Reinscribing the Visible in Images of Black Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Abstract

The article offers a critical rereading of the photograph Pilagem do Café (Victor Frond, 1861) through the artwork Parede da Memória (Rosana Paulino, 1994), shifting the gaze from the functional representation of enslaved labor toward the silenced experiences of motherhood, affection, and Black family life. Paulino's work is employed as a theoretical-methodological device that reconfigures Black visuality into a reliquary of affective memory. The analysis addresses how nineteenth-century visuality fixed Black bodies within categories of domesticity, erasing subjectivities and affective ties, particularly in the case of wet nurses, whose visibility in family albums contrasts with the denial of their own maternal bonds. Drawing on authors such as Azoulay, Hartman, and Spillers, the article discusses how the reinscription of the visible—inspired by Paulino's gesture—constitutes an exercise in unlearning colonial photography and an investment in insurgent memory as aesthetic and political reparation.