. Hábito as a Visual Technology Moors, Africans, and Americans in Sixteenth-Century Costume Books

Abstract

European imperial expansion in the early modern period required new frameworks capable of ordering the human diversity incorporated into imperial territories. In this context, print culture generated textual and visual repertoires that contributed to describing, hierarchizing, and circulating new forms of knowledge about human difference. Through a comparative analysis of figures labeled as Moors, Africans, and Indigenous Americans in a representative corpus of costume books published between 1529 and 1598, this article argues that hábito –understood as dress, territory, and custom– functioned as a visual technology of classification. Within the printed page, these works incorporated and organized global difference according to gradations of civility, ancestry, and Christianity. Rather than producing homogeneous representations of alterity, they deployed differentiated matrices of inclusion, assimilation, and degradation, in which dress played a central role in the construction of cultural hierarchies. This article, therefore, proposes reading costume books as part of the early processes of visual racialization that accompanied European imperial expansion.