At the turn of the 20th century, Cuban paintings and photographs usually depicted black bodies as part of narratives in which blackness seems incompatible with notions of modernity and nation. Visual culture becomes a merging of discursive transformations that link class, race, and identity and bring to a fore controversial representations of blackness. Many of these representations legitimate popular ideas about the relations among Afro-Cuban culture, corporeality, and the underworld,. This lecture will explore multiple visual expressions, particularly samples from Cuban ethnographic photography and pictorial works, to understand the negotiation of Cuban racial imaginaries and politics.
