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 a 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.

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

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