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Visual Disobedience
Art and Decoloniality in Central America
Kency Cornejo
Duke University Press, 2024
In Visual Disobedience, Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America. Cornejo reveals a direct line from US intervention to current forms of racial, economic, and gender injustice in the isthmus, connecting this to the criminalization and incarceration of migrants at the US-Mexico border today. Drawing on interviews with Central American artists and curators, she theorizes a form of “visual disobedience” in which art operates in opposition to nation-states, colonialism, and visual coloniality. She counters historical erasure by examining over eighty artworks and highlighting forty artists across the region. Cornejo also rejects the normalized image of the suffering Central American individual by repositioning artists as creative agents of their own realities. With this a comprehensive exploration of contemporary Central American art, Cornejo highlights the role of visual disobedience as a strategy of decolonial aesthetics to expose and combat coloniality, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, empire, and other systems of oppression.
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front cover of The Voice and Its Doubles
The Voice and Its Doubles
Media and Music in Northern Australia
Daniel Fisher
Duke University Press, 2016
Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher analyzes the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today’s Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip-hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity. 
 
 
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