Paris, Cuba, New York: Wifredo Lam and the Lost Origins of The Jungle

This article investigates the complex inscription of modernist Cuban imaginaries within Atlantic cultural and political networks. I consider the tropes of cultural intelligibility and epistemic opacity in the fields of visual culture and cultural hierarchy. Through historical contextualizations of Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle (1943) within the Paris and New York art scenes of the late 1930s and early 1940s, I address the questions of intelligibility and relative value in the international reception of exotic cultural forms. I examine some of the ways in which discourses of Lam and The Jungle have been constructed, appropriated, and made to illustrate national, regional, and global necessities. Finally, I engage with issues of insularity and cultural specificity within the context of an ongoing production of racialized images of ‘Third World’ political chaos in today’s global Atlantic.