ABSTRACT
With the increased focus on multiculturalism and globalism in academia, writing national histories begins to take a back seat to projects that look at connections and circulations among cultures. The chapter draws the recent studies in the humanities that focus on the cultural contact, colonialism, transnationalism, globalization, and ethnic Diasporas to understand how the Latin American artists in Paris created new visual languages to articulate or contest notions of nationalism, universality, authenticity, and hybridity based on their experiences abroad. Demographics and mapped evidence of physical presence can start to challenge the canonical stories of art history. When used in conjunction with narrative methods such as formal analysis, social history, and mining of archival sources, Mapping provides a link between the specificity of archival research and personal anecdote, and overarching theories about contact and cultural exchange. The Maps also be read as visual objects.
