DE, 2011 and 2009).
Miguel Valderrama is Professor of History at the Universidad de Chile. Among his published books are Coloquio sobre Gramsci (2016), Traiciones de Walter Benjamin (2015), and Modernismos historiográficos. Artes visuales, postdictadura, vanguardias (2008).
Isobel Whitelegg is Professor and Codirector of the MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies Programme at University of Leicester. She is the author of several book chapters and catalog essays. Her articles have appeared in Third Text and Afterall.
Series Editor's Preface
Blackwell Companions to Art History is a series of edited collections designed to cover the discipline of art history in all its complexities. Each volume is edited by specialists who lead a team of essayists, representing the best of leading scholarship, in mapping the state of research within the subfield under review, as well as pointing toward future trends in research.
A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art offers a new and insightful consideration of the art of this geographical region and its diasporas. The chapters combine to show the ways in which the established division of epochs in the histories of Euro‐American modern and contemporary art both converge with and vary from Latin American art.
This volume is divided into five chronological sections, followed by one dedicated to methodological approaches and debates. Each section signals major shifts in how art was positioned with regard to questions of national and ethnic identity, cosmopolitan modernisms and international art circuits, revolutionary movements, development, Cold War politics, and globalization. As a consequence, we see that Latin American Art can neither be collapsed into nor fully separated from Western canonical histories of modernism nor can it remain remote from global histories of the twentieth century in general.
Together, these essays combine to provide a new and thought‐provoking revision of our conception and understanding of Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art that will be essential reading for students, researchers, and teachers working on the history, theory, and practice of illustration, and in related fields. A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art is a very welcome addition to the series.
Dana Arnold, 2021
Introduction: Latin American and Latina/o Art
Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Megan A. Sullivan
Some fifteen years ago in Paris, the Czech‐born French writer Milan Kundera commented on how he imagined it must be to be a Latin American artist, writer, or intellectual. With so many countries in Latin America sharing a language, culture, and history, he envisioned a robust and fruitful exchange. Speaking from the viewpoint of the linguistic confusion of the old Austro‐Hungarian Empire, where no such community was possible, and from the perspective of a writer who had begun to write in French rather than his native Czech, he imagined something of an organic cultural, and even spiritual community; he was saddened to learn from his Peruvian interlocutor that this was often not the case (Lauer and Oquendo 2004, para. 11).
The Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski, in a 2012 interview, grouped Eastern Europe and South America together under the rubric of their shared complex relationship with the culture of Western Europe, when compared to what he saw as more radical differences in South Asia, East Asia, and Africa. “Our knowledge,” he argued in relation to Eastern Europe, “has been developed under the same umbrella as the West, under the same episteme as the Western one; we are a ‘close Other’ or ‘not the real Other’” (András 2012, para. 10).
These two brief anecdotes point to the fact that defining Latin America – or Latin American art – either as a shared sense of identity or in contradistinction to the “West” is no simple task. Luis Alberto Sánchez remarked, somewhat flippantly, “How could there not be a ‘Latin America’ when people talk so much about it?” Yet as he began to dig deeper, he noted that its supposed “indestructible unity” was rather difficult to pin down (Sánchez 2012, p. 132). Indeed, the region's very existence as an historically stable entity is hardly a given; it is neither a nation‐state nor a continent (and so neither a clearly bounded political nor geographic category), and both its meaning and the terms used to talk about it have shifted along with the purposes for which it has been used, both within and outside of the region. As the historian Michel Grobat has explained, “Americano” was embraced by colonial elites waging wars of independence against Spain in the nineteenth century, whereas “Hispano‐América” was adopted in the 1830s to differentiate the region from an increasingly expansionist United States (Grobat 2013, p. 1349). The idea of a “Latin race” developed in early nineteenth‐century Europe, and was applied to the Americas as a way of justifying France's imperial ambitions. For some, the imperial origins of the term and its status as a racial category that excludes huge swaths of the population not descended from Europeans are enough to dismiss it, whereas others have embraced its implicit power as an anti‐imperial category. Many subsequent efforts to define Latin America likewise came from outside, from the Cold War United States as well as from Latin American writers and intellectuals settled abroad. Regardless of its motivations – to pull the region into the orbit of a foreign power or to resist the imposition of those same powers – a distant view has often accompanied these discussions. Brazilian scholar Idelber Avelar (1997) argues that Latin America is “not a sovereign subject, but one which is produced in the very act of producing its object” and thus might be best approached via a genealogical method capable of tracking its various definitions and redefinitions. Latin America is a region marked by continuities – language, religion, colonial past, and its relationship to Western Europe and the United States – but also by contrasts, producing a remarkable heterogeneity and cultural richness that nevertheless jeopardize efforts to find commonalities.
Similar tensions between continuity and contradiction hold true for any effort to define “Latina/o.” Apart from residence in the United States, how are we to group such diverse cultures, histories, and politics as those of the Dominican and Puerto Rican diasporas in the US East, the Mexican‐American communities of the Southwest, the Cuban‐American enclaves in Miami and New Jersey, or the growing number of people migrating to the United States from Central America? Much like “Latin American,” “Latina/o” is not always a category used by those it purports to identify. People are far more likely to see themselves as Chicano, Puerto Rican, or Dominican and to feel a sense of shared culture with these narrower categories.
Moreover, how we might define the relationship between “Latina/o” and “Latin American”? This connection is sometimes fraught, even antagonistic (thus Mexican poet Octavio Paz's rejection of the Mexican‐American “pachuco,” the long‐standing rivalry between Cubans and Cuban‐Americans, or the increasing militarization of the US‐Mexico border); at other times, the concept of Latin America has served Latina/o communities as a means of constructing an identity and a cultural imaginary both for diasporic populations and for long‐standing citizens and residents of the United States (recall, for instance, the Chicana/o homeland of “Aztlán”; Miami, a mixture of peoples from all corners of the hemisphere, designated the unofficial capital of Latin America; or New York City as it rivals Puerto Rico itself as the place Nuyoricans call home).
If these ideas are unstable and shifting entities, then appending “art” to them only adds a further layer of complication. For decades, critics, scholars, and artists have debated whether such categories, which necessarily impose restrictions and norms onto deeply heterogeneous bodies of work, are meaningful
