The Bolivian scholar and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a
pre-eminent Latin American intellectual, world renowned for her work
in postcolonial and subaltern studies. She has long maintained that
we must acknowledge how colonial structures of domination continue to
affect indigenous identities and cultures. Even in contexts where
diversity and the value of indigenous cultures have been officially
recognized, "internal colonialism" operates as a structure
that shapes mental categories and social practices.
This book considers
this persistent colonial structure by examining artistic and popular
practices of apprehending and resisting it, arguing that in Andean
cultures there is a sustained practice of insubordinate image
production and use. Combining this visual history with other
instances of political resistance, the book offers an alternative
narrative to the history of Latin American decolonisation. This
narrative challenges the common conception that mestizaje
(race-mixing) and hybridity are liberatory formations, offering
instead a new theorisation of the complex racial configurations
produced by colonialism and its afterlives.
Given Rivera
Cusicanqui's vital contribution to critical epistemologies, this book
will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the
humanities and social sciences and to everyone concerned with the key
questions of critical theory today.