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Visual Culture and Latin

American Studies
ANDREA NOBLE
University of Durham, U.K.

THE VISUAL TURN

Amid the posts and turns of contemporary critical debate, visual culture
is booming in the Euro-American academy. There is a palpable feeling in the
humanities classroom that sight is currently the favored sense in this
regional academic arena. Its objects and methods of study, over the past ten
years or so, have been transformed beyond recognition. Traditional disciplines such as English, or indeed my own discipline of Modern Languages
once squarely literaryhave recently widened their purview. And now the
novel, poetry, and drama vie for attention alongside a wealth of visual artifacts and practices such as film, TV, photography, painting, performance,
digital and virtual imaging, etc. In turn, changes in the objects of study have
necessitated shifts in the critical tools and modes of analysis required for
approaching them.
The emergence of the field of study known as visual culture has been
posited as a symptom of, and as a response to, the image-based contemporary cultural landscape that, it is claimed, we now inhabit, and which in turn
inhabits us. In the age of the world pictureto cite an essay by Heidegger
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(1977) that is often positioned as a pre-text in a growing theoretical corpus

the 1990s witnessed an explosion into print of anthologies, readers, and
introductions whose express aim has been to stake out the shifting visual
terrains of contemporary culture. In this busy marketplace, the major academic publishers have issued an array of remarkably similar titles that jostle for our attention: Routledges The Visual Culture Reader (1998), not to be
confused with Sages Visual Culture: The Reader (1999); or Oxfords Practices
of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2001), as distinct from another
Routledge title, An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999); or, most recently
and simply, Politys Visual Culture (2003). That this list is by no means
exhaustive indicates that visual culture is out there and, for better or worse,
resolutely with us at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
To be sure, the rise of visual culture is a relatively new, progressive, and
potentially exciting endeavor. Visual culture, as an object of study, not only
provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary image cultures that are
purported to be increasingly part of everyday human experience. As a critical practice that comes in the wake of, and builds upon, the methodologies
of cultural studies and queer, postcolonial, and feminist theory, among other
radical interventions into the humanities, the newness of visual culture also
promises to shed light on the pressing political concerns of the day from a
different perspective. Nevertheless, the existence of volumes such as those
listed above signal that visual culture is already beginning to establish certain orthodoxies. In this essay, therefore, my intention, in part, is to take
stock of the visual-culture phenomenon or movement (as object of study
and mode of analysis) as it has emerged so far.1 This is because, as an academic movement on the ascendant, in some of its guises, visual culture displays a tendency to proclaim itself as innovative and progressive, almost
utopianclaims that, on further scrutiny, may in fact prove problematic.
Visual culture, as proposed by some of its practitioners, promises to liberate us from the limitations of narrative and textuality, and to enable us to
account for visuality, if not necessarily in visual terms, then at least on the
visuals terms.2 Visual culture also purports to transcend the conventional
confines of disciplinarity, and depending on whose account you read, is an
inter-, trans-, or even post- disciplinary mode of inquiry. Most pressingly

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in the context of the current discussion, however, visual culture has come of
age as globalization is calling into question established national boundaries
and the allegiances that they foster. Images now circulate transnationally in
ways that were barely imaginable a mere 20 years ago. Emerging in tandem
with such developments, visual culture concerns itself to some considerable
degree with the issues that arise when images travel. Indeed, as W. J. T.
Mitchell (1994) states in a seminal essay: the need for a global critique of
visual culture seems inescapable (16). Or to put it in pragmatic terms, what
is at stake when, for example, the Mexican soap opera Los ricos tambin lloran (The Rich Also Cry) is broadcast in Russia and becomes one of the most
successful programs in that countrys television history?
The example of the Mexican soap opera is not fortuitous. For if my aim in
part is to take stock of visual culture studies, I do so as someone who is located
within a disciplinary contextalbeit an interdisciplinary onethat I will now
more concretely define as Latin American (cultural) studies. Having spent my
undergraduate years in the pre-visual modern-languages classroom I alluded
to earlier, and my postgraduate and postdoctoral career focusing on Mexican
photography and film, I find myself attracted to visual culture both as a useful label and as a compelling prospect. Visual culture seems to describe and to
embrace what I personally endeavor to do as a scholar who works with, but is
not located exclusively in, art history and film studies, most particularly
because its theoretical and methodological concerns chime with my own. At
the same time, however, visual culture as it is currently practiced leaves me
uneasy. My concerns revolve around what it has to say about, and what its
implications might be for, the study of the visual cultures and the cultures of
visuality of Latin America. As a mode of inquiry that is on the one hand overtly
concerned with the global flow of images, and on the other has explicitly made
the examination of its own categories of analysis part of its project, visual culture is nevertheless marked by blind spots that at present may render its discourses problematic beyond the Anglo-American contexts of its emergence.
In a nutshell, this essay seeks to problematize the relatively recent ascendance
of visual culture as an object of study and mode of scholarship by confronting
it with that which it ostensibly erases: its conceptual anchor in theories and
practices of colonialism and Eurocentrism.

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VISUAL CULTURE: A SNAPSHOT

This is not the place to offer a detailed overview of the emergence of the field
so far. It is already well documented elsewhere.3 Some preliminary remarks
are, nevertheless, in order. Visual culture involves an engagement with some
of the most disputed terms on the contemporary critical agenda, not least
culture itself.4 Taken at face value, visual culture describes contemporary
culture as quintessentially visual in nature to the degree that those other key
termsmodernity and postmodernityhave become watchwords in
the critical lexis of the field. It is with some trepidation, then, that I proffer
some preliminary and provisional pointers. On some level, the uneven shifts
that have taken place in the West and beyondtowards urban, secular societiesthat fall under the broad rubric of techno-industrial modernity, and
latterly its postmodern crisis, are inextricably bound up with the technologies of vision associated with the camera. The processes of mass dislocation
and alienation wrought by the effects of modernization, in this account, are
echoed in ruptures in modes of sensory perception, as the camera places as
sheer presence within the field of vision that which was inconceivable prior
to its appearance. In the West, we may take for granted the ultrasound
scan of the fetus in the womb and the living snapshot of a deceased relative.
Such imaging techniques are, however, modes of organizing vision that have
radically altered human experience of time, space, and memory: modes that
have become even more complex in the global age of transnational flows of
capital and culture.
As an interdisciplinary or, in its more utopian version, a post-disciplinary practice,5 this new field engages with the visual cultures of modernity
on a number of levels. It takes as its object the artifacts, technologies, and
institutions of visual representation as constituting arenas of negotiation
and exchange. It refuses to recognize conventional boundaries between different visual media and between elite and popular cultural products.
Furthermore, it eschews the forms of historical periodization and generic
classification associated with more traditional disciplines such as art history, placing an emphasis instead on the everyday encounters between viewing subjects and viewed objects. Such encounters often take place outside
the formal institutions of viewing, and are more often than not fleeting and

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fragmentary events in which meaning is generated and contested, and in

which identities come into existence. The visual is not, however, simply
understood as an object, medium, or relationship. It is also a tendency
within the cultures of modernity to articulate human experience in terms
that privilege the visual over other senses; the electrocardiograph that renders the audible visually is but one example of this tendency. A critical practice that installs the act of looking at the center of its operations, then, visual
culture recognizes that perception is both partial and interested. Deeply
concerned with the politics of vision, visual culture (in the words of Irit
Rogoff) as a transdisciplinary and cross-methodological field of inquiry
means nothing less and nothing more than an opportunity to reconsider
some of the present cultures thorniest problems from yet another angle
(1998, 16).
In this expository preamble, my aim has been to provide a broad sketch
of how this powerful new Anglo-American academic incarnation has
emerged, and to consider what some of its key concerns might be. In so
doing, however, it has not been my intention to suggest that the coordinates
of visual culture are in any sense fixed, or indeed that those engaged in the
field are necessarily in agreement on what it means to practice visual culture. Indeed, whatever else visual culture is at the present moment, many of
those involved in it are at pains to stress the provisional and changing status of the field. In short, despite the frantic scramble to map that bespeaks
its status as a hot commodity within the academic marketplace, visual culture is, as many of its practitioners claim, still emerging and therefore in
flux. Given, however, its avowed interest in the transnational flows of culture, what then does this academic phenomenon have to say about Latin
America?

LATIN AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURES AND

THE EURO-AMERICAN ACADEMY
Of all the material currently available in the visual-culture market, Nicholas
Mirzoeff s two books An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999) and The Visual
Culture Reader (1998) arguably have the most to say about Latin America,

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and will therefore be the primary focus of the comments that follow. In the
former single-authored volume, Mirzoeff demonstrates an awareness of
Latin American cultural criticism when, for instance, he draws on Fernando
Ortizs (1999) concept of transculturation, which he invokes in order to elaborate a theoretical framework that offers a way to analyze the hybrid,
hyphenated, syncretic global diaspora in which we live (131). Furthermore,
the subcontinent crops up in analysis throughout the book, particularly in
the chapters that fall in the section, simply called Culture, that explores the
relationship between visual culture and colonial and postcolonial societies.
Likewise, in the second edited volume, The Visual Culture Readera
companion text that brings together material published prior to the establishment of visual culture as a discrete field of studyessays by such recognized cultural critics of Latin America as Mary Louise Pratt, Coco Fusco,
Nstor Garca Canclini, and Oriana Baddeley sit alongside those by Michel
Foucault and Roland Barthes, among others. In addition, the opening section, Introductions/Provocations, comprises three essays that set out the
groundwork for the chapters that follow. Significantly, this section includes
a chapter by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Narrativizing Visual Culture:
Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics. Widely recognized for their cogent critique of Eurocentric tendencies within dominant discourse, these critics
offer an overtly Latin Americanist take on visual culture, in which, as
Mirzoeff himself notes in his introductory gloss, they take a look at visual
culture from the outside. Here they offer one means of reconceptualizing
visual culture that moves away from the Euramerican progression of realism/modernism/postmodernism to a polycentric, globalized field of study.
The need to abandon this Eurocentric modernist version of history is perhaps the greatest single challenge for the emerging practice of visual culture
(Mirzoeff 1998, 11).
These are, of course, welcome developments. In fact, as far as the subcontinent is concerned, Mirzoeff s interventions are noteworthy. Not only
do they include discussions of Latin American cultural artifacts and issues,
and contributions by Latin Americanist cultural critics; what also distinguishes Mirzoeff s approach is his own declaration that At present, it must
be recognized that visual culture remains a discourse of the West about the

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West. . . . In short, the success or failure of visual culture may well depend
on its ability to think transculturally, oriented to the future, rather than take
the rear-mirror anthropological approach to culture as tradition (1998, 11).
In what we can assume is a tactic designed, if not yet to produce, then at
least to approximate such a non-Eurocentric discoursefor want of a better termMirzoeff argues that it is now time to leave aside the strategic
essentialism advocated by critics such as Spivak in the 1980s. A maneuver
that sought to render visible and make good the erasures and omissions of
traditional criticism from which non-white and non-Western cultures had
been excluded, strategic essentialism has now been consigned to an earlier
moment in the history of cultural theory.
Instead, Mirzoeff advocates the difficult step of moving beyond such
essentialism towards an understanding of the plural realities that coexist and
are in conflict with each other both in the present and in the past (1999, 25;
emphasis added). In order to conceptualize his goal, he employs a mathematical metaphor of culture understood as what, following Martin J. Powers,
he terms a fractal network. Such an approach to culture, suggests Mirzoeff,
precludes any possibility that any one overarching narrative can contain all
the possibilities of the new global/local system, for fractals may always be
extended (25). And indeed, Mirzoeff s own critical practice in both volumes
would seem to reflect an attempt to construct just such an inclusive fractal
network. Attentive to the plays of power that traverse the network, Mirzoeff s
wide-ranging discussion views visual culture as a global phenomenon: a phenomenon with, at first sight, a multiplicity of centers.
As Latin America is an area that has tended to be marginalized within
mainstream cultural theory, Mirzoeff s attention to it is, on one level, to be
applauded.6 At the same time, however, I detect a tension between the polycentric approach to visual culture that roves freely through the worlds image
fields, and this post-disciplines acknowledged status as a discourse of the
West about the West. It strikes me that with visual culture as it is currently
practiced, we may be up against an imperial center: that center which displaces itself while remaining the same, always becoming more central, more
hidden (McQuire 1998, 8). Before visual culture ventures onto non-Western
terrains, the foundations of the field, I want to suggest, require further

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scrutiny.7 For all that Mirzoeff appears to be aware of (and warns against)
the dangers of imposing an overarching narrative grid on the vast visual terrain he surveys, his own critical practice, almost despite himself, runs the
risk of doing precisely that. Visual culture, as it emerges as a global phenomenon in Mirzoeff s account, is organized around a fault line, on one side
of which is a past dominated by the text, and on the other side a present
and future in which the image promises to take over. In this way, visual culture conforms to a formula for thinking about the visuality of contemporary
culture that James Elkins (2003) puts in the following terms:
In the rush to accept the idea that our culture is the most visual, some
authors have been misread. Mitchells catchphrases, such as the pictorial
turn and picture theory, have gained wide currency, and when they appear
out of context they can seem to stand for the idea that we are a mainly pictorial society, which is not exactly what Mitchell actually claims. He says, for
example, that spectatorship may be as deep a problem as reading, and that
visual literacy might not be fully explicable in the model of textuality.8 (129)

There is, however, more to this text-image fault line in Mirzoeff s account.
For this fault line intersects with a particular chronological formation which
is put in the following terms in An Introduction: visualizing [i.e., pictures
themselves and experience as it is understood pictorially] makes the modern period radically different from the ancient and medieval worlds
(Mirzoeff 1999, 6). And, in what is, in effect, substantively the same introductory material, Mirzoeff makes this claim even more explicitly in the
Reader: This visualizing makes the modern period radically different from
the ancient and medieval world in which the world was understood as a
book (1998, 6). In this way, the tendency to visualize experience is set up as
that which distinguishes the modern and the postmodern from the premodern. There are a number of troubling assumptions that underpin such
observations here and elsewhere in the texts that trace the new visual culture: assumptions that reveal how deeply Eurocentric thinking permeates
the conceptual paradigms of the visual-culture terrain. I wish to unpack
these assumptions in the form of an interrelated series of questions and

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doubts that will serve as a base from which to launch a discussion of visual
culture as it might tentatively be envisioned from the context of Latin
American studies. These questions are the following:
1. What is the logic behind constructing visual culture as a radically new
critical practice, limited by acknowledged Eurocentric foundations? If
visual culture is to fulfill its radical promise, surely it is time to challenge
and critique the Eurocentric assumptions that underpin its foundations
before the methodological and theoretical orthodoxies that are fast developing within the field become too firmly entrenched.
2. If, as is claimed, visualizing is a phenomenon linked to the modern/postmodern moment, in the polycentric approach to culture, do such categories run the danger of becoming understood as historically and
culturally undifferentiated events? For a start, the very notion of modernity inevitably imposes a teleological narrative about Western European
dominance. Indeed, scholars working in the field of Latin American studies have forcefully argued that neither modernity nor postmodernity are
homogenized or uniformly experienced phenomena. Rather, they are subject to geographical, cultural, and historical contingencies.9
3. Is visual culture so dazzled by the visuality of contemporary global culture
that it has become blind to older genealogies of vision both in the West
and also, more importantly, elsewhere? Critics in the visual-culture field
stress the need to historicize questions of vision and visuality, but does
history currently have a real role to play in the visual-culture project?10
4. In the focus on visual culture and its powerful and pervasive presence
within modern and postmodern configurations of experience, do practitioners overstate the case for the ideological freight of the contemporary
image in everyday visual encounters? While it would be foolhardy to deny
the exponential explosion of what might be called the technical and cultural mediation of visual experience (Jay 2002, 271), it would be equally
shortsighted to ignore the role of visual communication in older historical and geopolitical settings.
5. What, moreover, are the ramifications of the text/image fault line? Let us
leave aside, for the moment, the troubling and inaccurate claim that the

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ancient and medieval worlds were conceptualized as books, although we

might legitimately ask: For whom was the world a book? What was a
book? What exactly was the world? And also, can we know exactly what
constituted an image?11 This chronological and conceptual fault line
serves to reinforce a reductive binary opposition that cuts to the quick of
debates around visual culture, and turns on historically and culturally
contingent terms of reference.

In a nutshell, in its endeavors to stake a claim for its newness and difference from neighboring disciplines, does what Jay (2002) aptly terms the
visual-culture juggernaut elide the breaks, ruptures, and differences that
inevitably mark the histories of visuality understood as global phenomena?
In order to start to suggest answers to these questions, I now want to sketch
out a scenario that calls into question the notion that Latin American visual
cultures can simply be mapped as fractals onto the paradigms that are
emerging in this new field. The scenario I have in mind involves taking the
long view ofor, if you like, a sideways look atdebates in the study of Latin
American cultural history.12 In the following sections of this discussion, I
wish to read Walter Mignolos account of colonial semiosis in tandem with
Serge Gruzinskis analysis of image wars and the construction of the colonial cultural imaginary in Mexico. I must stress that I take the long view as
a fascinated onlooker through the lens of contemporary visual culture, my
aim being to unsettle some of the assumptions that undergird this project
as it is currently practiced.

LOOKING AT VISUAL CULTURE OTHERWISE

In an age driven by the development of a globalized system of capital, in the
words of Scott McQuire, Rapid circulation of people and products is today
counterpointed by the rapid circulation of images and representations
(McQuire 1998, 6). If, however, visuality and globalization are bound together
within the cultural economy as specifically contemporary phenomena,
Shohat and Stam (2000) usefully remind us that:

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What is often forgotten is that globalization is not a new phenomenon; it

forms part of the much longer history of colonialism going at least as far
back as 1492. Columbus, in this sense, performed the founding gesture of
globalization. Although colonization per se pre-dated European colonialism,
what was new in European colonialism was its planetary reach, its affiliation
with global institutional power, and its imperative mode, its attempted submission of the world to a single universal regime of truth and power. (384)

Significantly, this earlier global moment is also one in which the charged and
ambivalent issues of visuality (and its other, textuality) that have so captivated the contemporary (Western) gaze have dramatic resonances.13
Issues of textuality and visuality are a central concern in Walter
Mignolos important study The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995), which
explores the interrelationships between literacy, territorialization, and colonization. Although Mignolo comes at the colonial encounter through the
prism of writing, his work also raises pertinent questions about the status
and significance of visual systems of communication within pre- and postcontact societies: questions that may serve to unsettle the neat chronological/cultural divisions that structure contemporary debates in visual culture.
In the introduction to his volume, Mignolo argues for a field of study he calls
colonial semiosis, and which, like the related field colonial discourse, is
concerned with the relationship between discourse and power in colonial
situations. Unlike colonial discoursea term that is, according to Mignolo,
limited to oral and written interactionssemiosis stretches beyond the latter to take into account semiotic relationships between different writing
systems, such as the Latin Alphabet introduced by the Spaniards, the pictoideographic writing system of Meso-American cultures and the quipus of
colonial Peru (Mignolo 1995, 7).
Mignolo traces the confluence of, on the one hand, the expulsion of the
Moors from the Iberian Peninsula followed by the expansion and consolidation of the Spanish empire, and on the other, the appearance of Elio Antonio
de Nebrijas grammar of Castilian in 1492 and rules of orthography in 1517. In
so doing, he underlines how the dual ideological function of alphabetic

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script was to tame the voice and to subjugate a conquered peoplea people without letters and, in the eyes of the Europeans, therefore without
memory and without history. What the Spanish could not fully comprehend,
however, was that alphabetic writing was not the only way of encoding and
transmitting knowledge, and that, for example, the Mexicas (Aztecs)
recorded and disseminated information regarding the past pict-orally.
That is to say, the Nahuatl-speaking people painted signs on material surfaces known as amoxtli that functioned as visual triggers for scholars whose
role it was to interpret them aloud to an audience. The visual was linked
but not reducible to oral communication, for the act of interpretation
required the interpreter to embellish and expand the story. The Spanish and
the Mexicas therefore not only had different ways of encoding knowledge
textually versus visuallybut they also had different concepts of the activities of reading and writing, which in the latter context are more
accurately described as looking at and telling. In the words of Mignolo,
Mexicas put an accent on the act of observing and telling out loud the stories of what they were looking at (movements of the sky or the black and the
red ink). Spaniards stressed reading the word rather than reading the world,
and made the letter the anchor of knowledge and understanding (Mignolo
1995, 105).
Mignolos study demonstrates how, with the spread of Western literacy
in the sixteenth century, categories that were in effect historically and
regionally contingentnamely, reading, writing, and their material base, the
bookserved to erase or to deny as coeval other systems of encoding and
transmitting knowledge. With the rise of European power, reading, writing,
and the book parted company with their regional status in a process whereby
regional values became universalized markers by which other cultures were
to be measured. If we effect a shift whereby we view visual culture as a contemporary Anglo-American construct from the colonial periphery, the basic
premises on which the field is founded, most notably its insistence on a textual versus visual divide, begin to look decidedly shaky. To put it bluntly, in
pre-contact, premodern Mexica societies, the world was not understood
as a book, because books are Western, regional codifications of knowledge
and simply did not exist.14

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If Mignolo comes at the colonial scene via questions of writing, Serge

Gruzinski foregrounds the equally crucial issue, in that context, of visual
representation. And if Mignolos work reveals the historical and cultural contingency of key terms that frame debates in visual culture, Gruzinskis may
put the contemporary emphasis on the ideological burden of visual representation into historical perspective. In his recently translated study The
Image at War (2000), the French ethnohistorian focuses on modalities of
vision and visualizing in the processes of conquest and colonization
processes involving an encounter between cultures with radically different
forms of imagining and imaging their worlds. The central but contested
position occupied by the image in these processes is summarized in the following terms in the introduction:
For spiritual reasons (the imperatives of evangelization), linguistic reasons
(the obstacles of many indigenous languages), and technical reasons (the diffusion of the printing press and the rise of engraving), the image exerted a
remarkable influence on the discovery, conquest and colonization of the New
World in the sixteenth century. Because the imagealong with the written
wordconstitutes one of the major tools of European culture, the gigantic
enterprise of Westernization that swooped down upon the American continent became in part a war of images that perpetuated itself for centuries
andaccording to all indicationsmay not even be over today. (12)

Gruzinskis ensuing analysis of the role of the visual image in the contact
zone is richly complex and, in particular, privileges the baroque image as a
disputed form within the sphere of religion. Through this prism, Gruzinski
examines the Spaniards violent iconoclastic destruction of the
Amerindians idols, and the clash between fundamentally different gazes
and systems of visual representation: the Amerindian gaze that did not recognize a split between signifier and signified, and the European gaze that
did. He explores the Spaniards colonizing zeal that led to their attempt to
repress the preexisting traditions and to saturate the visual domain of the
New World with a Western, Catholic iconography and mode of visualizing the world. In an encounter in which images had the power to convey

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meaning across linguistic boundaries, Gruzinski foregrounds the experience of rupture arising from accommodations between Europeans and
Amerindians that were negotiated through and registered in the emerging
colonial imaginary.
This is the most fleeting of snapshots and cannot even start to capture
the complexities of Gruzinskis exploration of the decisive role of visual culture in colonial relations. I offer the snapshot, however, to signal that
Gruzinskis analysis is highly suggestive in the present context, for there are
a number of points of convergence between the contemporary fascination
with images and their meaningsa fascination that has spawned the field
of study called visual cultureand this older colonial scene. First, the
period of industrial modernity (understood here as rooted in the technological changes that have taken place over the last two centuries in the developed West) does not have a privileged purchase on the image as a site
overburdened by ideology. The power/knowledge quotient that W. J. T.
Mitchell (1994) perceives in contemporary visual culture, a culture that is
too deeply embedded in technologies of desire, domination, and violence . . .
to be ignored (24), is palpably registered in colonial-looking relations which
are equally shot through with these attributes, and which may not, after all,
be so exclusively modern.15
Indeed, colonial image wars provide a graphic alternative context in
which to challenge visual cultures fetishization of the contemporary image
as a place where meanings are created and contested (Mirzoeff 1999, 6).
Given the complexity and diversity of the Amerindian cultures, the struggle
by the Europeans to impose their own frame of reference on the preexisting
visual cultures of the New World was inevitably fragmentary; the image
was the ultimate site for power and resistance. What emerged from the
process was an essentially composite, transcultural imaginary that fused
elements from both the European and the multiple indigenous systems of
representation. Moreover, image wars that raged in the colonial context
were part of everyday experience, in a sphere that was radically transformed
in the wake of the destructive first waves of iconoclasm. In this process of
transformation, the visual image was crucial in mediating the rupture that
occurred in the way people saw and experienced the world, themselves, and

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others in the (new) world. Finally, although the war of images that was
unleashed in the colonial period was to a large degree centered upon religious iconography, Gruzinskis study nevertheless has repercussions for an
understanding of visual cultures produced in the more secular contemporary era. This is because his analysis establishes a historical context in which
to explore the power relations that underpin visual images that circulate in
contemporary Mexico, and that play a fundamental role in the formation of
cultural identities in the region. Indeed, the connection between contemporary visual culture as that which exists on a continuum with the war of
images that was perpetuated for centuries and which today in no way
appears to have concluded is made absolutely explicit in the books subtitle,
From Christopher Columbus to Blade Runner, 14922019.
By mobilizing The Image at War and The Darker Side of the Renaissance
in the context of my raid on the conceptual terrain of visual culture, my aim
has been to take this new field of inquiry to task from the perspective of
Latin American studies. In so doing, I must stress that my own critical practice is not exempt from charges of Eurocentrism. After all, the cultural and
theoretical paradigms on which I have elaborated my critique are themselves
the products of a Latin Americanism as practiced through the U.S. academic
publishing market.16 Nor, in my insistence upon the colonial past, has my
intention been to elide important distinctions in modes of visual communication that have undoubtedly wrought massive transformations over the
past two hundred years. In the modern age, the impact on human experience
of time and space made by the contemporary ubiquity and speed of the
visual image, coupled with the power of the gaze to penetrate further than
ever before, cannot be overstated. What I would argue, however, is that the
dazzling globalized terrain of contemporary image cultures is underpinned
by geopolitical contours and archaeological strata. If visual culture is ever to
overcome its current status as a discourse of the West about the West, it will
need to attend to these contours and strata. By starting to look at the contemporary visual turn through the perspective of Latin American colonial
studies, two issues become clear. First, it is time to give some more thought
to the conceptual categories on which visual culture is currently founded. It
is not enough to map Latin America (or, I suspect, other geopolitical

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locations) as fractals onto unproblematized Western definitions of textual

and visual representation. As Mignolos study of the colonial scene demonstrates, such definitions are woefully inadequate. Second, the shattered fragments and the dislocations that have become the hallmarks of modern and
postmodern cultures and are bound up with technologies of vision have
important yet overlooked antecedents in this earlier colonial scene. As
Gruzinskis analysis reveals, issues of vision and visuality are equally central
factors in the violent rupture of the colonial encounter. In short, if the success of visual culture depends on its ability to think transculturally, oriented
to the future (Mirzoeff 1998, 10), that future, I suspect, may lie in paying
closer attention to a pre- and postcolonial past.

NOTES
I would like to thank Jens Andermann, Alex Hughes, and Jonathan Long for taking the time to
read and comment on this essay, and the British Academy for generous financial support to
deliver a version of this essay at the Federacin Internacional de Estudios sobre Amrica Latina
y el Caribe (FIEALC), Osaka, Japan, in September 2003.
1.

Bal (2003) provisionally terms visual culture a movement, noting that Like all movements, it may die soon, or it may have a long and productive life (6). In the context of
the present discussion, I see visual culture as a term that refers to both the object of
study (visuality) and the methodologies of study of that object. Like other commentators, I feel skeptical about visual culture as an academic phenomenon, and in this sense
my intervention here forms part of a wider critical questioning of the emergence of
visual culture that is taking place in a range of publications. In addition to Bal, see, for
example, Jay (2002), Mitchell (2002), and Elkins (2003).

2.

See Bal (2003) for a critique of what she terms the visual essentialism of visual culture that would divorce or isolate the visual from the rest of culture.

3.

In addition to the glut of introductions and readers mentioned above, discussion of

what it means to do visual culture is also taking place in new publications, such as
the Journal of Visual Culture, Visual Studies, and Visual Communication. The first chapter of James Elkinss Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (2003) offers an invaluable
and comprehensive overview of the field, its institutional locations at an international
level, and its publications.

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4.
5.

235

See Sousloff (1996) for a cogent overview of the evolution of the word culture.
Nicholas Mirzoeff (1999) is one of the critics who make the claim for visual cultures
post-disciplinary status, which he defines in the following terms: It is true that visual
culture will not sit comfortably in already existing university structures. It is part of an
emerging body of post-disciplinary academic endeavors from cultural studies, gay and
lesbian studies to African-American studies, and so on, whose focus crosses the borders of traditional academic disciplines at will. In this sense, visual culture is a tactic,
not an academic discipline. It is a fluid interpretive structure, centered on understanding the response to visual media of both individuals and groups. Its definitions
come from the questions it asks and the issues it seeks to raise (4). For reasons that
will become clear below, I have reservations about the utopian thrust of the notion of
post-disciplinarity.

6.

Robert Young (1995) makes this point in the context of a critique of colonial discourse
analysis. He asks: To what extent is colonial discourse itself a legitimate category? It
is hard to avoid the accusation that there is a certain idealism involved in its use as a
way of dealing with the totality of discourses of and about colonialism. If this has not
been over-apparent it is because the dominance in recent years of India as object of
attention among those working in the fieldand therefore not surprisingly in the work
done by themhas meant that there has been a noticeable geographical homogenization of the history of colonialism. But does the fact that modern colonialism was
effected by European or European derived powers mean that the discourse of colonialism operated everywhere in a similar enough way for the theoretical paradigms of
colonial-discourse analysis to work equally well for them all? (164) This is surely a
timely and welcome intervention. However, Young then goes on: South America, where
many states achieved independence in the early nineteenth century, would be only the
most obvious example of a region where colonialism has a very different history from
that of, say, India which the British left only in 1947. Young, of course, has a valid point.
But what exactly does he mean when he uses the label South America? For more on the
postcolonial debate and Latin America, see de Toro and de Toro (1999).

7.

The matter of Latin Americas geopolitical status is complex. As anthropologist/historian Claudio Lomnitz has argued, Latin Americas status as Western or non-Western
is ambiguous, and it thus falls short in providing a radical sense of alterity for
Europeans. Thus, the continent has not usually been cast in the role that the Orient,
Africa, or Oceania have played in the Western imaginary . . . Mexico and Latin America
have much more often been portrayed by Europeans and Americans as backward than
as radically different (Lomnitz 2001, 127). I therefore use the term Western with
some caution, although I do wish to insist on the radical difference of its pre-Hispanic
cultural traditions.

8.

Elkins is, of course, referring here to Mitchells seminal essay Picture Theory (1994).

9.

On the matter of Latin America and (post)modernity see Beverley, Oviedo, and Aronna

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(1995). See also Schelling (2000) for a cogent introduction to the experience of modernity in Latin America.
10.

See Jonathan Crary (1990) for an important study that seeks to establish a historical

11.

I have found Carolyn Deans work on the paintings depicting Corpus Christi in colonial

genealogy of visuality.
Cuzco richly suggestive in formulating this question. Analyzing the encounter between
Andean and Spanish traditions of visual representation, Dean (1999) notes that there
was no Inca tradition of mimetic representation: the powerful essences of ruler (rather
than their superficial form) were housed in (rather than recorded on) rocks and/or bundles of their bodily excrescences (e.g., their hair and nails); these were referred to as
their wawkis (huaques), or brother. In part because wawkis and mummies of the royal
deceased were revered, kept, and treated as though they were still animate or capable
of imminent animation, there was no Andean tradition of sublimational image-making
because there was no absence to disavow (114).
12.

Latin American history is a field that is itself experiencing a new and hotly debated cultural turn. See, for example, Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 2 (1999) for a
collection of wonderfully polemical interventions into the new cultural turn in Mexican
historiography.

13.

I am aware that such a definition is the subject of some considerable controversy (see,
for example, Garca Canclini [1999, 45]). I find it helpful to take the long view of the
phenomenon of globalization as a tactic to counter the insistence on the difference and
newness of contemporary global cultures that is part of the visual culture project.

14.

Significantly, as a critic attentive to the Eurocentrism of visual culture, Elkins (2003),

asking if visual culture can ever be truly multicultural, picks up on the relevance of
Mesoamerica for the field. Within Mayan studies, a tremendous amount remains to be
done to understand how a Mayan viewer would make his or her way through a complex image made of mingled words (glyphs) and images (148). While this comment is
no doubt valid, it strikes me that more could be said.

15.

I am not arguing here that Mitchell himself suggests that the pictorial turn is unique
to the contemporary cultural moment. Indeed, he has recently taken to task those who
would misread his essay: The fallacy of a pictorial turn. Since this is a phrase that I
have coined . . . Ill try to set the record straight on what I mean by it. First I did not
mean to make the claim that the modern era is unique or unprecedented in its obsession with vision and visual representation. My aim was to acknowledge the perception
of a turn to the visual or to the image as a commonplace, a thing that is said casually
and unreflectively about our time, and is usually greeted with unreflective assent both
by those who like the idea and those who hate it. But the pictorial turn is a trope, a
figure of speech, that has been repeated many times since antiquity (Mitchell 2002,
173; emphasis in the original).

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16.

237

Gruzinski is a French scholar whose work has been translated widely into both English
and Spanish. Mignolo is an Argentine based in the U.S. academy. James Elkins (2003)
muses on what a truly multicultural practice of visual studies might look like: First,
it should include substantial numbers of scholars interested in objects other than
Western ones: that is increasingly the case, even though non-Western subjects are still
in a tiny minority. A consistently multicultural practice should also be open to texts
that cross two more lines, becoming non-Western not only in subject matter but in the
theories that serve as models and in the form of the writing itself (112). If we accept
this definition, my own critical practice only passes the Elkins test on the first criterion. I would argue, however, that the issue of a truly multicultural practice of visual
studies requires considerably more debate.

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