Race and Latin American Modernisms, 1900-1950

Catalog description

This course analyzes the various currents of modernism that developed in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of race and ethnicity. From theories such as movements such as mestizaje and indigenismo to afrocubanismo, artists and intellectuals in Latin America were preoccupied with constructions of racial identity as they sought both to account for indigeneity, racial hybridity, and the African diaspora in the push toward cultural and political nationalisms. Disenfranchised politically, racialized subjects featured prominently in the formation of modern, state and aesthetic policies by the intellectual elite, raising questions of cultural appropriation and primitivism, at the same time that they reveal anxieties over the construct of whiteness. Breaking with centuries of Euro-centrism resulting from colonialism, however, many of these vanguard movements and cultural thinkers attempted to engage with local racial thematics precisely to assert their modernity. Engaging with a variety of manifestos, painting practices, and socio-historical contexts, we will concentrate on aesthetic formations of race in the broader effort to put pressure on a (white) Euro-American art history.