Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America(Dissident Acts)

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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
Kency Cornejo is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico.  

Review :
“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 Zavalacoauthor 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