In an 1893 letter to sexologist G. Frank Lydston, the then-president of the American Medical Association Hunter McGuire asked for a scientific explanation to a growing problem in southern states. “Before the late war between the States, a rape by a negro of a white women [sic] was almost unknown; now the newspapers tell us how common it is.” The problem, Dr. Lydston explained, was “hereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our negroes,” especially a “sexual furor” that was common among “lower animals.” Once “the compulsory thrift characteristic of the negro in slavery” was destroyed, such furor ran amok. The “primitive instincts” that slavery had previously “bottled up” were now unleashed.

Just a few years before the official abolition of slavery in Cuba, Basque painter Víctor Patricio Landaluze, a resident of the island since mid-century, offered a visual rendition of these white racist anxieties in his painting José Francisco (ca. 1880). Momentarily freed from the surveillance of his masters, the enslaved Black man in the image unsubtly holds a long duster while amorously kissing a marble bust representing a white woman. Above him, a white lady in a portrait painting appears to look, with censoring gaze, at a scene that reveals the dangerous “truths” of Black fantasies and desires, later diagnosed by Lydston.

The anxieties present in Landaluze’s painting and in Lyndston’s sexological theories are critically unveiled a century later in this untitled photograph of 1994 by the Afro-Cuban artist René Peña. Despite obvious visual differences and historical contexts, the image engages the enduring transnational power of “scientific” narratives such as Lyndston’s and the sublimated visual idioms of Landaluze, both of which celebrate slavery as the only way to discipline the unruly bodies of males of African descent.

If, with emancipation and the specter of Afro-descendant citizenship, the sexuality of Black men became, in the racist imagination, increasingly threatening and transgressive, Peña visualizes those fears by transforming the genitalia of the Black model literally into a dagger. The image directly confronts us with long-standing myths that continue to inform ideas about the bodies and sexuality of men racialized as “black” into the present. ■

In an 1893 letter to sexologist G. Frank Lydston, the then-president of the American Medical Association Hunter McGuire asked for a scientific explanation to a growing problem in southern states. “Before the late war between the States, a rape by a negro of a white women [sic] was almost unknown; now the newspapers tell us how common it is.” The problem, Dr. Lydston explained, was “hereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our negroes,” especially a “sexual furor” that was common among “lower animals.” Once “the compulsory thrift characteristic of the negro in slavery” was destroyed, such furor ran amok. The “primitive instincts” that slavery had previously “bottled up” were now unleashed.

Just a few years before the official abolition of slavery in Cuba, Basque painter Víctor Patricio Landaluze, a resident of the island since mid-century, offered a visual rendition of these white racist anxieties in his painting José Francisco (ca. 1880). Momentarily freed from the surveillance of his masters, the enslaved Black man in the image unsubtly holds a long duster while amorously kissing a marble bust representing a white woman. Above him, a white lady in a portrait painting appears to look, with censoring gaze, at a scene that reveals the dangerous “truths” of Black fantasies and desires, later diagnosed by Lydston.

The anxieties present in Landaluze’s painting and in Lyndston’s sexological theories are critically unveiled a century later in this untitled photograph of 1994 by the Afro-Cuban artist René Peña. Despite obvious visual differences and historical contexts, the image engages the enduring transnational power of “scientific” narratives such as Lyndston’s and the sublimated visual idioms of Landaluze, both of which celebrate slavery as the only way to discipline the unruly bodies of males of African descent.

If, with emancipation and the specter of Afro-descendant citizenship, the sexuality of Black men became, in the racist imagination, increasingly threatening and transgressive, Peña visualizes those fears by transforming the genitalia of the Black model literally into a dagger. The image directly confronts us with long-standing myths that continue to inform ideas about the bodies and sexuality of men racialized as “black” into the present. ■