Colonial Genealogies and Conceptual Reconstruction in the Americas

This article is part of a series of responses to Episode 2.5 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.

In Episode 2.5 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast, Chris Nygren and Ryan McDermott take us on a fascinating journey through an important period in eighteenth century Spanish–American art with their exploration of the casta painting genre. As they say, these images are doing the real work of “constructing and imposing identities” that charged the social and political imaginary of their viewers, since the production of racial categories was, ultimately, a means of asserting and maintaining a hierarchy of power that was necessary for the colonial project.

As we learn in this podcast, within the colonial context, casta paintings were instruments of state power. And yet, the podcast closes with a compelling meditation on the effects of time and the changing of meanings. What was once an instrument of colonial dominance has become, centuries later, a source of identity for a racial diaspora throughout Latin America and even a source of familial identity. Ilona Katzew, an expert in the casta painting genre and head of the Department of Latin American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum, describes the surprising nature of contemporary responses to this colonial genre of painting in the podcast: “for today’s viewers, the pictures are quite striking because… people see themselves represented in these works… They portray my family or people I know.” It is no wonder, then, that these paintings serve to better understand the complexity of the region’s past and all the people who played a role in shaping it. They are a form of genealogical history through their commitment to representative depictions categorizing people.

Luis de Mena, casta painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, (1750)

This case study exemplifies what we call “genealogies of modernity,” since the idea behind the casta paintings was not unique to the period. Categorizing these myriad peoples into neat slots during the eighteenth century required, in the minds of Spaniards, going back to the sixteenth century for sources. Thus, the racial categories of the Spanish colonies were not quite so modern; rather, as the Podcast shows, “they were just an adaptation of a genealogical conception of inheritance that had already been in Spain for hundreds of years.”

The important analysis on sixteenth century Spanish conceptions of religious inheritance notwithstanding, Chris and Ryan remind us that what sparked this genealogical foray was an Enlightenment project bent on understanding the complexity of different peoples in a neat, categorical way. What we discover from this episode on Spanish–American art history is that the Enlightenment, modernity, and colonialism are intricately entangled in ways that we are just beginning to discuss and unpack. Grappling with this fact is necessary for a more nuanced and complete understanding of modernity, but does this necessarily mean eschewing the Enlightenment and its ideas? Perhaps not, and the reason can be found in historical study.

An implicit point in this excellent episode is that, often in history, harmful ideas are creatively reconstructed by thinkers and actors who adapt them to new circumstances and contexts. This change takes place in ways that we cannot foresee but only appreciate in retrospect. The meanings of concepts evolve through this process of reconstruction. 

Allow me to elaborate through a parallel example in Latin American intellectual history. Since Enlightenment thought lingered in Spanish America beyond its visual art, we can apply the Podcast’s important insights about the casta genre to the area of political and social thought by looking at a particular instance in which the same method of conceptual reconstruction was used to absorb and counter certain Enlightenment tropes that lingered in the region. Here, I want to introduce the concepts of the noble savage and of barbarism.

Before the Wars of Spanish–American Independence (1809–1825), the writings of thinkers like Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Raynal were widely read by Spanish Americans. These thinkers, moreover, incorporated a language of savagery and barbarism in their writings while referencing the Americas. Their use of these concepts in the eighteenth century to describe Indigenous Americans instilled the view that these societies were savage and barbarous. They turned such cultures into a pre-civilizational ideal that was praised by those who thought European society had become far too decadent and derided by those who understood colonialism to be a civilizing project.

Despite these concepts entering the Americas in the eighteenth century, the conversation about barbarism and savagery did not end when these colonies achieved independence from Spain. It is in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—post-independence—that the notions of savagery and barbarism reemerged in a range of meaningful and new ways. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, in his famous 1845 novel, Facundo, reinterprets the civilization/barbarism binary by lifting it out of the Old World–New World dichotomy and applying it to people of his own native Argentina who were opposed to development and progress. Another case of creative reconstruction comes from Jose Enrique Rodo, whose novel Ariel, published in 1900, turns the conception of the savage upside down by describing European and North American society as barbaric because they were, in his view, materialistic and utilitarian. Later in the twentieth century, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade cites Montaigne and Rousseau’s “natural man” in his 1928 “Cannibalist Manifesto,” which creatively reconstructs savagery and barbarism by calling for an artistic revival in Brazilian culture through the figurative act of “cannibalizing” other cultures. To be sure, all of these examples are but a sample of a broader discourse in Latin American thought on barbarism and savagery, but their range demonstrates the multiple directions in which colonial concepts were creatively reconstructed. In each instance, a genealogy can be traced back to the colonial imposition of the label “savage,” which each thinker reinterprets according to the conditions of his time.

This method of seeking a recourse in history, namely through the traditions of one’s own culture, and imbuing colonial concepts with new meanings, is integral for the formation of a later Latin American identity. We might expand this example to submit that the act of conceptual reconstruction and the eventual evolution of concepts is a natural consequence of critically engaging with the past, be it through genealogical study or historical study. Still, we must acknowledge that it is not a perfect process: all the thinkers mentioned just before are still grappling with this controversial concept of barbarism, and in some instances even perpetuating it. What genealogies like these demonstrate is that the Enlightenment’s roots in the colonial world, including that of Spanish America, cannot be removed; rather, they can only be reimagined. Such moments of conceptual reconstruction, like what we see in the contemporary reception of casta paintings, demonstrate that the passage of time brings forth new meanings, and with those new meanings, new realities.

Nayeli Riano is a doctoral candidate in Political Theory at Georgetown University. Her dissertation connects the Enlightenment discourse on civilization and barbarism with the development of these concepts in Latin American political thought. She previously studied intellectual history at the University of St Andrews (MLitt) and English at the University of Pennsylvania (BA).