Abstract
I analyze the role of the sketch of manners—a humorous textual and visual genre sometimes called cuadro de costumbres in Spanish and crônica de costumes in Portuguese—as an important genre of nation-building literature in nineteenth-century Latin America. The short satirical essays blend fiction with nonfiction and often deal with racial themes. Writers and publishers paired texts with lithographic representations, creating a hybrid visual-textual genre in which the images and texts validated each other. At the intersection of the emerging social sciences and changing political configurations for newly independent Latin American nations, many political lettered elites experimented with sketches of manners as didactic tools alongside novels, poetry, travel writing, and biographies, which have received more critical attention. In this paper, I compare the emergence and impact of sketches of manners in Mexico and Brazil. These case studies, with distinct imperial histories and population demographics, demonstrate the widespread popularity of the genre across Latin America. I analyze the relationship between humor and race in the Los mexicanos pintados por si mismos collection (1864) and sketches from the Brazilian periodicals O carapuceiro (1832-1847) and Semana Ilustrada (1861-1875). I contend that, due to the genre’s satirical bent and playfulness, it became a privileged genre for educating urban readers on racial discourses exalting whiteness in the mid-nineteenth century. The popularity and politicization of sketches of manners in Latin America suggests that scholars of Literary and Cultural studies should revisit the nineteenth century archive and consider the importance of genres marginalized by academic canons.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Race, Nation-Building, Nineteenth-Century, Humor, Genres, Visuality
