The Visual in Latin American History

A collection of essays examining the role of visual materials in shaping Latin American lives, historical thought, and worldmaking.

Historians have long valued visual media as a source of documentation and illustration. More recently, scholars have also been turning to visual media for another purpose: to directly observe historical processes. Paintings, maps, visual narratives, graffiti, photography—these objects do not simply transmit information about events; they are events. They imbue the historical change we seek to understand.

The Visual in Latin American History is a collection of essays that applies cutting-edge visual-studies methodology to the history of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Contributors focus on the visual production of postcolonial national imaginaries across Latin America—mythologies that purposely omitted Indigenous groups, African diasporic communities, and new migrants from Europe and Asia. The essays range across a vast territory, including erasure in archeology and Afro-Colombian portraiture; image making in domestic spaces and social movements; the visual vocabularies of urban planning and agrarian reform; military "performance" and anti-imperial Cold War exchanges; and humanitarian documentary along the US border.Collectively, the authors show how visual methods can radically transform our understanding of power and culture in Latin America and beyond.