Agnes Lugo-Ortiz

Friday, 14 June 2013, 6-7.30pm, Keynes Library (Room 114), School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, Cambridge UP, 2013) is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe’s full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, ‘slave’ and ‘portraiture’ as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave’s body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. On the occasion of the publication of this book, co-editor Agnes Lugo-Ortiz will reflect upon the intellectual concerns that gave birth to the project and the inquiries it engages, the conceptual challenges that emerge from the juxtaposition of these seemingly antithetical notions of ‘enslavement’ and ‘portraiture,’ as well as the questions that remain to be pursued.

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures at the University of Chicago.  Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she obtained her BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. She is the author of Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba, 1860-1898) (University of Puerto Rico Press, 1999) and co-editor of Herencia: The Anthology of US Hispanic Writing (Oxford UP, 2001), En otra voz: Antología de la Literatura Hispana de los Estados Unidos, and Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, volume V (both with Arte Público Press, 2002 and 2006 respectively), as well as of numerous essays on nineteenth- and twentieth -centuries on Latin American and Caribbean literatures. She is currently working on a book-length project on the visual culture of slavery in colonial Cuba (specifically from 1727 to 1886—the dates that frame the emergence and final collapse of the large slaveholding plantations system on the island), underlining its transamerican and transatlantic connections.