Chocolat but not Black: Black Latin American 'Primitive' in Fin-de-Siecle Thursday, February 21, 2013   -   6:00 PM Location:  Visual Arts Center VAC-117 Semans Lecture Hall

Dr. Lyneise Williams is an associate professor of art history at UNC-Chapel Hill. Williams will talk and interrogate the advertising imagery and illustrations of the black Spanish-speaking Chocolat in the French press and advertisements. They articulate a distinct expression of the "primitive" that employs notions of deception, visual tropes related to ideas of blackness illustrators borrowed from the U.S. and French visual strategies used to depict Euro-Latin Americans in popular and anthropological sources. This particular thread of the "primitive" complicated established ideas about blackness in Paris by introducing a white European component into the mix. This complexity has received little recognition. Visualizing Chocolat's Spanish heritage was key to playing up popular and anthropological perceptions of the Spanish and Portuguese Americas as the "laboratory of racial mixing."  Even as illustrators employed visual tropes associated with African Americans and minstrelsy to Chocolat, they undermined conventional representations of blackness by melding them and juxtaposing them with elements linked to visual representations of white Europeans.

Event Type:  Lecture Contact:  King, Brenda P E-mail:  brking@davidson.edu