Samba and the Brown Body Politic

Abstract

During the first half of the twentieth century, representing the body was a pivotal means to reimagine national and regional identities at a moment when the legacies of colonial power structures were coming under increasing scrutiny. The body became a vehicle through which artists could envision new, expanded, and intersecting notions of race, gender, class, nation, and region. Through close readings of single images created in eight different countries—Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba—this Dialogues contains essays by scholars from South America, Europe, and the United States that reveal the capaciousness for the body to encapsulate local racial, class, and gender dynamics, to illuminate regional and national politics, and to embody divides between socially progressive politics and entrenched conservative social systems and hierarchies. The authors pay careful attention to form, subject, and style to demonstrate the potency of modernist figuration, an international and vibrant visual language, to interrogate issues of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and gender. Together, the essays point to the critical particularities of iconography, context, and style. In so doing, they reinforce the ability of representation to resonate in multivalent ways and assert the power of the image to stir debate, fix (or challenge) convictions, and raise questions about histories. The authors harness the power and visual variety of realisms and representation in Latin America, revealing the malleability of the modernist body and its efficacy as a carrier of meaning and locus for debates about power, progress, and identity.