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La presencia del arte contemporáneo latinoamericano en el mundo contemporáneo, es concebida y movilizada a través de la existencia de una diáspora que ha perdido toda clase de arraigo en sus lugares territoriales definitorios. Los lenguajes que éstas muestran tienden ha consolidar un gusto por la simultaneidad, por la complejidad, por lo marginal, por lo oculto, y por las relativizaciones de una realidad que se pregunta constantemente por el sentido de su ser. Las diásporas artísticas ubican sus propuestas en medio de una serie de posicionamientos, para tratar de narrar las historias y las situaciones, que comenzaron ha emerger, en el momento en el cual se establece una dominante epocal, observadora y tolerante de la diversidad de los márgenes. El arte de las diásporas parecía configurar un nuevo espacio de representación, digno de ser atrapado o explicado dentro de nuevas posiciones teóricas, que manifestarán el por qué de unas de estas expresiones, muchas veces imposibles de traducir ante la pérdida del sentido del monopolio cultural occidental en el campo de las artes. De allí que, se hallan confeccionado en el mundo contemporáneo tardocapitalista y posindustrial, posiciones teóricas que incluyentes y estudiosas de la alteridad, de las diferencias, de la otredad, de la subalternidad. Para partir de los enunciados fragmentarios y múltiples mostrados por las teorías multiculturalistas y por la Crítica Poscolonial. Un intento de dotar de sentido a una realidad global, que ha perdido las fronteras. En este sentido, el espectro teórico que estudia a la diversidad observa a las culturas, a sus contaminaciones y desplazamientos desde diversas perspectivas, las cuales han incido en el mundo del arte contemporáneo en la formulación de un Nuevo Internacionalismo incluyente de las representaciones de los otros. El arte latinoamericano en este contexto se encuentra convocado, invitado, para legitimar la puesta en escena de unas realidades que pretenden ser cercanas, y a su vez alejadas, por las tensiones producidas por las propuestas discursivas del multiculturalismo y del poscolonialismo, en sus lecturas sobre las culturas como opuestas y no como parte integrante de una metacultura global. Las diásporas se ubican a partir de la deconstrucción de los postulados mayores de estas nuevas tendencias teóricas, para evidenciar su localidad desde la particularidad de sus legados e historias. Espacio en el cual, los artistas pertenecientes a la diáspora contemporánea, han demostrado responder con presteza a la cantidad de situaciones presentadas en medio de una realidad interconectada desde tiempos anteriores, y que en la actualidad manifiesta la exacerbación de las relaciones con lo que se pretende diferente.

When, in 2015, students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa demanded the removal of a statue of British colonial and diamond merchant Cecil Rhodes from their campus, they initiated what was to become a global call to ‘decolonize the university’. In the same year, students at University College London began to ask the question: why is my curriculum white? Other public sector cultural institutions soon joined the chorus in an overdue acknowledgement that unspoken colonial legacies had for too long upheld and promulgated white privilege. The role of public sculpture as a catalyst for political debate and change has a long tradition within art's histories. It serves to remind us of the centrality of the discipline in promoting and maintaining dominant cultural values; and yet it also enables us to interrogate them as historically located and subject to inevitable temporal mutation. Whilst postcolonial studies and critical race studies have been informing and challenging the shape of art history for several decades, new generations of students, scholars, critics, curators, collectors, artists and audiences are seeking radical re-evaluations of the academy and those cultural institutions who hold themselves up as standard-bearers of our collective cultural heritage. But, what, if anything, is specific about the current moment's demands to reassess how universities, museums, and galleries teach, research, collect and exhibit? How can art historians, curators, collectors, museum directors, artists and writers respond to the call to decolonize art history? How can we draw from the rich legacy of postcolonial, feminist, queer and Marxist perspectives within art history, and what are the new theoretical perspectives that are needed?

Postcolonial theory has developed mainly in the U.S. academy, and it has focused chiefly on nineteenth-century and twentieth-century colonization and decolonization processes in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Colonialism in Latin America originated centuries earlier, in the transoceanic adventures from which European modernity itself was born. Coloniality at Large brings together classic and new reflections on the theoretical implications of colonialism in Latin America. By pointing out its particular characteristics, the contributors highlight some of the philosophical and ideological blind spots of contemporary postcolonial theory as they offer a thorough analysis of that theory’s applicability to Latin America’s past and present. Written by internationally renowned scholars based in Latin America, the United States, and Europe, the essays reflect multiple disciplinary and ideological perspectives. Some are translated into English for the first time. The collection includes theoretical reflections, literary criticism, and historical and ethnographic case studies focused on Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, the Andes, and the Caribbean. Contributors examine the relation of Marxist thought, dependency theory, and liberation theology to Latin Americans’ experience of and resistance to coloniality, and they emphasize the critique of Occidentalism and modernity as central to any understanding of the colonial project. Analyzing the many ways that Latin Americans have resisted imperialism and sought emancipation and sovereignty over several centuries, they delve into topics including violence, identity, otherness, memory, heterogeneity, and language. Contributors also explore Latin American intellectuals’ ambivalence about, or objections to, the “post” in postcolonial; to many, globalization and neoliberalism are the contemporary guises of colonialism in Latin America. Contributors : Arturo Arias, Gordon Brotherston, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Sara Castro-Klaren, Amaryll Chanady, Fernando Coronil, Román de la Campa, Enrique Dussel, Ramón Grosfoguel, Russell G. Hamilton, Peter Hulme, Carlos A. Jáuregui, Michael Löwy, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, José Antonio Mazzotti, Eduardo Mendieta, Walter D. Mignolo, Mario Roberto Morales, Mabel Moraña, Mary Louise Pratt, Aníbal Quijano, José Rabasa, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Catherine E. Walsh

Inuit have been participating in the development of photo-reproductive media since at least the 19th century, and indeed much earlier if we continue on Michelle Raheja’s suggestion that there is much more behind Nanook’s smile than Robert Flaherty would have us believe. This paper examines how photographer Peter Pitseolak (1902-1973) and filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk have employed photography and film in relation to Raheja’s notion of “visual sovereignty” as a process of infiltrating media of representational control, altering their principles to visualize Indigenous ownership of their images. For camera-based media, this pertains as much to conceptions of time, continuity and “presence,” as to the broader dynamics of creative retellings. This paper will attempt to address such media-ontological shifts – in Pitseolak’s altered position as photographer and the effect this had on his images and the “presence” of his subjects, and in Kunuk’s staging of oral histories and, through the nature of film as an experience of “cinematic time,” composing time in a way that speaks to Inuit worldviews and life patterns – as radical renegotiations of the mediating properties of photography and film. In that they displace the Western camera’s hegemonic framing and time-based structures, repositioning Inuit “presence” and relations to land within the fundamental conditions of photo-reproduction, this paper will address these works from a position of decolonial media aesthetics, considering the effects of their works as opening up not only for more holistic, community-grounded representation models, but for expanding these relations to land and time directly into the expanded sensory field of media technologies.

This thesis argues that photography is tainted with ingrained racist ideologies that have been present since its earliest inception in 1839. It considers the act of photographing the Other as a site of Western violence, myth, fantasy and disavowal. It examines archival images through the prism of race, representation and human rights with the aim of extracting new meanings that bring the Other into focus. This is done by reading the images both against the politics of the time in which they were made and as contemporary objects at work in the political and cultural present. The thesis makes the case that photography is burdened with ideological fault-lines concerning race and rights. The fault-lines have been forged by cultural and colonial violence resulting in Western scopic regimes that have dominated and fixed the Other within an inescapable set of Western epistemologies that have been used to serve and enhance imperial perspectives on race. I argue that these perspectives are still active within the Western mindset manifest as benign acts of photographic empathy that work to ultimately bolster Western hegemonies and economies. This thesis is based on 25 years of experience as a researcher and curator of international photography exhibitions, direct research into archives in different continental settings, the presentation of papers in a variety of national and international contexts, and interviews withphotographers, curators and academics. My hypothesis is that the history of photography can only be complete if the voice of the subaltern is made critically present within it, so allowing us to engage with important political racial memory work that can help us re-read the past and reconfigure different meanings concerning history, race, rights and human recognition in the present. I argue that photography requires decolonising work to be carried out on its history. I propose that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography and the effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.