Articles

Images of Whiteness: The Presence of Absence

Join us for the presentation and discussion of Lilia Moritz Schwarcz's latest book, Images of Whiteness: The Presence of Absence (2024), moderated by Mauricio Acuña and Ingrid Brioso Rieumont. A former Guggenheim Fellow and a leading Brazilian scholar, Schwarcz is renowned for her work in the history of transatlantic slavery, comparative race relations, the Brazilian Empire, visual culture, academic art, and anthropology. In this book, she offers a profound analysis of Brazilian iconographies that spans from the 16th century to the present.

Schwarcz examines a wide range of Brazilian imagery—from maps and public monuments to photographs and advertisements—revealing how these visuals have been shaped by deeply ingrained racist ideologies. More than an iconographic study, the book traces the long history of how whiteness has been symbolically constructed, reinforcing systems of racial hierarchy and subordination. Central to her argument is the concept of the pervasive yet absent racial presence of white people in these records, reinforcing their aesthetic dominance as the norm.

This event will provide a space to engage with Schwarcz's thought-provoking analysis, fostering an understanding of how visual culture in Brazil has influenced perceptions of race and power.

 

Thursday, April 17

4:30-6:00 pm

Rockefeller 003

 

Lilia Schwarcz is a Full Professor of Anthropology at the University of São Paulo and a Visiting Professor at Princeton University. She is the author of Brazilian Authoritarianism: Past and Present (Princeton University Press, 2022), Spectacle of Races: Scientists, Institutions, and Racial Theories in Brazil at the End of the 19th Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), The Emperor's Beard: D. Pedro II, a Tropical King (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), and Brazil: A Biography (with Heloisa Starling, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Penguin UK, 2018). Schwarcz curated the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibition, featured at the National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles, and Houston. She has received numerous honors, including being a Guggenheim Fellow (2006/2007), a John Carter Brown Library Fellow (2007), and a Tinker Professor at Columbia University (2008). Recently, she was elected an "Immortal" to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, the prestigious institution founded by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis in 1897.

 

This event is sponsored by the Leslie Center and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.