Nigra Sum, Sed Formosa: Visualizing a Radical Black Consciousness in Aponte’s Libro de Pinturas

The execution of José Antonio Aponte by Cuban authorities on 9 April, 1812 represents a key moment in the account of African Diasporan consciousness in the Americas. Aponte, a free black painter and militiaman living in the barrios extramuros of Havana, had faced trial for an alleged conspiracy to liberate Cuban slaves following the example of the Haitian Revolution. Among the evidence presented by Cuban authorities at the trial of Aponte included his libro de pinturas, a seventy-two-page artistic manifesto that freely disassembled and reassembled icons and symbols of the Catholic Church and Hispanic visual culture, and employed this intertextual assemblage to hearken to Ancient Africa’s Christian past and eschatological future. This paper examines the libro de pinturas and contextualizes it within the Age of Revolution to uncover the radical black political theology embedded within its mobilization of images. It will be demonstrated that the desire for and knowledge of freedom was not an acculturated trait developed within African peoples in the West as they became exposed to Enlightenment ideology, but rather always already existed within the liberated imaginations of the African Diasporan collective consciousness.