Apr. 23
12:30–1:30 pm
Zoom
Join Professor Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, who will give a virtual talk at Northwestern University titled Cuban Black Portraiture in the Age of Revolutions. Professor Lugo-Ortiz is an Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Hispanic Studies at UChicago, as well as a co-founder of the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture (SLAVICULT).
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 Lugo-Ortiz will lay out the idiosyncratic aesthetics at work in Aponte’s portraits and 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.