Agnes Lugo-Ortiz

My areas of specialty are Latin American Literatures of the Nineteenth Century and Caribbean Cultural Histories, with a focus on the relationships between culture and politics, slavery, racial formations and visuality, and on the epistemologies and power dynamics that underwrite the construction of archives. I situate these inquiries within a broader transatlantic context, understood as a historical crucible of the cultures of modernity. In my early work, I explored how literature partook in the articulation of discourses of national identity in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the aesthetic forms activated to advance specific anti-colonial projects, and the place of gender and desire as structural elements of those endeavors. This was the subject of my first book, Identidades imaginadas. Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la Guerra (Cuba, 1860-1898), and of multiple essays about the colonial question in Puerto Rico, centuries-long frontier of imperial disputes. In my work, I am also attentive to the role of diasporic communities in the reconfiguration of cultural geographies and national subjectivities. This interest crystallized in my decades-long affiliation with the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, an initiative devoted to constructing the literary archive of Spanish-speaking populations in what has become the United States (before the 1960s), and in several scholarly collections produced under its auspices, among them Herencia and En otra voz.

In my current book project, “The Plantation Gaze: Slavery and Visual Culture in Colonial Cuba (1727–1886),” I continue my core interests in the production of alternative archives by examining how the development of a modern visual culture on the island was imbricated, in counterintuitive ways, with the demands of the slaveholding plantation, and its implications for contemporary discussions of the scopic regimes of modernity. The idea of “visual culture” here is not restricted to aestheticized objects of fine art but encompasses a wide array of optical experiences manifested in artifacts that range from accounts of religious and semi-theatrical events staged on plantations; the visual and performative dimensions of slave codes, catechisms, and slave narratives; medico-anthropological treatises and their anatomical or (proto)ethnographical imagery; as well as objects of material culture. In this sense, my explorations are geared towards historicizing the complicities between visuality and racialized enslaved domination in the modern world within a complex set of frameworks and are representative of my general outlook on the production of knowledge both in research and teaching: transdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and politically and ethically aware. 

Akin to this work, I co-edited with Angela Rosenthal the volume Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World; co-founded in 2016, with Cécile Fromont and Larissa Brewer-García, the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture; and, most recently, co-curated with Isabela Fraga the digital exhibit Palimpsests: Visual Idioms of Enslavement in the Nineteenth-Century and Their Afterlives. I am also co-founder and co-editor of the digital journal Categoría Cinco. Revista de Política y Cultura, a forum committed to anti-colonial projects in Puerto Rico.

Selected Publications

• The Plantation Gaze: Slavery and Visual Culture in Cuba during the Age of Revolution (Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2027)
• The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Co-edited with Graciela Montaldo (Routledge, 2025).
• Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. Co-edited with Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge UP, 2013).
• Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba 1860-1898) (Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Serie Caribe, 1999)
• “Facing the Enslaved (Explorations for a Transatlantic Archive).” Empire and its Aftermath: Transhispanic Reflections on the African Diaspora. Edited by Jerome Branche. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2022; 103-141.
• “Esclavitud, monstruosidad y abandono: Domingo Fernández (‘congo negro de nación’) en el 'Libro de los peces' de Antonio Parra (1787)." In Consuelo Naranjo-Orovio and Miguel Angel Puig-Samper (eds.), Color, raza y racialización en América y el Caribe. Madrid: Libros de La Catarata, 2022; 52-78.
• “After Redemption and Abandonment: Cuban Black Portraiture in the Age of Revolution.” Colonial Latin American Review 32.2 (2021): 305-340. Awarded Prize for Best Essay, Section on the Nineteenth Century of the Latin American Studies Association.
• “Introducción” to Luis Muñoz Marín’s “La verdad sencilla sobre el status político.” Categoría Cinco. Revista de Política y Cultura—Puerto Rico. 1.2 (April 2021).
• “Des routes du démoniaque: tabac, commerce et culture visuelle aux Caraïbes et leurs axes transatlantiques.” In Chic emprise: Culture, usages et sociabilités du tabac du XVIe au XVIIIe Siècle. Paris, France: Musée du Nouveau Monde de La Rochelle/Louvre/La Geste, 2019; 164-179.
• “Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives.” Volume co-edited with Larissa Brewer-García, Cécile Fromont, and Allyson Nadia Field (in preparation).