Vision, Race, and Modernity

Scholars of Latin America whose work is concerned with visual subjects often search in vain for substantive treatments of Andean themes. Once we finish admiring the photographs of Martín Chambi, we don’t know where to turn. I am happy to report that Vision, Race, and Modernity is just what we needed. Deborah Poole’s carefully argued and finely crafted book spotlights visual concerns and places them within the political, social, cultural, and historical context of their production and exchange. Not only does it serve as the benchmark against which studies of visual matters in the Andes will be measured, but it offers fresh insights into relationships between Europe and the Americas, anthropology and history, and art and science that scholars in all disciplines will find stimulating, provocative, and wholly original.Poole has organized her book chronologically, beginning in the eighteenth century and ending in the 1940s, but her purpose is not to write a definitive history of visual representation in the Andes. Rather, because both vision and representation are material and social, she makes the “image world” her subject, a term which “captures the complexity and multiplicity of this realm of images ... circulating among Europe, North America, and Andean South America” (p. 7), connecting places, people, cultures, and classes, but never in a simple way.During the three centuries Poole examines, images of astonishing diversity were made with different media and technologies. Many images were produced by Europeans, some working in South America, others staying in Europe and imagining distant scenes; other images were produced by Andean artists incorporating European styles and media. The relationship between producers and consumers of images shapes Poole’s discussion throughout. Although the images were produced with specific audiences and aims in mind, the producers seldom controlled who ultimately saw the images. Poole raises questions about subaltern regimes of vision and the extent to which the value of an object, and the images contained therein, vary with the specific historical and social location of its viewer. Assessing the diverse political uses of the varied images, Poole moves beyond narrow theoretical discourses about “the gaze” and toward an analysis of visual culture that fully considers the relationship between images and power.Poole relentlessly pursues a large question: How were modernity and race associated? Over time, via technologies of reproduction and representation, the media used to produce the images changed, and the means and extent of their circulation expanded geometrically. Photography, the paramount example, circled the globe as studio portraits, stereographs, cartes de visite, postcards, etc. Poole’s concern is never primarily with technology, although she provides technical information. Rather, she presents ways in which technological change served to spread the image and thus to generalize ideas about race in the modern age.Amidst myriad studies of the changing meanings of race, the strength of Poole’s contribution lies in her dissection of the visual realm because, through the period under consideration, race claimed an increasingly larger role within the visual economy of modernity. She does not aim to pinpoint when the idea of race or racism originated. Poole focuses on ways “the particular visual qualities that modern racial discourse has assigned to ‘race’ have come to seem so natural” (p. 22). She argues, building on Foucault, that the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century was the period when a different understanding of race emerged in Europe, coinciding with a break from classical regimes of knowledge. It is not that the modern idea of race was new, for to some extent it repackaged and revitalized old ideas. But the many ways it worked were different: “changes in the idea of ‘race’ could be read as part of a parallel and enabling history of visual and spatial technologies” (pp. 215–16). Because science in this period worked to categorize all human types racially and relied on technology to do so, the history of science that Poole presents is also a visual history.In the individual chapters, Poole begins with eighteenth-century French imaginings of the precolumbian past and shows how Enlightenment ideas about the nation were connected to those about the body, especially the female body, and expressed in travel accounts and in plays and operas about the Incas. In chapter three, she explores scientific discourses of the early nineteenth century, such as the work of von Humboldt, as the physiognomic or typologic mode of description took hold in studying South America. In chapter four she again takes up gender, focusing on Peru in the mid-nineteenth century, building her discussion of racial types around Lima’s tapadas (veiled or covered women). The images discussed in these three chapters were reproduced through diverse media, but engravings in books were particularly important because they enjoyed a large circulation.After photography came on the scene in the mid-nineteenth century, the subject of chapter five, small portable images such as the carte de visite became central in purveying racial categories and making them into stereotypes. In chapters six and seven she continues to discuss photography but turns the tables to concentrate on Peruvian artists and photographers active in Lima and Cusco in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her concern with subaltern views extends through chapter eight, in which she reflects on the role of photographic portraits in consolidating racial discourse.Two significant features of the book may not find favor among all readers. Deborah Poole, who is on the graduate faculty of the New School, is an anthropologist whose previous work has often traced cultural themes through Peruvian history. Readers will not find any discussion here of the early years of the Andean-European encounter. Although, as she notes, many studies trace the roots of contemporary Andean culture and society to “the ethnic and cultural dichotomies generated by the Spanish colonial experience” (p. 22), she deliberately begins her study two centuries later in order to illuminate the Andean postcolonial period and to set the Andes into modern history.In addition, Poole clearly states that the particular characteristics of the Andean-European encounter were uniquely shaped by the “political and historical relationships linking the Andean republics of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia with the northern European and North American countries that dominated cultural production concerning Latin America” (p. 21). Nonetheless, very little about Ecuador and Bolivia, and nothing about Andean areas of Colombia and Chile, penetrates the solidly Peruvian substance of the book. This will disappoint people who live and work in those countries, for it seems that once again a Peruvianist is using Peru to stand for the Andes. Part of her argument, however, is that the very technologies of representation she discusses helped create the idea that Peru equaled the Andes and, even more broadly, that a cultural and racial entity called “the Andes” existed. For it was precisely from the eighteenth century on that Latin America was increasingly developed and underdeveloped by the dominant cultures; it was not a backwater whose visual economy evolved in isolation from Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century when photography began, Andean peoples were enmeshed in global structures of commercial domination. Although her book is titled “the Andean image world,” Poole in fact convinces the reader that this is not a single world but that multiple discourses and interdependencies have shaped conflictual understandings of what the Andes means, both for those born and raised there and for armchair viewers.In practical terms, the book is priced and sized for classroom adoption. The quality of the 45 black and white images is generally good. For the reader who wants to examine them closely, the size is a disadvantage. For example, while it may be desirable to group small photographs like cartes de visite since they were often collected in albums, on these pages they appear the size of passport photographs. More images could have been printed full page without substantially increasing the book’s length. In this respect, the technology of reproduction of the images and the book fit well within the historical period when the book was produced

Modernity · Political science · Race (biology) · Sociology · Visual culture · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Latin American history and culture · Photographic and Visual Arts

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