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- Creators: Arizona State University
When the Irish continued to rebel against English rule, the colonizers began employing methods of extreme violence to subdue the Gaelic people. At the same time, they began to practice more extreme forms of cultural colonization by attacking those aspects of Gaelic culture which most resisted conformity to English standards of civility. The Gaelic legal system, called Brehon law, redistributive inheritance, cattle herding and traditional forms of Irish dress were denigrated to assert English authority over the Irish people. English fear of the negative effects of Gaelic culture were exemplified by the Anglo-Irish lords, who were originally of English descent, but had "degenerated" into Irish barbarians through the use of Gaelic culture. This retrograde process could also occurred when an English person practiced marriage, childbirth, wet-nursing or fosterage with Irish persons. These interactions, and the consequences which came from them, were often described in terms of infection and disease. Thus culture, operating on multiple levels, and how that culture was represented, became a powerful site for colonial power to operate.
Although photography has played a pivotal role in how people see themselves and how they see “others,” scholars have written very little on the (self)representation of Afro-Latin Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century photography. This study argues that photographic portraits produced during this period contributed to creating negative stereotypes about Afro-Latin Americans and legitimizing Black subalternization. However, it also contends that photography served as a means of Afro Latin American self-representation. This dissertation begins by contextualizing the subjugation and exclusion of African cultures that started with the colonization of the Americas. It uses the findings of the Subaltern Studies as a methodological tool in revisiting the past; and offers a theoretical conceptualization of the photographic practice, pointing out its limits and possibilities. Subsequently, it analyzes the corpus, which consists of photographs produced in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. These are examined taking into account their context of production and reception. As a result, this research indicated that mainly two types of photographs of Black people were produced in Latin America during this period: photographs taken for commercial purposes, which highlighted the “exoticism” and “otherness” of Afro-Latin Americans; and anthropometric portraits used by scientists to “prove” the biological and cultural inferiority of Black people. However, the analysis also showed that Afro-Latin Americans appropriated the medium to express their subjectivity. These photographs should be seen as counter-images that subverted the photographic practice in vogue. They open new ways of thinking about Black representation throughout history.