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This book explores the cultural and ethical implications of generative AI through the lens of Indigenous visual culture in Latin America. 

Responding to the rise of tools like DALL·E 2 and Midjourney, this groundbreaking volume documents the AIAI project (2023–), which invited a group of Indigenous artists and writers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru to critically engage with image generation technologies. Through collaborative experimentation with a range of both commercial and bespoke tools, contributors reflect on the promises and pitfalls of AI—from its potential for ‘dreaming,’ for imagining Indigenous futures, to the frustration of its ability to ‘hallucinate,’ to distort, and misrepresent Indigenous cultures.

Bringing together artists, writers, and scholars, the book challenges dominant narratives around AI and representation, using a decolonial framework rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. Structured in three parts—context and theory, creative reflections, and generative critique—it foregrounds multivocal and multilingual perspectives, resisting homogenization and reframing participatory research. This is the first book-length study of generative AI’s impact on Indigenous visual culture in Latin America, making a timely and vital contribution to global debates on AI, art, and cultural sovereignty.

Peruvian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints face the dilemma of embracing their faith while finding space to nourish their Peruvianness. Jason Palmer draws on eight years of fieldwork to provide an on-the-ground look at the relationship between Peruvian Saints and the racial and gender complexities of the contemporary Church.

Peruvian Saints discovered that the foundational ideas of kinship and religion ceased being distinct categories in their faith. At the same time, they came to see that LDS rituals and reenactments placed coloniality in opposition to the Peruvians’ indigenous roots and family against the more expansive Peruvian idea of familia. In part one, Palmer explores how Peruvian Saints resolved the first clash by creating the idea of a new pioneer indigeneity that rejected victimhood in favor of subtle engagements with power. Part two illuminates the work performed by Peruvian Saints as they stretched the Anglo Church’s model of the nuclear family to encompass familia.

A collection of essays about Indigeneity and horror in cinema, literature, and beyond.

How did Indigeneity come to be horrifying? Think of the “Indian burial ground” trope, a staple of 1970s horror cinema, not to mention decades of Western films and fictions that made “savage Indians” the face of fear in popular culture. Can horror do something else in the hands of Indigenous people? Creators such as Eden Robinson and Jeff Barnaby have self-consciously turned to horror to tell new kinds of stories, stories that question who is a monster and what constitutes the monstrous.

Horror and Indigeneity explores representations of Indigenous people in settler horror texts and in the growing corpus of horror by Indigenous writers and filmmakers. Widely spanning time periods and media, the contributors to this edited volume address themes such as cannibalism, eco-horror, historical trauma, and contemporary antiracism as they relate to classical horror cinema and recent works such as The Dead Can’t Dance, Lovecraft Country, and Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians. Also featuring interviews with Jones and director T. J. Cuthand, Horror and Indigeneity rethinks the terror of the Other in potent and provocactive terms.

Winner of a NWSA/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize

Groundbreaking and ambitious, Indians on Indian Lands presents the case for holding Indian diasporas accountable for acts of violence within a colonial settler nation.

In The Limits of Latin American Philosophy: Indigeneity and the Mestizo Question, Jorge Sanchez-Perez argues that the distinction between Latin American philosophy and Indigenous philosophy from Latin America has been neglected. While Latin American philosophers have succeeded in carving out a conceptual space in the landscape of Western philosophy, a space in which issues positions relevant to Latin American concerns are discussed and debated, this space has failed to sufficiently acknowledge the differences with Indigenous philosophy from Latin America. Although both fields can point to some, even if contested, geographical shared space, they emerge from different conceptual backgrounds. While Latin American philosophy emerges as a project in relation, even if as a rejection, to Europe, Indigenous philosophy from Latin America predates the existence of Europe by thousands of years. By defining the countours of Latin American philosophy, The Limits of Latin American Philosophy aims to make room for discussions of Indigenous philosophy from Latin America.

Through the concept of mestiza/o melancholia, scholar Gabriela Spears-Rico offers a new way to think about the relationship between mestizaje and indigeneity in Mexico. For Spears-Rico, the concept is a longing for the lost part of one’s identity, manifested in touristic visits and material appropriations of folklorized indigeneity, yet unconcerned with political reparations for Indigenous people.

Relying on a rich ethnography in mestiza/o and P’urhépecha pueblos in Michoacán, the book examines mestiza/o mourning and melancholia as it appears in Day of the Dead tourism and in Virgin of Guadalupe worship among Mexican mestizos. This book centers Indigenous resistance, articulating a P’urhépecha critique of regional necropolitics and obstinate appropriations, arguing for the need to decolonize mestizaje. A deep conversation with P’urhépecha dissent, this book elevates the need for solidarity with current Indigenous movements in a region fraught by extractive settler colonialism.

Mestiza/o Melancholia challenges readers to rethink identity, tourism, and belonging in Mexico.

How were indigenous social practices deemed queer and aberrant by colonial forces?

In Queering Colonial Natal, T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natalestablished by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal provinceto show how settler regimes “queered” indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy; restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship; and assigning only Europeans to government schools. 

Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natal’s white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims. 

Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each group’s claim to authority. 

Prize for Best Book in Environmental Studies, Latin American Studies Association
Honorable mention for Best Book Prize in Visual Culture, Latin American Studies Association
Honorable mention for Best Book on Mexico, Latin American Studies Association 

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis.

Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, historian Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century. 

This work traces how scientific intellectuals studied and debated what it meant to know and claim the flora that sprang from Mexican soil—ranging from individual plants to forests and vegetated landscapes—and the importance they placed on indigeneity. It also points to the short- and long-term consequences of these efforts. López draws on archival and published sources produced from the sixteenth century through the start of the twentieth century and gives special attention to the use of visual images such as scientific illustrations and landscape art. López employs the term “visualization” in recognition of the degree to which officials, botanists, and draftsmen produced imagery and also how they and others viewed nature.

Rooted in Place reveals how scientific endeavors were not just about cataloging flora but were deeply intertwined with the construction of identity and the political landscape at three pivotal moments in Mexican history.

A sophisticated analysis of an influential Indigenous political ideology.

When the political ideology known as “Indianism” developed in Bolivia in the 1960s, it was premised on a rejection of Bolivian nationalism. Over the ensuing decades, however, it underwent several mutations as it moved out of a close circle of intellectuals to grip the urban masses that brought Evo Morales—the first Indigenous president—to power in 2006.

The Social Life of Indianism offers a fresh perspective by examining Bolivian Indigenous politics through the lens of political ideology. Through an ethnographic study of Indianism in the city of El Alto, Tathagatan Ravindran shows how canonical Indianism—the original ideology that rejects Bolivia as enslaver of the Indian nation—provided philosophical ballast for exponents of a more popular folk Indianism that accommodates the Bolivian state and pursues Indigenous empowerment within it. Synthesizing approaches from several disciplines, Ravindran demonstrates how canonical Indianism was not refuted or supplanted; it refracted, in the broader public, into a new common sense. A sophisticated analysis of a complex political landscape, The Social Life of Indianism brings much-needed nuance to one of the most prominent forms of Indigenous ideology and offers a unique framework for analyzing political ideologies across the contemporary world.

An ethnography of the decolonization of Maya-ness.

On the Yucatan Peninsula today, undergraduates are inventing a new sense of being Maya by studying linguistics and culture in their own language: Maya. In this bold theoretical intervention informed by ethnographic research, Catherine Rhodes argues that these students are undoing the category of modernity itself. Created through colonization of the Americas, modernity is the counterpart to coloniality; the students, Rhodes suggests, are creating decoloniality’s companion: “demodernity.”

Disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, history, and archaeology invented “the Maya” as an essentialized ethnos in a colonial, modern mold. Undoing Modernity follows students and their teachers as they upset the seemingly stable ethnic definition of Maya, with its reliance on a firm dichotomy of Maya and modern. Maya linguistics does not prove that Maya is modern but instead rejects the Maya-ness that modernity built, while also fostering within the university an intellectual space in which students articulate identity on their own terms. An erudite and ultimately hopeful work of interdisciplinary scholarship that brings linguistic anthropology, Mesoamerican studies, and critical Indigenous studies into the conversation, Undoing Modernity dares to imagine the world on the other side of colonial/modern ideals of Indigeneity.

How the “ecoprimitivist” tourism boom of the early 1990s reshaped the lives of young Kichwa men

We Are Important People Now illuminates the trajectories and life experiences of young Napo Kichwa men who have worked as tour guides in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon, in the wake of the “ecoprimitivist” tourism boom of the early 1990s. Anthropologist Ernesto J. Benitez analyzes the socioeconomic situation of these men and the motivations and desires that drive them to seek service-based employment. Benitez discusses how the tour guides go through complex processes of transition and adjustment navigating tourists’ expectations, familial obligations, and desires for socioeconomic mobility. The opportunities for self-transformation are at once attractive and fraught with contradictions. They now see their indigeneity as an asset, but their urban lifestyles, pursuits of intimate relationships with foreign tourists, and sometimes-dismissive attitudes toward Kichwa people in rural Ecuador distance them socially from the broader Kichwa population. 

Importantly, the book interrogates the possibilities and limitations that produce—and are produced by—such emergent forms of identity formation, situating the current period within a broader analysis of the colonial and postcolonial history of the area. It pays special attention to how different processes of interaction with and incorporation into colonial and state productive and biopolitical regimes have impacted the historical production and performance of Kichwa ethnic and gendered identities in the Upper Amazon region. A wide swath of anthropologists, Latin Americanists, and gender and Indigenous studies specialists will be edified by this timely and accessible narrative.