Beatriz Rodríguez
bbalanta@smu.edu
Southern Methodist University, Texas, USA
Abstract:
In this paper, I show that in the age of freedom and equality statements, the ethnographic images produced by Comisión Corográfica (a major geographic project in mid-nineteenth century Colombia) promotes and provides aesthetic tools that normalize, codify, and reify racial ideologies at a time in Colombian history in which structures of domination were heavily contested. Our main objective is to provide a critical reading of these images in order to account for how conventions mobilized by these visual registers established the fiction of race in nineteenth-century Colombia.
Keywords: racial discourse, representation, visual culture.
