Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations

Chapter 5. Forms of Historic Imagination, Visual Culture, Historiography, and the Tropes of War in Nineteenth-Century Venezuela

101 5 Forms of Historic Imagination Visual Culture, Historiography, and the Tropes of War in Nineteenth-Century Venezuela Beatriz González-Stephan “Making history” is a practice. . . . If it is true that the organization of history is relative to a place and a time, this is first of all because of its techniques of production. Generally speaking, every society thinks of itself“historically,” with the instruments that pertain to it. . . . History is mediated by technique. —Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History Clio’s Closet The relationships between the written word and visual culture throughout the nineteenth century were complex. They shared symbolic spaces, mobilized didactic forces, sought to delineate their respective domains, and fought over clientele. Both print and image competed ferociously to get ahead and achieve—each in its own way—the goals of the project of enlightened modernity. Of course, each embraced different meanings of this “enlightenment.”1 Nevertheless, written and visual cultures complemented and mutually contaminated each other. In most cases, words found support in images, on and off the printed page (see Chapter 1 in this volume). I would like to draw attention to the levels of complexity of the interactions between words and images, especially the porosity of the sphere of letters (relating specifically to historical genres and historiographical practices pertaining to the realm of high culture), through a series of enormously popular manifestations that belong to the world of the visual spectacle . These manifestations include expressions and representations for This chapter was translated from Spanish by William G. Acree Jr. 102 Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America popular classes and the public at large and had little in common with elite preferences. After all, nineteenth-century Latin America was profoundly marked by a visual rhetoric—a rhetoric of the image—that required the world of letters to develop a form of textuality that made its references more visible, that worked to elaborate a more realist codification, and that, in sum, painted with words.2 The circuits of the written word and visual culture established lines of communication that were not exactly fluid or obvious, but that allowed for epistemic matrices to cross. Limiting oneself to the horizon of literary production , at least for the nineteenth century has impoverished the potential meanings of numerous cultural practices, including but not limited to the production of historical fiction.3 In the words of Michel de Certeau, the practice of history occurs in a specific place at a specific moment, conditioned by other cultural practices and activities. For now, what is important to keep in mind is this larger context of other cultural practices (that could pertain to the realms of popular culture and scopic rituals, for example), and that the specificity of the practice of history is situated locally (obeying the logic of production determined by a given place’s traditions).4 Cultural phenomena are complex, so it can pay off to engage in what has been called cultural criticism, a methodology that attempts to shed light on lineages and connections that traditional disciplinary approaches have ignored in favor of establishing discreet and discontinuous entities of knowledge. Reestablishing some of these nexuses could seem imprudent , but the benefits outweigh the risks. They permit us to rethink cultural phenomena from other vantage points and understand better their legacies. I would like to invert the order, so to say, of the premises of our analysis of the interrelation and circulation of diverse cultural forms of the nineteenth century, avoiding from the beginning the question of the place of letters and focusing instead on the complex mediations of visual and material culture and the universe of the written word. Studying these mediations (historiographical panoramas, serial novels, print collections of socalled galleries of illustrious men, poetic albums) means asking about the dialogues among different modes of popular culture, public festivals and celebrations, fairs and exhibitions, the advent of a culture of technology, and daily consumption of decorative styles, as well as the emergence of literary genres that have enjoyed large reading publics. What is the genealogy that controlled historiographical production (the mechanism for producing a sense of the past) in a society trained to read visual formats? In a society that reads narratives based on images—from engravings appearing on loose leaves and “live” paintings to parades and dioramas—how was it Beatriz González-Stephan 103 possible to build a lettered repertoire capable of interacting with a visually...