Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Posted in Books, Communications/Media Studies, Europe, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs on 2019-11-04 17:54Z by Steven

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Bloomsbury
2019-02-21
232 pages
9 colour and 37 bw illus
229 x 152 mm
Hardback 9781501332357

Lyneise E. Williams, Associate Professor of Art History
University of North Carolina

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

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.

Table of 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
  • Select Bibliography
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In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre–Civil War New Orleans

Posted in Arts, Biography, Books, Economics, Louisiana, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2019-06-10 23:55Z by Steven

In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre–Civil War New Orleans

Historic New Orleans Collection
2010
128 pages
70 color images, 7 b/w images
8″ × 9½”
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-917860-57-7

Edited and with an introduction by Erin M. Greenwald, with essays by William Keyse Rudolph and Patricia Brady

Julien Hudson, born in 1811 in New Orleans, was the son of a property-owning free woman of color and a white English merchant, ironmonger, and ship chandler. Hudson began painting in the mid-1820s, training first in New Orleans and later in Paris. Little is known about his personal life, outside of scattered details found in a handful of public documents and a pair of early-twentieth-century reminiscences by former student George Coulon and prominent Creole of color Rodolphe Desdunes. This carefully researched volume is the most thorough examination to date of Julien Hudson and his world.

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Theaster Gates on how his new show was inspired by the eviction of 45 people from an island in Maine

Posted in Arts, Europe, History, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2019-02-11 01:14Z by Steven

Theaster Gates on how his new show was inspired by the eviction of 45 people from an island in Maine

The Art Newspaper
2019-02-01

Anna Swansom

Theaster Gates
Theaster Gates ©Theaster Gates; Photo: Julian Salinas

The Chicago-based artist’s exhibition in Paris examines the forced removal in 1911 of the inhabitants of Malaga Island

The US artist Theaster Gates has taken the eviction of a mixed-race community from a small island in Maine as the starting point for his first solo exhibition in France, opening this month at the Palais de Tokyo. In 1912, 45 people from Malaga Island were evicted by the state authorities and eight of them were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded following the state’s purchase of the island in 1911. The island, a poor fishing village of black, white and mixed-race people, was ridiculed in a Maine newspaper as a “strange community” of “peculiar people”; its eviction has recently been described by a US documentary as having been motivated by economics, racism, eugenics and political retribution.

Through new works including sculptures, a film and a video, the Chicago-based artist has developed the wide-ranging project and exhibition, Amalgam, which explores the complexity of interraciality and migratory histories. The show has been organised by Katell Jaffrès and has received support from Regen Projects, Richard Gray Gallery and White Cube.

The Art Newspaper: How did you become interested in the history of Malaga Island and how did this lead to Amalgam?

Theaster Gates: I had started a residency in 2017 at Colby College in Maine and was visiting a friend who said there was this important, not well-known history about this island that used to have black and mixed-race people that were evicted. We were in a boat and he suggested having lobsters on the adjacent island before checking it out. So I learned of it quite leisurely and then started to do research.

The idea of interracial mixing led to the creation of a sculptural form, “amalgam”: a by-product of what happens when one artistic form from history meets another one to create a new kind of work. I wanted to create a bridge that would make people more curious about this island and for people who are of mixed race and from backgrounds where their parents are of different religions, I wanted Malaga to be a place where all mixes felt that they had a home. The beauty of mixing is one of the cornerstones of the exhibition…

Read the interview article here.

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Provenance: A Novel

Posted in Books, Europe, History, Media Archive, Novels, Passing, United States on 2017-09-21 19:28Z by Steven

Provenance: A Novel

Creative Cache
2015-09-16
334 pages
5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0991614325

Donna Drew Sawyer

  • Winner of the 2017 Maryland Writers’ Association Annual Book Award for Historical Fiction
  • Selected for the 2017 “Go On Girl Book Club” reading list
  • Finalist for 2016 “Phillis Wheatley Award for First Fiction.”

Southern civility turns savage when Hank Whitaker’s dying words reveal the unimaginable. No one—not his socialite wife, Maggie, or young son, Lance—ever suspected the successful businessman, husband, and father they knew and loved was a black man passing for white. In 1931, in the segregated South, marriage between whites and blacks is illegal. Maggie is now a criminal facing jail. When Lance receives death threats to atone for his father’s betrayal, the family flees the U.S. for the racial freedom of Paris.

Still grieving Hank’s death and fearful of their uncertain future as Europe marches toward war, Lance and Maggie mourn the lives they loved but lost. As they struggle to create new lives and identities for themselves, they find a surprising community of artists and American expats that are on the same journey and show them a different way to live and to love. Provenance is a sweeping historical saga about love, betrayal, tragedy, triumph, passion, privilege and the universal desire for acceptance—regardless of who you are or where you’re from.

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Half-Blood Blues

Posted in Books, Europe, Media Archive, Novels on 2011-11-11 05:53Z by Steven

Half-Blood Blues

Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
2011-09-03
304 pages
8.5 X 5.5 X 0.9 in
Cloth ISBN:9780887627415
Paperback ISBN: ISBN: 9781250012708

Esi Edugyan

  • Winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Paris, 1940.  A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again.  He is twenty years old.  He is a German citizen.  And he is black.

Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero’s fate.  From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of  Paris—where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance—Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance.

Half-Blood Blues, the second novel by an exceptionally talented young writer, is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

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