Angelo Agostini is widely known as one of the most important cartoonists of nineteen-century Brazil. His fame was built on the many images of Blacks he published. In those images, the Italian artist seems to be a tireless defender of the slaves' cause. This article analyzes such images through a different set of interpretive keys. Instead of celebrating the implacable abolitionist, it seeks the underlying racial meanings, and the political logic of his caricatures of Black people. The Italian-Brazilian artist created, and recreated stereotypes of his subjects, defining those characters as sluggards, or as dangerous and irrational, and even as passive under the horrors of slavery. Mixing slavery and race to produce his drawings, Agostini created his own reputation as an abolitionist hero.
<bdi><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Angelo_Agostini" class="extiw" title="w:en:Angelo Agostini"><span title="Italian illustrator and journalist (1843-1910)">Angelo Agostini</span></a>
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<span class="int-own-work" lang="en">Own work</span>