Race and the Aesthetics of Frivolity in the Work of Count François G. de Cisneros

This article analyzes the somatic and racial semiotics of aristocratic dandyism in the travel chronicles of a forgotten Cuban modernista named Francisco García Cisneros. Focusing on the transatlantic and inter-American dimensions of Cisneros's identity reconfiguration in New York in the late 1890s—when he changed his name to Count François G. de Cisneros—, this article argues that behind Cisneros's seemingly innocuous aesthetic of frivolity resides a twofold racial project. On the one hand, being in New York allows Cisneros to circumvent Cuban and Latin American affiliations and perform a Latin sense of self that casts its dismissive, monocled gaze towards the United States, which he critiques as a miscegenated race. At the same time, the politics of posing, passing, and authenticity inform the floating significations and elitist consumption of Latin blanqueamiento in Cuba, where Cisneros's representations of global Otherness camouflage Afro-Cuban agency during the early Cuban Republic.