Williams, Daryle. Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945 (Chapter V - Excerpts). Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865. New York: Routledge, 2000.
 

Two new books that have applied in different ways the conceptual background previously revised in this seminar framed the discussion on Visual Culture. Although coming from different schools, Williams and Wood dialogue with the work of Pierre Nora (1996) because they assume that visual imaginary embodies memory. Like museums and monumental statuary, images of paintings, engravings, photographs, and illustrations of traveling accounts and artifacts offer a description of their surrounding intentionality, not by their forms themselves, but by the meanings they convey in relation to the space in which they are portrayed, reproduced, and exhibited.

Our discussion seminar started with a delineation of the theoretical background that supports Wood’s book. In his book, Wood uses both traditional and contemporary approaches of Art History. Following there is an outline of the more traditional forms of visual description that Wood uses in his book- Formal analysis: description of visual information (material, technique, color, composition, and schools

- Archival Research: historical backgrounds of objects. - Correlative approach that looks for affinities between visual images that are similar in form and structure. For example, a correlative approach was done with the image of a leg in J.M.W. Turner’s Slaver Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On of 1840 (fig. 2.20, p. 47) and Peter Brueghel’s 1567 oil painting Landscape with Fall of Icarus (fig. 2.21, p. 48).

Wood’s more contemporary approach to visual information is framed within the following schools:

-Semiotics: the interpretation of signs that constitute systems of languages (written, spoken, or structural languages) and signification. Semiotics looks for the explanation on how signs function, signify, represent, and communicate. Lately, inside the semiotic school, a ground of academics has embraced the concept of intertextuality that is associated to the deconstruction tradition (Jacques Derrida). The major focus of Derrida’s work is the text, the discourse, and it expression. Intertextuality looks at the way in which the texts communicate with one other. Everything is constantly in dialogue with other texts.

-Foucault: Foucault believes in systems of power that produce silence through technologies of surveillance. Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) delineates the mechanism of surveillance. Specifically, the technology emerging around slavery control is discussed in chapter 5: Pain and Torture, yet the influence of Foucault is expressed throughout the book. In this framework, slavery is considered a system of power that creates silences, exclusions. Then, the visual culture associated with slavery is a system of power, which creates silences. In this sense, it is important to remark the impossibility of the slaves’ representation through the visual media.

-Race Theory is the third contemporary approach that Wood uses in his book. The major exponents in this area cited in the book are Paul Gilroy, H.R. Gates, and novelist Toni Morrison. Their approaches imply idea that race does not follow the conventional categories of Western thought. Because blackness constructs not only a biological difference, but also an existential difference, it challenges the universalistic concepts and categories of Semiotics and the Foucaultian School. In fact, race theorists believe that other groups than whites experienced the postmodern condition centuries before the 1960s under circumstances that were strange to Western knowledge and experience, like the African Diaspora. Wood’s argument in this area is that the visual media not only represents difference, but that in the production of the image itself there is difference. There were some questions about the clarity of this argument.

Yet, the definitions of memory that we have looked in previous weeks, such as the mnemothecnics by LeGoff or the concepts of social memory of Hallbawchs, become more difficult to identify as they are applied in specific contexts. When applying these authors’ theories to the study and analysis of visual culture, some of the frozen, crystallized categories have to be modified to be useful.

The seminar then followed comparing Williams’ text and Wood’s book in terms of their historical questions, backgrounds, and methodologies. Even if both texts are talking about different cultures and periods, we concluded that there are some basic overlaps that Williams and Wood share.

There was some controversy around the question of contemporaneous approaches. To some of us, Wood’s text was a retroactive gaze that did not take into consideration the effects of visual politics in the present. In contrast, Williams’ account on the history of the collections in Brazil is a description of the terms in which the collections were acquired and a delineation of the intentionality around the politics for acquiring and exhibiting certain collections. Yet, this point was later on contended when we discussed Wood’s conclusion on the construction of slave narratives in Wilberforce House, Liverpool. Wood argues that the way in which the Middle Passage is staged in WH is a promotion of the tradition of white-centric notions that were represented in visual culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which the depiction of the body of the African or New World slave is not necessary as there is an objectification of the artifacts around slavery that constitutes the kernel of the slave narrative (4, 223). Yet, Wood believes that in Salvador da Bahia there is a complete different approach to the African legacy: "You don’t have to look for the memory of slavery in Bahia - it is engulfing, it is a part of things" (293). This statement is rather problematic in that it implies that people in Salvador da Bahia live in a horizon of what LeGoff described as historicity. This notion is somewhat repeated in Nora’s description of a "living" memory. How is it possible for Salvadorians to live in a pre-industrial horizon in the twentieth century?

And yet, Wood follows a historical dictum: the affirmation of change. Wood delineates some of the shifting meanings attributed to specific artifacts. An instance in which we see the relation between past legacy and a present purpose is the different functions attributed to the 1789 copper engraving titled Description of a Slave Ship (fig. 2.2), and how these changed overtime to fill the needs of the present. Reproduced many times, this engraving was originally produced under anti-slavery trade propaganda. Yet in Bob Marley’s album cover of 1979 (fig. 2), it has other significance for the audience to which this album was intended. A sense of cultural pride has reconfigured the narrative of the Middle Passage into the contemporary political agenda of African nations (p. 34). Williams's study is an effort to connect the events of the past and the present. The circumstances in which the collection of national art have been acquired and exhibited define and give us clues as to what the intentions of government and powerful offices may be for the construction of the idea of the nation. Canclini’s idea that museums often try to freeze the past in order to make it the base of identity/history/patrimony and provide authenticity by codifying and representing "official" memories (133) is applied to the context of the first regime of the Vargas government. Authentic pieces and copies of European art connect the national museums to the Louvre, shaping a national discourse that related to the European tradition.

What did Wood meant when he rejected the notion of the Middle Passage to be "tabula rasa" (p.19) of African consciousness? Wood, following Louis Gates, believes that this white-centric belief is only a fiction that served to specific political activities against the African identity. Wood argument is that the visual representations of the Middle Passage functioned before and after the abolition as a medium for the objectification and minimization of the African body. For Wood then, there is no space for a human representation of the African subject in the visual imaginary of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Why did Wood title his book "Blind Memory"? What does "Blind" mean and how does it differentiate from previous descriptions of Memory?

First, the concept of blind memory as one pertaining to the west possibility or impossibility to look at slavery is related to Anderson’s "collective amnesia," that is a willingness to forget some parts of the historical past in order to create a group ideal. Blind memory then is a conscious decision to remember a dehumanized slavery. In Brazil, a same project of "voluntary forgetfulness" was put in place when in 1940 the National Museum of Fine Arts exhibited the Exposição da Missão Artística de 1816. The exhibit included Debret’s watercolors taken from Voyage Picturesque et Historic au Brésil (1834-1839), in which the artist depicted raw descriptions of the brutality of the slave system. This cruel description of slavery contradicted the promotion of a "strong, confident, and unified visions of Brazil’s past, present, and future" (Williams, 14).

Second, the concept of blindness implies a possible sight. The title not only implies then a conscious decision of forgetfulness, but also describes the possibility of seeing through visual culture. The metaphor includes a certain materiality/corporeality of the physical function of seeing, just as the "texture" of memory in the text of James Young implied a tactile sense. How does these corporal metaphors relate to the "naturalness" of the official discourses that are presented in museums?

Third, in the concept of seeing exhibits staged in museums, we related the possibility of seeing official discourses. This question was repeated in several moments in this seminar (the Enola Gay exhibit, the staging of Patrimony in the Museo Antropologico Nacional de Mexico) and is particularly interesting in the discussion of the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery because of its alleged authority in the arranging of memory.
 

Session discussant: Mark Kehren
Recorder: Marisabel Villagomez