"Here is the Evidence": Arturo Alfonso Schomburg's Black Countervisuality

Abstract

This essay explores Arturo Alfonso Schomburg's relationship to the arts and the visual more generally. It argues that despite Schomburg's fundamental association with the printed word, the visual is an equally significant dimension in several key ways. Not only did Schomburg collect art and promote artists, the scope of Schomburg's work was focused on making Black humanity visible and disrupting the processes through which Blacks are disappeared from the historical record and collective memory. Moreover, Schomburg gathered books and other objects to enable a specific form of Black countervisuality that affirmed both the Black subject's desire to be seen and the "right to look." The visual is also at the heart of Schomburg's "Afro-Hispanic turn," an epistemological revolt through which Schomburg strove to render Hispanic Caribbean and Spanish Blacks visible to challenge intra-Black hierarchies, open new geographies for Blackness, and tell a different story of Black globality, including his own place in it.