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    Visual Disobedience
    Art and Decoloniality in Central America

    Kency Cornejo (Author)

    9781478030546

    Paperback / softback, published 18 October 2024

    304 pages, 91 color illustrations
    22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.68 kg

    “As a scholar whose works straddles Latin American and diasporic Latinx art history, I need this book. Countless others like me will learn from this important and unique study. Kency Cornejo brings a depth of understanding to the issues and artists she showcases who bear witness, resist, and stand up with extraordinary courage and creativity against violence. Visual Disobedience will be a stand-out work in Latin American modern and contemporary art history and is essential to the wider history of contemporary art in the Americas.”
    - Adriana Zavala, coauthor of Resurrecting Tenochtitlan: Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City
    “Kency Cornejo masterfully themeatizes the subversive acts of visual disobedience that she finds in a large array of artists and artworks from the Central American region. Building from a variety of decolonial projects and theoretical positions, this splendid text illuminates highly creative works that visualize and further advance the struggle against the naturalization of poverty and early death, rape, feminicide, imprisonment as well as the violence of nation-state institutions and borders. This book is an anticolonial act of resistance and insurgency that demonstrates the reach and density of visual combative decoloniality in and from Central America.”
    - Nelson Maldonado-Torres, author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity "Visual Disobedience is a brilliant and necessary book that makes a valuable contribution to the study of Latin American art and will influence the discipline for a long time to come." - Gavin O'Toole Morning Star "The title, “Visual Disobedience”, is fully earned by the stunning diversity of the images of eighty artworks filling its pages. . . . Kency Cornejo observes how art from Central America has been rendered invisible by the art world and the cultural establishment as a whole. Her book is a vital and welcomed step forward in challenging this erasure." - Sean Sheehan The Prisma

    In Visual Disobedience, Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America. Cornejo reveals a direct line from US intervention to current forms of racial, economic, and gender injustice in the isthmus, connecting this to the criminalization and incarceration of migrants at the US-Mexico border today. Drawing on interviews with Central American artists and curators, she theorizes a form of “visual disobedience” in which art operates in opposition to nation-states, colonialism, and visual coloniality. She counters historical erasure by examining over eighty artworks and highlighting forty artists across the region. Cornejo also rejects the normalized image of the suffering Central American individual by repositioning artists as creative agents of their own realities. With this comprehensive exploration of contemporary Central American art, Cornejo highlights the role of visual disobedience as a strategy of decolonial aesthetics to expose and combat coloniality, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, empire, and other systems of oppression.

    List of Illustrations 
    ix
    Acknowledgments 
    xix
    Introduction. Against Visual Coloniality 
    1
    1. Semillas: Art and Indigenous Defiance in Guatemala 
    35
    2. A Creative Turn to the Body: Feminist Dissonance and Erotic Autonomy in Central American Art 
    78
    3. Shifting the Border: Central American Art against the War on Mobility 
    132
    4. “
    Los Siempre Sospechosos de Todo”
    : Art on Criminalization, Prisons, and Social Cleansing in Central America 
    177
    Conclusion. Visual Disobedience and Art Histories Otherwise 
    231
    Notes 
    239
    Bibliography 
    257
    Index 
    271
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