Latin America at Fin-de-Siècle Universal Exhibitions Modern Cultures of Visuality

"At the fin de siècle, Latin America speaks the new international language of modernity: cosmopolitism, transnational spectacles, travels, and visuality. Uslenghi brilliantly analyzes the articulations, nuances, and controversies of that language in Brazilian, Argentine, and Mexican culture." - Graciela Montaldo, Columbia University, USA

 

"The book's guiding argument militates against a facile casting of Latin American presence at the exhibitions as an exotic display for European spectators, and instead focuses on Latin American intellectuals availing themselves of the exhibitions as a point of departure for crafting and partaking of a cosmopolitan modernity on behalf of their transnational reading and viewing publics, a modernity that nevertheless finds itself incorporated into nationalist narratives. The study is particularly successful in asserting the relevance of literature and photography for grasping the international exhibitions' long-standing impact on LatinAmerican societies." - Claire F. Fox, University of Iowa, USA

 

"In three acts, drawing on a wealth of archive material, Uslenghi charts Latin Americans' attempts at 'conquering the image' the monumental mirrors of nineteenth-century world fairs shone back at them. This is truly pioneering work: a densely textured, theoretically acute study of the global circuits opened up by novel modes of making and circulating images and of the performances of spectatorship these called forth." - Jens Andermann, author of
The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil