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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 paper discusses the visuality processes in Latin America since the called «decolonial turn» approach. It analyzes the structural relationship between visual practices and global power arising in the context of the modern world system. It seeks to study the relationship between visual technologies, discourses and practices and the analytics of the coloniality of power, knowledge and being. It addresses the different types of hierarchies produced through a visual dispositive in the context of the international division of technology labor, the racialization of the population, and the global economy of images.

As a teenager during my first internship at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a diversity initiative for inner-city youth, the education curator enthusiastically asked, “Who here would like to be an art historian!?” Like all the other Black and Brown inner-city kids, I laughed inside. My response was not due to a lack of art appreciation; I grew up in a family of refugees who were all self-taught artists back home in El Salvador, who taught me to draw before I learned to read. Nor was my response rooted in apathy for creative expression, for I was involved in art and theater from my elementary through my high school years. Art was such a natural part of my life that the idea of studying it seemed wasteful to me. The truth was, the internship was one of two jobs I was working to financially help my family and pay for my first year of community college. Hidden even deeper, though, I believed the museum world was not my world. I was a guanaca (the appellative given to people from El Salvador) whose family fled war and remained invisible in mainstream US Latinx history and culture. I was also from the hood—in my case Compton, California, a city made notorious by gangsta rap and police brutality. I believed that people like me guarded the art on the museum walls, cleaned the floors and bathrooms for visitors, and served the food at the high-priced café. People who looked like me, who came from where I did, did not determine what art could be, nor could we afford to buy it. We certainly did not write the history of art, for if we had, we would see ourselves represented on the walls.

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.

El retrato ha sido, a lo largo de la historia de la fotografía, un ritual cuya gramática visual está siempre condicionada por una mirada determinada. Retratamos para recordar, para fijar un instante en el tiempo. Cuando recordamos lo fotografiado convocamos de nuevo ese instante, pero, además, convocamos una realidad, un orden social específico construido por determinados actores sociales. La fotografía ha representado y legitimado en muchos momentos un patrón de poder colonial que, a través de sus estructuras de dominación, ha elaborado rígidas jerarquías sociales y raciales que han circunscrito a indios, afros, mujeres y clases populares a lo que Frantz Fanon llama la zona del No-ser. ¿Es posible recordar, entonces, a partir de la fotografía, de manera crítica y sin reproducir en tal ejercicio la matriz colonial que hizo posible la toma de la imagen?

The Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) research program is a collective project associated with Latin America. In addition to a critique of Eurocentric “colonial modernity,” the project highlights non-Eurocentric forms of knowing and being in the world. It also aims to foster alternative or decolonial thinking emerging from the lived colonial experiences of those situated “outside” Europe. This last is what MCD proponents claim differentiates it from postcolonial critiques of modernity with their emphasis on deconstruction. This review provides a brief but critical overview of the MCD project's parameters and claims. It makes a cautionary call to those tempted by “alternatives to modernity,” who might want to uncritically adopt alternative decolonial thinking. It concludes with a call for a closer and critical engagement with Latin American decolonial ideas and those they contest.

This paper analyzes the growth of gender studies in Latin America, despite facing resistance in the scientific field and from the advance of conservative policies on the continent. It also addresses the challenges that feminist research faces in colonized spaces. To develop our argument, we draw on the scholarship of feminist researchers in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, such as Veleda da Silva and Lan (2007), Silva and Vieira (2014), Silva, César and Pinto (2015), Colombara (2016), Lan (2016), Veleda da Silva (2016), Ibarra-García and Escamilla-Herrera (2016), Zaragocin-Carvajal, Moreano-Venegas, and Álvarez-Velasco (2018), and Silva and Ornat (2019). This paper also examines the difficulties that Latin American feminist geographies face in establishing their own foundations in a globalized world where the geopolitics of global knowledge of geography is increasingly structured by the epistemological centralization of the Anglophone northern hemisphere.

Discussion of Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008) by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jauregui (eds.).

This article attempts to review and synthesise the main debates in critical geography across both the Latin American and Anglo-Saxon traditions. By reviewing the main theoretical approaches including from political ecology, feminist geography, post-colonial and de-colonial approaches and the geography of motilities and migration, the aim of this article is to delineate a pan-Latin American approach to critical geography. We also consider why some approaches and topics have received greater or lesser attention in Latin American scholarship. Finally, we emphasize the importance of establishing a new transnational dialogue based on regionally situated critical research that questions and proposes new pathways in the production of knowledge from and about the region. We suggest this approach be nested in critical theory and committed to local political and territorial struggles.

Este libro reúne ensayos de doce teóricos latinoamericanos, quienes hacen una reflexión acerca de la diversidad epistémica en el mundo contemporáneo. Plantean que la decolonialidad en el siglo XXI tendrá que dirigirse a la heterarquía de las múltiples relaciones raciales, étnicas, sexuales, económicas y de género que quedaron intactas durante el siglo XX.

Este trabajo trata sobre artes visuales modernas y contemporáneas en América latina. Como ejes trasversales del texto se plantea: la decolonialidad y la antropofagia crítica. Parte desde la problematización de las estéticas decoloniales y la revisión histórica del arte latinoamericano del siglo XX, primero modernista luego posmoderno, desde una aproximación decolonial. Su intención es analizar si la opción decolonial es viable para artes visuales. Pretende analizar la propuesta de la decolonialidad, así como sus límites y sus principales riesgos. Además de establecer puentes con la ética posmoderna y la ética latinoamericana. En el capítulo dos trata como eje principal la antropofagia, tanto como movimiento artístico moderno, como propuesta de producción y aproximación crítica, cultural y artística. Mira a la antropofagia como proceso y como metodología posmoderna de resistencia. Bajo estos parámetros analiza la obra de tres artistas modernistas latinoamericanos: Joaquín Torres García, Tarsila do Amaral y Wilfredo Lam. Luego, y a partir de esta aproximación, en el capítulo tres se plantea el análisis crítico a una práctica artística: la muestra ARTNIVORA (2011) del colectivo femenino de arte La emancipada en Quito. Analiza en esta muestra, como el colectivo emplea la antropofagia crítica para buscar un argumento de emancipación de género. En esta muestra de arte actual, las estrategias de la apropiación y la cita contemporáneas son leídas como una práctica antropofágica. La intención es presentar un diferente punto de vista para la producción y la apreciación de las artes visuales y plásticas contemporáneas latinoamericanas, tanto obras de arte, como el trabajo creativo y los procesos de sus autores y autoras. El texto plantea la importancia del sentido de pertenencia con la localidad en la expresión de arte visual, si bien emplea un lenguaje cuyos códigos pueden ser leídos internacionalmente, su anclaje es su localidad y problemáticas insertas en un contexto local.

La producción visual de América Latina del siglo XX condensa una variable de emergentes artísticos diversosno solo por la complejidad histórica que caracteriza al continente sino por la pluralidad de comunidades nativas que conformaron su territorio geográfico. Así como la crítica cultural ha abonado fuertemente el terreno de las artes también han surgido otras vías de estudio enlazadas con dimensiones sociales, económicas y políticas. Cabe mencionar los aportes al ámbito de las producciones visualesde una perspectiva analítica que en el escenario latinoamericano se inscribe en el llamado ‘giro decolonial’. América Latina posee una tradición franqueada por luchas contra el colonialismo y el eurocentrismo. En la actualidad, la esfera artística contemporánea manifiesta sus posicionamientos colectivos frente a una sociedad globalizada. En este aspecto, las contribuciones de la inflexión decolonial permiten pensar otros sentidos inherentes a las formulaciones estéticas surgidas en estas regiones. Se analizarán las obras de Alfredo Jaar, Tania Bruguera y Milagros de la Torre.

Se trata de revisar las concepciones canónicas de la modernidad artística latinoamericana desde una perspectiva crítica y situada desde los estudios decoloniales y el hacer en las cátedras Historia de las Artes Visuales III e Historia de la Música III de la Facultad de Bellas Artes de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. En ambas materias se trabajan contenidossobre las artes locales, nacionales y latinoamericanas/sudamericanas, en comparación conlos movimientos europeos de la modernidad y la contemporaneidad. Este proyecto revisa algunas líneas historiográficas recientes sobre la historia y la teoría de las artes locales ylatinoamericanas. Se revisarán, también, algunos casos de producciones artísticas.

The visualization of the ways of doing what is sensible in a globalized society is one more form of discipline of sensitivity and its poetics. The border between a colonized sensibility and an insurgent sensibility becomes blurred as the international distribution of the sensible assigns specific ways capable of domesticating the sensibilities that overwhelm it. Those sensitivities not that cannot be captured neither as merchandise, nor as an archive, nor as heritage. The overflow and excess of these sensitivities that have not been caught in the networks of an international art market jeopardize, by their very existence, the categories that aesthetics, as a modern-colonial discipline has produced to conceptualize and codify the sensitivities (isolationism) neutralized their capacities to witness historically subjugated life experiences. In this sense, decolonial stasis retrace the traced path, and one of the ways of retracing is to disarticulate or at least resignify words such as "art", "artist", "work", "production", "aesthetic", or "Poetic", among others.

Stemming from Grosfoguel’s decolonial discourse, and particularly his enquiry on how to steer away from the alternative between Eurocentric universalism and third world fundamentalism in the production of knowledge, this article aims to respond to this query in relation to the field of the art produced by Latin American women artists in the past four decades. It does so by investigating the decolonial approach advanced by third world feminism (particularly scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty) and by rescuing it from—what I reckon to be—a methodological impasse. It proposes to resolve such an issue by reclaiming transnational feminism as a way out from what I see as a fundamentalist and essentialist tactic. Following from a theoretically and methodological introduction, this essay analyzes the practice of Cuban-born artist Marta María Pérez Bravo, specifically looking at the photographic series Para Concebir (1985–1986); it proposes a decolonial reading of her work, which merges third world feminism’s nation-based approach with a transnational outlook, hence giving justice to the migration of goods, ideas, and people that Ella Shohat sees as deeply characterizing the contemporary cultural background. Finally, this article claims that Pérez Bravo’s oeuvre offers the visual articulation of a decolonial strategy, concurrently combining global with local concerns.

Bringing Latin American popular art out of the margins and into the center of serious scholarship, this book rethinks the cultural canon and recovers previously undervalued cultural forms as art. Juan Ramos uses "decolonial aesthetics," a theory that frees the idea of art from Eurocentric forms of expression and philosophies of the beautiful, to examine the long decade of the 1960s in Latin America--a time of cultural production that has not been studied extensively from a decolonial perspective. Ramos looks at examples of "antipoetry," unconventional verse that challenges canonical poets and often addresses urgent social concerns. He analyzes the militant popular songs of nueva canción by musicians such as Mercedes Sosa and Violeta Parra. He discusses films that use visually shocking images and melodramatic effects to tell the stories of Latin American nations. He asserts that these different art forms should not be studied in isolation but rather brought together as a network of contributions to decolonial art. These art forms, he argues, appeal to an aesthetic that involves all the senses. Instead of being outdated byproducts of their historical moments, they continue to influence Latin American cultural production today.