The politics of Digital India: between local compulsions and transnational pressures

Abstract

horse and next to a Bugatti automobile, the trappings of European civility. Despite Brown’s efforts to assimilate, the French continued to view him through a racialized lens. Chapter four is an analysis of the work of Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari, who was born to Italian parents. Figari centered Blackness in his visions of the cultural mixing that characterized the “Americas,” a locale he conceived of as beyond national boundaries (p. 142). Using an anthropological lens, Figari essentialized the cultural contributions of Black Uruguayans and Argentines as “candombe,” a West and Central African dance tradition syncretized with Catholicism. While Figari’s impressionistic paintings of African dancers reinforced notions of their primitivism, he also argued for Black intelligence and blamed whites for creating white supremacist, segregated societies. Williams notes the contradictions in Figari’s work: his writings cast African-descended people as “hypersexual and uncultivated animals,” but his paintings also humanized his subjects (p. 174). Williams concludes that through these oscillating portrayals, Figari created new stereotypes that were tied to his cultural context, consigning Black Latin Americans to “a visible but isolated existence” (p. 180). Williams’s book is particularly relevant to international media critics and art historians who seek to understand the Latin and African diasporas across the colonial world. In the concluding chapter, Williams articulates her theory of Latinizing Blackness, which distills the impact of the complex politics of racial identity during this era. Williams could reference this theory throughout the book to more clearly guide her analysis of Latin American and Black identities in Parisian representations. Similarly, Williams presents notions such as the “gaze” that Parisians used upon Latin Americans and that Latin Americans sometimes returned. Future research could expand upon this notion according to gendered and racialized understandings of the colonial gaze and the technology of white sight, as articulated by Nicolas Mirzoeff. Finally, the often-convoluted terms translated from Spanish, French, and other languages, particularly the racial epithets used for Black Latin Americans, could further contextualized historically. A discussion of not only their denotations but also their connotations and larger social implications would round out Williams’s analysis. In sum, Williams’s survey of representations of Latin Blackness begins to expose the complex processes of Europeans’ racialization of African descendants in transnational and transcolonial contexts, which resulted in ambivalent, and contested, representations.