Reclaiming Representations: Transnational Photographic Practices from Brazil and the Challenging of Mestiçagem and Branquitude

This dissertation examines how Brazilian-born artists, Maria Thereza Alves, Jonathas de Andrade, and Dalton Paula have used photographic techniques to represent racialized populations in Brazil. These three artists have long been committed to opposing the oppression of these populations through their practices. First, my goal is to investigate how these artists tackle or dialogue with hegemonic national discourses to claim the photographed subjects’ spaces for recognition within a nation-state, in this case, Brazil. Second, I study how mestiçagem operates vis-à-vis whiteness and non-whiteness in Brazil, more specifically through the photographic. I examine how these three artists represent notions of Blackness and indigenous subjectivities. I contend that these artists work within an expanded field of photography; their practices are examples of the relationship between the production of images and the role of images for subaltern racialized communities. Although the celebration of mestiçagem is a particular trope linked to modernity in Brazil and in Latin America, it emerged to address a colonial context in which the concept of race had been primarily used to enable a reorganization of labor, via slavery, that operated through the dehumanization of non-whiteness. My dissertation advocates for a broader understanding of the visual discourse on racial miscegenation in Brazil, not to demonize mestiçagem, but to develop a critique of its celebratory “normative” cooption as a national narrative and its veiled (and not-so-veiled) associations with branquitude. Through these artists’ practices one observes how mestiçagem operates as an ambivalent visual discourse vis-à-vis whiteness and non-whiteness in Brazil. I argue that these artists’ responses to this ambivalence takes place through an expanded field of photography: These artworks expand the image into pursuing reclamation for racialized communities. So that the portrait, the photographic document, and the photographic archive are expanded in that pursuit of visualizing and reclaiming the photographed subjects as part of a public sphere. To understand the discursive coupling of mestiçagem with whiteness and reveal how it manifests through visuality is not to speak only about Brazil, but to examine how these artists either deploy or challenge discourses that are reminiscent of a modern ontological mandate based on racial difference. Thus, this dissertation serves local Brazilian scholarship regarding the representation of difference in visual culture and examine ideas of Blackness, whiteness, and indigenous subjectivities and their representation beyond the U.S. national scope, making a space for the recognition of itinerant and transnational visualities