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Racial Ambiguity in Peruvian Visual Culture, from the 18th to the 20th CenturiesNatalia Majluf View the images for Dr. Majluf's paper Abstract Although vision plays a fundamental role in the establishment of racist discourse, it has rarely been the subject of theoretical discussions of racism. My paper attempts to explore certain aspects of this issue through a case study of Peruvian representations of racial categories. There are two starting points for this paper. One is the difficulty critics have demonstrated in establishing the racial identification of "Indians" represented in the work of nineteenth-century Peruvian painter Francisco Laso. The other is the scarcity of visual representations of race in a region where racial categories have played a crucial role in shaping broad social discourses and practices. Common problems relating to the visual identification and interpretation of racial differences are compounded in Peruvian society by the instability of racial categories. The case under study thus reveals aspects of the formation of racist discourses and stereotypes which are rarely exposed in other societies, where such differences are perceived to be more clearly defined. Far from attempting to draw definitive conclusions, this paper will try to pose new questions relating to the formation of racial perceptions and discourses. |