Visuality as a Purveyor of Truth

Abstract

The Optic of the State: Visuality and State Violence in Argentina and Brazil. By Jens Andermann. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. 256 pp., $27.95 paper (ISBN: 978-0822959724). Travelers to Latin America are often struck by the overwhelming visual inscription of national history onto public spaces routinely visited by urban and rural residents. Towns, neighborhoods, avenues, schools, and subway stops recall the names of generals whose statues cast shadows over plazas, and whose military adventures are venerated by spectators in museums. National history thus visualized is made to feel inescapable, natural, chronological and ancient even though the events depicted date only from the last decades of the nineteenth century. One-hundred years after the Latin American states had consolidated in the 1880s, comparative studies of nation formation began to unravel the reasons that the nation had held a mysterious and powerful grip over its citizens for a century. Three studies published in 1983 marked out new paths for a historicized interpretation of the nation. If Ernest Gellner (1983) focused on the modernity of the nation and its relationship to industrialization, Benedict Anderson (1983) explored the role of print capitalism in convincing citizens to imagine themselves as a community, and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) analyzed traditions that made citizens feel the nation was ancient. In the Latin American context, Doris Sommers (1991) revealed the allegorical strategies borrowed from family romance that convinced readers of nineteenth-century foundational fictions to desire a certain type of new national community. The most exciting recent scholarship on the nation has challenged readers to move beyond print sources, offering insights from popular culture, media studies and visual anthropology. Ariel de La Fuente (2000), for example, recently explained the nature of the charisma of caudillos or traditional regional power brokers by analyzing the lyrics of songs and the legends recalled in oral culture, and John Mraz (1997) had made a similar claim for film's unique capacity to represent charisma through a visual focus on …