Slave life in the early African diaspora’ (www.slaveryimages.org), the ‘Digital Aponte Project’ (http://aponte.hosting.nyu.edu), the ‘Fashion and Race Database’ (fashionandrace.org), and Jonathan Squares’s ‘Fashioning the self in slavery and freedom.’ Recent museum exhibitions include ‘Visionary Aponte: art and Black freedom’ (New York and Miami, 2017–2018), ‘Histórias afro-atlânticas’ (MASP, Brazil, 2018), and Isabel Löfgre and Patricia Gouvêa’s ongoing ‘Mae Preta Project’ in Brazil, a traveling set of exhibitions on Black wetnurses.

13 A notable example is the early American portrait gallery at the Worcester Art Museum; see also ‘Shifting image: in search of Johan Maurits’ (Mauritshuis, The Hague, 2019).

14 ‘Revealing the African presence in Renaissance Europe,’ (Walters Art Museum, 2012–2013); ‘Histórias Afro-atlânticas’ exhibition (Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2018).

15 Diaspora studies have largely moved away from this preoccupation to consider instead issues of modernity and contemporary art. For a historiography of African diaspora art history, see Thompson 2011.

16 See FitzPatrick Sifford 2019; on depictions in Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva coronica, see most recently Benoist 2010.

17 Tribe also documents several instances of ceiling decorations in the baroque churches of Minas Gerais in which biblical figures and Church Fathers appear to be rendered as Black or mulato (1996).

18 On Black saints see also Fiume 2006; Brewer-Garcia 2012; 2015; Cussen 2014; Rowe 2016.

19 See also various essays in Fromont 2019.

20 For an examination of aesthetic density in the orisha thrones of Cuba, see Brown 2003.

21 This approach may be particularly valuable for the study of maroon societies, for example.

22 Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, personal communication May 2017 and November 2019.

23 See various essays in Araújo 1988; see also Tribe 1996; and Valerio, this issue.

24 See also a surviving copy of a self-portrait by José de Campeche (see Sullivan 2014, 42–43).

25 Other image of note include and Blas Tupac Amaro’s donor portrait of Don Manuel de Salzes y de Doña Francisca Infante (1767) featuring a Black female servant who may have been their slave Marcia Angelina (Martinez Silva et al. 2014); Vicente Albán’s Noble Woman with her Slave (c. 1783, Bleichmar 2012); and a late eighteenth-century prayer rug from Arequipa showing a male and female figure with a Black attendant (Bagneris 2013).

26 On Eckhout and Post, see van den Boogaart 2012; Brienen 2006; 2013; on Debret, see Buono 2007; Wood 2013; Rarey 2015; on Ender, see Valente 2012; on Biard, Ana Araujo 2015; and Tuanay, Corrêa do Lago 2008.

27 On Julião, see Lara 2002; Tenreiro 2008; Fromont 2014. In contrast to Julião’s ubiquity, images by Joaquim Cândido Guilhobel (Gillobel, 1787–1859), have received almost no attention.

28 Lane 2010; Fraunhar 2008; 2018, Lugo-Ortiz 2012; Moran 2012.