“A pleasant field for serious inspiration.” Picturing otherness in post-independence South America (1830-1922)

Abstract

The present article examines the visual representations of otherness that emerged or were consumed by Hispanic-South American elites from independence to the early twentieth century. The objective is to analyze them in inductive terms, but in the light of the changes and continuities that occurred at the level of local political imaginaries and through the Atlantic impact of romanticism, the new realist pictorial tendencies, ethnic nationalisms, and the incipient socio-scientific doctrines. Artistic subjective creation and its interaction with its social environments (European and American) will also be considered as important variables. In the end, we argue, following the psycho-social theory of social representations, that the preexisting markers of otherness underwent mostly peripheral changes, which did not mean their disappearance but their adaptation, sometimes aggravated in alterizing terms, to the new bio-racialist contemporary ideas and realities.