Racialized bodies from the visual discourse of otherness: unwritten memoirs of the subalterns in the plastic work of Victor P. de Landaluze

Abstract

The second half of the 19th century in Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the most complex and defining stages for the gestation of visual repertoires on racialized women, becoming an hybrid archetype, contaminated, in many cases, by the place of enunciation of otherness. The representations of the black woman and mulatto, in the work of the Spanish painter Víctor Patricio de Landaluze, show the strengthening of colonial expansion over the daily or domestic life of Cuban slavery society. The female figures that shape the visual repertoire of the Spanish artist and military are racialized and sexed subjects, from which both categories – race and sex – were based on a structurally naturalized order.