MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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I create, therefore I am
GAVIN O’TOOLE explores the resistance expressed by central American artists to their own erasure by US imperialist policies
FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE: Regina Jose Galindo, “¿Quien puede borrar las huellas?”, (“Who can erase the footprints?”)
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ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
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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