Race, Visual Culture, and Science in Colonial Nueva Granada 1777-1819

Abstract

This dissertation examines how visual culture actively participated in the construction of racial ideologies in the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada between 1777 and 1819. It uncovers the visual strategies through which Black subjects were constructed at a time when the trafficking of enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants was still in force. It further explores how racial differences were perceived, theorized, and invoked by criollo intellectual elites who articulated these ideas in their scientific production. It argues that colonial visual culture and scientific discourse were mutually constitutive in the production of racial ideologies and in the visual construction of Blackness at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this research, whiteness is understood as a structural system that used science to shape other ethnicities in order to sustain a supposed racial superiority. This dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework and is organized into four chapters. Across all chapters, the research focuses on reading images and texts together, treating them as mutually constitutive sites where racial difference was theorized, visualized, and naturalized. By doing so, the dissertation seeks to offer tools for recognizing the persistence of racist visual logics in contemporary representations of Blackness.