Representing Latin America through Pre-Columbian Art

Abstract

Latin America has often been represented by images of pre-Columbian artifacts and artwork on book covers and in other printed materials produced by Latin American studies. This article tries to show that there are strong connections between this type of representation and the semantics of Latin America both in everyday English language and in the discourses of the social sciences. First, the author reviews the history of the concept of Latin America in everyday English language, showing how it has been defined as the opposite of a glorified collective self-image of America, in cultural, temporal, and racial terms. Next, chief approaches of Latin American studies (modernization theory, studies of corporatism, and the present-day textbook literature) are examined, focusing on how social scientific discourses have defined Latin America. Before returning to the topic of pre-Columbian representation, the covers of the best-selling present-day textbooks are surveyed to show how these pictorial representations reproduce the cultural and temporal perceptions of otherness already present in the texts, plus a racial perception that is mostly absent in them. The author argues that the pre-Columbian representation reproduces the three aspects of Latin America’s othering in a powerful and synthetic way. Last, the results of the present analysis are evaluated in the light of some contributions to postcolonial theory, visual culture studies and picture theory.