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En esta charla conversaremos sobre las luchas históricas por la reivindicación de los derechos del pueblo afro que están detrás de su estética, específicamente en dos de sus expresiones femeninas: el turbante afro y el pelo natural, los cuales han servido como elementos de resistencia para la pervivencia de las prácticas y costumbres ancestrales. Como parte de la exposición temporal del Museo del Oro 'A bordo de un navío esclavista, La Marie-Séraphique' (que se presentó en Bogotá del 7 de octubre de 2018 al 7 de abril de 2019) hablamos en el museo sobre algunos peinados ancestrales, como la espina de pescado, las tropas, el hundidito, el ciempiés y la vicha, y sobre los usos, significados y modelos de los turbantes afro, como la cadena del esclavo, la autoridad, el kitambala, el enkeycha y el doek. El termino mata ‘e pelo surge de las expresiones propias de nuestras ancestras, que se referían al pelo afro cómo una gran mata (árbol), frondosa, incontrolable y rizada, que requería unos cuidados particulares por su condición crespa, abundante y diversa. El cuerpo de la mujer negra, raizal y palenquera ha estado históricamente ligado a las luchas por la reivindicación de los derechos del pueblo afro, siendo la mata ‘e pelo el elemento estético que más las ha transmitido. Entre las personas de ancestros africanos, la estética del pelo afro se remonta a un pasado cargado de lucha y resistencia, pues las trenzas fueron usadas para la elaboración de mapas que marcaban el camino a la libertad de los cimarrones. Las mujeres se reunían en el patio para peinar a las más pequeñas. Diseñaban en su cabeza un mapa lleno de caminitos y salidas de escape, en el que ubicaban los montes, ríos y árboles más altos. Así, al verlas, los hombres sabían cuáles rutas tomar. Su código, desconocido para los amos, les permitía a los esclavizados huir. El balance humano de la trata de cautivos africanos a través del Atlántico es dramático: con una inmensa brutalidad, desplazó a 13 millones de hombres, mujeres y niños entre la segunda mitad del siglo XVI y finales del siglo XIX. #ElMuseoDelOroTambiénEsAfro Producción Banco de la República Realización Santiago Martínez

La exposición Presencia negra en Bogotá hace parte de la investigación en Migraciones que desde la Universidad Nacional lideran Mercedes Angola y Maguemati Wabgou. Está presente en el Claustro de San Agustín, como un homenaje a los hacedores de grandes historias que se desconocen, personas cuyos aportes a la construcción de la sociedad colombiana y a la consolidación de la identidad nacional desde diversas perspectivas y disciplinas ha invisibilizado la historia colombiana. En compañía de sus protagonistas, acompáñenos en la formulación de nuevas preguntas de investigación en torno al aporte de la gente negra a Colombia y a países vecinos, pues no solo se ha producido migración interna sino, "fuga" hacia otros países. Invitados : Mercedes Angola, artista plástica e investigadora y Maguemati Wabgou, sociólogo e investigador.

Compuesta por 355 obras de arte de naturaleza muy variada, la exposición en sala y ahora impresa busca visibilizar, dignificar, valorar y difundir los legados civilizatorios, reativos, culturales, económicos, sociales, políticos, tecnológicos, ambientales e históricos de los pueblos del África occidental y de sus descendientes en la construcción de Antioquia. Además, este catálogo pretende ubicar en las manos del público, y de los especialistas en museos y en estética, el de-bate sobre las encrucijadas que encierra la representación museal de las obras artísticas y de las culturas de los pueblos afroamericanos fraguados en el seno de las dinámicas esclavistas, imperiales y coloniales.

When E. Carmen Ramos organized Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, art holdings of Latinx artists at the institution were minimal and unbalanced. The museum lacked works by foundational figures; entire groups like Dominican Americans were missing, as were genres like abstract art; and with a collection dominated by colonial and folk art and work by Mexican Americans, it was impossible to produce any comprehensive exhibition of contemporary Latinx art, much less one that represented the diversity of artists and trends. Ramos was one of the few Latinx curators hired in the aftermath of the infamous 1994 “Willful Neglect” report documenting a historical pattern of discrimination at the Smithsonian Institute and calling for the hiring of Latinx curators to help direct the Smithsonian’s priorities in research, collections, and exhibitions.1 Twenty-five years later, this pattern of exclusion continues apace. In 2018, a study by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center found that while the Smithsonian’s Latinx workforce grew from 2.5 percent to 10.1 percent, this growth falls short of representing the growth of the Latinx population, which since 1994 has doubled to 17.8 percent of the total population. In sum, the task of putting a dent in a mostly white canonical art history and collection was a daunting one, and whatever Ramos did would be a politically charged intervention. This would be the first major scholarly survey exhibition of Latinx art, a statement to insert it as central to US art history, and the first major show of its type in a major North American museum in decades.

Pairing Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez with Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, this article meditates on relational black and brown aesthetic strategies by reading femme gestures performatively across individual works, as well as the exhibition spaces within which the artists draft practices of informed and resistant engagement. Working with both theories of brownness that emerge from Latinx studies as well as scholarship of the black radical tradition, the author follows a sense of shared aesthetic gestures in Báez and Mutu’s work toward an indictment of pervasive Global North racial epistemologies. Focusing on the performative gesture as the basis for relation, this article ultimately hones in on the chimeric figures—amalgamations of flora and fauna—that both artists deploy, arguing that these present a model for imagining an otherwise arrangement of the social.R Poniendo en diálogo a Firelei Báez, una artista nacida en República Dominicana, con Wangechi Mutu, que nació en Kenia, este artículo invita a una meditación sobre las estrategias estéticas relacionales negras y morenas mediante una lectura en clave performativa de gestos femeninos en obras individuales y en aquellos espacios de exposición en que las artistas elaboran prácticas de participación política informada y de resistencia. Trabajando tanto con las teorías de lo moreno (brownness) que emergen de los estudios Latinx como con el trabajo académico de la tradición radical negra, la autora rastrea gestos estéticos presentes tanto en el trabajo de Báez como en el de Mutu para denunciar las omnipresentes epistemologías raciales del norte global. Centrándose en el gesto performativo como la base de la relación, este artículo se enfoca en última instancia en las figuras quiméricas – amalgamaciones de flora y fauna – que ambas artistas despliegan en su trabajo para sostener que estas presentan un modelo para imaginar otra manera de organizar lo social.

According to the 2000 census, Latinos/as have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined. Juana María Rodríguez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project’s case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodríguez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields. As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodríguez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.

"Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings proposes a theory of sexual politics that works in the interstices between radical queer desires and the urgency of transforming public policy, between utopian longings and everyday failures. Considering the ways in which bodily movement is assigned cultural meaning, Juana Maria Rodriguez takes the stereotypes of the hyperbolically gestural queer Latina femme body as a starting point from which to discuss how gestures and forms of embodiment inform sexual pleasures and practices in the social realm. Centered on the sexuality of racialized queer female subjects, the book's varied archive--which includes burlesque border crossings, daddy play, pornography, sodomy laws, and sovereignty claims--seeks to bring to the fore alternative sexual practices and machinations that exist outside the sightlines of mainstream cosmopolitan gay male culture. Situating articulations of sexual subjectivity between the interpretive poles of law and performance, Rodriguez argues that forms of agency continually mediate among these various structures of legibility--the rigid confines of the law and the imaginative possibilities of the performative. She reads the strategies of Puerto Rican activists working toward self-determination alongside sexual performances on stage, in commercial pornography, in multi-media installations, on the dance floor, and in the bedroom. Rodriguez examines not only how projections of racialized sex erupt onto various discursive mediums but also how the confluence of racial and gendered anxieties seeps into the gestures and utterances of sexual acts, kinship structures, and activist practices. Ultimately, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings reveals--in lyrical style and explicit detail--how sex has been deployed in contemporary queer communities in order to radically reconceptualize sexual politics"--

In the 1960s, topless entertainment became legal in San Francisco, although cross-dressing continued to be criminalized. This article documents queer Latina/x visual and performance cultures of San Francisco’s strip club industry during this critical moment. It employs visual and performance analyses that draw from ethnographic interviews and archival research about three Latinas who performed as exotic dancers during this period, two of whom were out transsexuals: Roxanne Lorraine Alegria, Vicki Starr, and Lola Raquel. Engaging Marcia Ochoa’s notion of “spectacular femininities” and Juana María Rodríguez’s theory of “queer gesture,” the article maps out a queer Latina/x herstoriography about the early days of topless entertainment in San Francisco. It demonstrates how the transgressive practices of these Latina performers enrich genealogies of queer and Latina/x performance and visual cultures since the 1960s. It thus contributes to the expansion and intersection of the fields of performance studies, Latina/x studies, and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. These fields and their intertwinings offer critical tools to resist the sexism, homophobia, racism, transphobia, and whorephobia that pervade every level of society, as well as the cultural amnesia to which San Francisco has been increasingly prone due to its incessant gentrification and growing technocracy since the early 2010s.RESUMEN Este artículo documenta las culturas visuales y de performance latinas/x queer de los clubes de striptease de San Francisco durante un momento crítico en la historia de la ciudad. En la década de 1960, los shows en topless se legalizaron en San Francisco, aunque el travestismo se continuó criminalizando. Otálvaro-Hormillosa emplea análisis visuales y de performance que se basan en entrevistas etnográficas e investigación de archivo sobre tres latinas que actuaron como bailarinas exóticas durante este período, dos de las cuales reconocían públicamente que eran transexuales: Roxanne Lorraine Alegria, Vicki Starr y Lola Raquel. En diálogo con la noción de “feminidades espectaculares” de Marcia Ochoa y la teoría de “gestos queer” de Juana María Rodríguez, Otálvaro-Hormillosa describe una historiografía latina/x queer propiamente femenina sobre los primeros días del entretenimiento en topless en San Francisco. El artículo demuestra cómo las prácticas transgresoras de estas intérpretes latinas enriquecen las genealogías de las culturas visuales y de performance queer y latinas/x desde los años sesenta. Al hacerlo, contribuye a la expansión e intersección de los campos de los estudios de performance, estudios latinas/x, y estudios feministas, de género y de sexualidad. Estos campos y sus entrecruzamientos pueden ofrecer herramientas críticas para resistir el sexismo, la homofobia, el racismo, la transfobia y la putafobia que permea todos los niveles de la sociedad, así como la amnesia cultural a la que San Francisco ha sido cada vez más propenso debido a su incesante gentrificación y creciente tecnocracia desde principios de los años 2010.RESUMO Este artigo documenta a cultura visual e de performance na indústria de clubes de strip-tease de São Francisco, durante um momento crítico da história da cidade. Nos anos 60, o entretenimento topless se tornou legal em São Francisco, embora a prática do cross-dressing continuasse criminalizada. Otálvaro-Hormillosa emprega análise visual e de performance baseadas em entrevistas etnográficas e pesquisas de arquivos sobre três latinas que se apresentaram como dançarinas exóticas durante esse período, duas das quais eram transexuais: Roxanne Lorraine Alegria, Vicki Starr e Lola Raquel. Engajando a noção de “feminilidades espetaculares” de Marcia Ochoa e a teoria do “gesto queer” de Juana María Rodríguez, Otálvaro-Hormillosa mapeia uma herstoriografia queer latina/x sobre os sobre os primórdios do entretenimento topless em São Francisco. O artigo demonstra como as práticas transgressivas dessas artistas latinas enriquecem as genealogias das culturas visual e de performance queer e latina/x desde os anos 1960. Deste modo, contribui para a expansão e intersecção dos campos de estudos da performance, estudos latinos e estudos feministas, de gênero e sexualidade. Esses campos e seus entrelaçamentos podem oferecer ferramentas críticas para resistir ao sexismo, homofobia, racismo, transfobia e putafobia que permeiam todos os níveis da sociedade, bem como a amnésia cultural para a qual San Francisco tem sido cada vez mais propensa devido à sua gentrificação incessante e crescente tecnocracia desde o início dos anos 2010.

Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring more than 125 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960.

This dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.

The development of Global Renaissance art history has had an undeniable impact on the field of colonial Latin American art. Some of the earliest manifestations of this disciplinary partnership can be found in exhibitions, monographs, articles, and edited volumes produced around the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage. Exhibitions such as Circa 1492 at the National Gallery and a wave of scholarly publications addressed the cataclysmic impact of the European invasion and subsequent colonization of the Americas at an epistemological, linguistic, political, biological, and aesthetic level. The year 1992 precipitated an outpouring of critical reflection on the history of colonialism in the Western hemisphere and its enduring legacies both within Latin America and its diasporic communities.

In this paper I offer a brief overview of the academic debates about post-colonial theories and the concept of coloniality, seeking to map out their Latin American translations, especially from the perspective of feminist theories in relation to the coloniality of gender. By emphasizing an intersectional approach to understand the gendered character of coloniality, decolonial feminists are seeking innovative ways of articulating new epistemologies or “saberes propios”. However, in these debates little attention has been given to the issue of the travels and translations of decolonial feminisms in Latin America. In focusing on the vexed issue of translation, I want to explore some of the challenges Latin American decolonial feminists are facing today.

This essay aims to trace an overview of the decolonial aesthetics through the analysis of artistic expressions that occurred in Latin American territory. This analysis will allow us to enhance the cultural and artistic practices within its plurality and the typical spatial archetypes within its temporal resignification. The necessity of creation and the search for new epistemological fields translate the historical movements of the Latin-American cultural mouvance and the juxtaposition of temporalities, practices and the confluence of knowledge. We can find a stage of resistance and socio-historical borders subverted, mainly in the context of artistic and cultural manifestations and its capacity of invention and relativization. This essay aims to bring a reflection on the construction of cultural spaces and the dismantling of a single hegemonic perspective to define the artistic practices. The analysis and the epistemological questioning of the Latin-American trans-historical movement delineates an overview of the history of artistic productions that came out of practices and every-day life inventions and the elaboration of temporary spaces of claim and contestation through exhibitions, performances, festivals, and so forth. The idea of subverting a geopolitical imaginary and a cartography of the world (even if initially in local dynamics) consists of a central focus of this work.

There was no meaningful attempt to counter the black aesthetic with conceptual criteria for creating and evaluating art which would simultaneously acknowledge its ideological content even as it allowed for expansive notions of artistic freedom. To re-open the creative space that much of the black aesthetic movement closed down, it seems vital for those involved in contemporary black arts to engage in a revitalized discussion of aesthetics. In part, a radical aesthetic acknowledges that the people are constantly changing positions, locations, that their needs and concerns vary, that these diverse directions must correspond with shifts in critical thinking. Innovative African-American artists have rarely documented their process, their critical thinking on the subject of aesthetics. Certainly many of the revolutionary, visionary critical perspectives on music that were inherent to John Coltrane’s oppositional aesthetics and his cultural production will never be shared because they were not fully documented.

Searching the critical work of post-colonial critics, the author found much writing that bespeaks the continued fascination with the way white minds, particularly the colonial imperialist traveler, perceive blackness, and very little expressed interest in representations of whiteness in the black imagination. Some white people may even imagine there is no representation of whiteness in the black imagination, especially one that is based on concrete observation or mythic conjecture. Stereotypes black folks maintain about white folks are not the only representations of whiteness in the black imagination. Yet it is this representation of whiteness in the black imagination, first learned in the narrow confines of poor black rural community, that is sustained by the author travels to many different locations. Theorizing diverse journeying is crucial to the people understanding of any politics of location.

Discursos sobre “raza” y nación en Colombia, 1880-1930 constituye un aporte a la investigación sobre la formación de la nación en Colombia durante los siglos xix al xx. El libro es producto de la investigación de tesis de maestría del autor y se centra en mostrar cómo las elites del país concibieron y, en específico, aplicaron con la legislación y otros recursos políticos y culturales, formas de poder y hegemonía mediante las cuales establecieron su dominio a partir del control social, la higienización -“depuración racial o blanqueamiento de la raza”- y el señalamiento a los grupos que resistieron esas formas arbitrarias de poder desde arriba. La estructura del libro está dividida en una introducción, cuatro capítulos, las conclusiones, la bibliografía y una corta semblanza del autor. El primer capítulo es un análisis metodológico de la “alteridad”, a partir de la perspectiva poscolonial y decolonial; siguiendo a autores de renombre en ese campo, trata de demostrar – lamentablemente de modo uniforme– el carácter cruel y violento del proceso de europeización y de sus valores “irracionales” más recurrentes. Los capítulos del dos al cinco se dedican a sustentar la postura metodológica con un material de fuentes y de análisis sobre el racismo colombiano en los siglos xix y xx.

En medio del proceso de construcción de la República, durante el siglo xix, en Venezuela los sectores no blancos de la sociedad intentaron legitimarse a través de la fotografía en las carte-de-visite, con el objetivo de ratificar su posición en esta sociedad ‘café con leche’. El uso de esta tecnología, así como la aparición y aceptación de manuales de urbanidad, fueron parte de un proceso en el que estos sectores intentaron ‘modernizarse’, reflejando las tensiones sociales asociadas, por ejemplo, a la dicotomía campo-ciudad o a la necesidad de ‘blanquearse’ ante los ojos de los coterráneos. El objetivo de este trabajo, es estudiar la manera en que el retrato fotográfico y el manual de urbanidad actúan en una sociedad cuyas diferencias y distancias sociales y económicas han sufrido un gran trastorno luego del proceso independentista. During the process of the construction of the Republic, in the 19th Century, non-white sectors of Venezuelan society attempted to legitimise themselves through photographs in their cart-de-visite, with the object of ratifying their position in this ‘coffee and milk’ society. The use of such technology, as well as the introduction and acceptance of urbanity handbooks, were part of a process in which these sectors tried to ‘modernise’, reflecting related social tensions, for example, the urban-rural dichotomy or the need for ‘whitening’ themselves in the eyes of their fellow citizens. The purpose of this paper is to study the way in which photographic portraits and urbanity handbooks act in a society in which social and economic differences and distances have undergone a great upheaval since the independence process.

La perspectiva de género en el arte del Caribe colombiano se puede contextualizar con el movimiento feminista planetario. La comparación se establece en las creaciones de mujeres artistas de esta región, ya que subvierten, manifiestan y revelan con denotada libertad expresiva, no solamente sus inquietudes intimistas, sino toda una serie de cuestionamientos a las condiciones que culturalmente se le han impuesto a la mujer en el Caribe. Son dos generaciones diferentes; las primeras, analizadas en esta entrega, pueden ser catalogadas como pioneras de la perspectiva de género en el arte colombiano. Las segundas, consolidan problemáticas en apuestas individuales, de manera diaspórica y cada vez más comprometidas con el movimiento social de mujeres. En ambos casos lo hacen a través de las artes visuales, audiovisuales, performáticas e híbridas. Estamos ante artistas vanguardistas, de las artes visuales y performáticas en el Caribe colombiano; preferimos llamarlas, en ambos casos, visionarias. Gender perspective in the Colombian Caribbean art can be contextualized within the worldwide feminist movement. The comparison is established in the artwork of female artists from this region, as they subvert, demonstrate, and reveal with poignant expressive freedom, not only their intimate concerns, but a whole series of questions to the conditions that have been culturally imposed on women in the Caribbean. They come from two different generations. The first generation, analyzed in this installment, can be defined as the pioneers of gender perspective in Colombian art. The second generation consolidates issues through individual pledges in a diasporic way and increasingly committed to the social women’s movement. Both generations do this through performative, hybrid, visual and audiovisual art. These are avant-garde artists of the visual and performative art in the Colombian Caribbean. We prefer to call them, in both cases, visionaries.