Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Lyneise E. Williams makes an insightful contribution to the limited art historical scholarship on the representation of Black Latin Americans in Parisian visual media. * Early Popular Visual Culture * Lyneise E. Williams uses the city of Paris to analyze the evolution of the Western representation of Afro-Latinos, who became more and more present in the French landscape at the end of the 19th century because of the colonies in African and the Caribbean, among others. The author analyzes how this presence was received and studies the influence of the latter on the vision that Westerners had of foreigners, returning to the figures of Alfonso Teofilo Brown, Pedro Figari and Rafael Padilla. The complex subjects of race and representation are addressed here by the through an approach that is both historical and contemporary, making it possible to understand the discrimination observed in Parisian visual culture, in art, but also in the business world, with communication tools loaded with socially accepted racism. * Critique d’art * Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 is intellectually ambitious, providing a clear, readable, and well-researched view of a subject almost completely missing from the art historical literature on Parisian modernism: the representation of Black Latin Americans. This book thus crucially adds to a vital literature within modernism studies that considers the relationship of French culture—roughly the center of the art world in the modernist period—to colonized Africa and the African Diaspora. Williams takes up complex subjects of race and racial categories with elegance and clarity, and her acute discussions of particular works anchor these more general discussions in visual immediacy. Starting with a highly engaging consideration of representations of Latinized Blackness, she establishes a clear baseline of assumptions about this hybrid group—and Latin Americans in general—in French popular culture and modernist art. -- Patricia Leighten, Professor Emerita, Duke University, USA