Revolutionary Aesthetics: Art, History, and Political Imagination in 20th-Century and Contemporary Latin America
Description
This seminar invites papers that explore the ways in which artistic practices across Latin America have engaged with revolutionary thought, historical memory, and political organizations that supported radical changes from the 20th century to the present. From cinema and performance to muralism, installation, and community-based art, Latin American artists have long confronted economic and political elites while reinterpreting the colonial past, reimagining liberation, and struggling against state violence.
We are particularly interested in contributions that examine how visual, performative, and interdisciplinary artistic expressions have intervened in moments of political rupture and social transformation—from the revolutionary movements of the 20th century to contemporary uprisings and grassroots struggles. How have artists documented, represented, and reinterpreted revolutions? How does aesthetics become a vehicle for historical critique, utopian imagination, or decolonial praxis?
This panel encourages reflection on:
- Revolutionary aesthetics and the legacy of emancipatory movements
- Art as historical testimony and a form of political engagement
- The role of race, gender, and class in visual and performative articulations of revolution
- Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and feminist reconfigurations of national narratives in a context of change
- Experimental and community-based practices that challenge institutional or colonial forms of cultural production
By engaging with a wide range of artistic media, this seminar aims to interrogate how Latin American artists—past and present—mobilize history and revolution as aesthetic and political forces. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches from scholars working in history, film and media studies, cultural studies, performance, political theory, and related fields.
Proposals are welcome in both English and Spanish.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jacques Coste is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Stony Brook University. He frequently writes opinion pieces, political essays, and short fiction stories for several Mexican magazines, including Nexos, Conspiratio, Expansión Política, and Confabulario. He is the author of Derechos humanos y política en México (Instituto Mora Press, 2022) and is currently working on a dissertation about Mexico's transition to democracy, focusing on popular culture and the public sphere.
Speaker Bio
Zilkia Janer received a PhD in Literature and Critical Theory from Duke University. Her research examines diverse cultural practices in the context of modernity, coloniality, and globalization. Her most recent book is The Coloniality of Modern Taste: A Critique of Gastronomic Thought. She is also the author of Puerto Rican Nation-Building Literature: Impossible Romance and Latino Food Culture.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Sanmartín is a Professor of (Afro)Spanish-American and (Afro)Caribbean Literatures at California State University, Fresno.Her publications have appeared in multiple journals and edited collections. She is the author of Black Women as Custodians of History:Unsung Rebel (M)Others in African American and Afro-Cuban Women's Writing (2014) and the coeditor of Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text:Essays on Caribbean Women's Writing (2015).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sebastián Hincapié Rojas. Sociólogo de la Universidad de Antioquia y magister en historia de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Miembro del Grupo de Investigación en Historia Social (GIHS). Actualmente es estudiante del doctorado en historia en Stony Brook University, Nueva York.
Speaker Bio
Shannon Dowd is an associate professor of Spanish at Niagara University and author of The Other Border Wars: Conflict and Stasis in Latin American Culture. She is writing a book on toxicity in contemporary Latin American literary and visual culture.
Speaker Bio
PhD student in Latin American literary and cultural studies at The Ohio State University in the USA, with an emphasis on film studies and visual arts. I hold a master's degree in cultural narratives as part of the European Union's Erasmus Mundus program and I am a philosopher from the University of Antioquia. I currently works on community cinema in Colombia. I recently published an article on the cinema of Laura Mora and her forms of countervisuality in Colombian cinema.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Anthony Pearce is a PhD Candidate at The University of British Columbia and Associated Faculty at The Ohio State University. His doctoral research examines the relationship between photography and text in the representation of the internal conflict in Peru of the 1980s and 1990s.