Northwestern Events Calendar

Apr
23
2021

Cuban Black Portraiture in the Age of Revolutions - The Nineteenth Century Series

When: Friday, April 23, 2021
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM CT

Where: Online

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Spanish and Portuguese   (847) 491-8249

Group: Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Category: Academic

Description:

Lecture by Agnes Lugo, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago.

In tandem with radical reconfigurations in notions of political subjectivity, the Age of Revolutions in the Caribbean produced visual artifacts that challenged dominant conventions of representation and legibility. Among these was the now lost Libro de pinturas by José Antonio Aponte, a black man accused in 1812 of organizing a conspiracy to overthrow colonial slavery in Cuba. Portraiture had an important function in this book. In this presentation I will lay out the idiosyncratic aesthetics at work in Aponte’s portraits and will place them in relation to shifts in the practices of black portraiture at the end of the eighteenth century. Amidst an international milieu of emancipation, Aponte’s portraits offered a profound meditation on historical temporality, political sovereignty, and the dignified status of Cuban blacks as subjects of the Spanish Crown that went against the grain of the island’s emerging plantation society that condemned them to racist subordination and enslavement.

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is a specialist in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history. Her work focuses on questions concerning the relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities. This is the subject of her book Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba 1860-1898) and of her current book-length project "Riddles of Modern Identity: Biography and Visual Portraiture in Slaveholding Cuba (1760-1886)." She is also the author of numerous essays that address the interconnections between queer sexualities, gender and anti-colonial politics in twentieth-century Puerto Rico. 

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