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GAVIN O’TOOLE explores the resistance expressed by central American artists to their own erasure by US imperialist policies
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Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America
Kency Cornejo, Duke University Press, £22.99
IT is a breathtaking revelation to learn that, to date, no US academic book has offered a history of Central American art, analysed it in relation to the legacies of its own brutal colonialism in the isthmus, or examined the resulting decolonial resistance this has spawned.
Such a powerful observation by Kency Cornejo in itself represents a protest against the sub-region’s invisibility in colonial aesthetics, and the author goes on to offer potent examples of the creative backlash this has given rise to.
It is not a niche observation confined to the rarefied air of university art history departments but one with profound significance for postcolonial studies that extends far beyond the field in real time.
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