Description
Book SynopsisLaura E. Pérez analyzes Latina art to explore a new notion of decolonial thought and love based on the integration of body, mind, and spirit that offers a means to creating a more democratic and just present and future.
Trade Review“Laura E. Pérez renews the precepts of 1950s Third World liberation and extends the contemporary politics of women-of-color freedom fighters into the future. She speaks with many voices—the learned scholar, the analyst, the teacher, the maker of new aesthetics, the poet, the dreamer, and the guide—and offers her readers a multitude of routes for crossing academic and subjective terrains to find new possibilities for thinking, doing, and being. An outstanding work of decolonial writing by one of the great Chicana feminist philosophers of our time,
Eros Ideologies is exactly the book I have needed to best teach my undergraduate and graduate students.” -- Chela Sandoval, author of * Methodology of the Oppressed *
“Laura E. Pérez’s newest book is a tour de force that integrates the mind-body-spirit through a series of writings that weave together the theoretical and poetical within the context of decolonization. She explores the works of artists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Ester Hernández, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood as she crosses disciplines to bring the embodied psyche to bear on questions of the erotic and the spiritual.” -- Amalia Mesa-Bains, Professor Emerita, California State University, Monterey Bay
"Pérez eloquently reflects on activism, art, philosophy, poetry, politics, and selfhood. She offers radical reappraisals of the art of Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Esther Hernández, and Liliana Wilson, among many artists whose histories have been obfuscated by Eurocentric ideas and whose praxes she creatively reexamines. This cross-disciplinary study powerfully recombines theoretical and literary sources that speak to academic practice, lived experience, and poetic meditation. Writing in multiple authorial voices, Pérez shatters the high/low art dichotomy that has often segregated Latinx art history from mainstream US culture. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty." -- L. Estevez * Choice *
"Readers unfamiliar with Latina, especially Chicana, art and politics are treated to eye-opening beauty mixed with expressions of suffering and resistance. Readers already immersed in the culturally rich world of protest art foregrounding gender and eroticisim will find new ways into the multilayered visionaries featured here." -- Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer * Religion *
"Eros Ideologies is a teacherly text: Pérez shows us not only how to look at, but also how to
be with, art of the Americas.… Certainly, the use of personal prose in scholarly publications is not unprecedented in the discourses of ethnic studies, anthropology, history, literature, art, and cultural studies; but Pérez's approach is tactical as readers enter her classroom—a space of 'heart and hearth'—where she interweaves decades of close study of theoretical and spiritual texts, lifelong contemplations of artwork, and the conversations she has maintained with the many artists who made them." -- Ella Maria Diaz * Latino Studies *
"
Eros Ideologies can serve as an approachable and valuable introduction to very urgent concerns." -- Andrew William Lee * Religion and the Arts *
"It is Pérez’s mindful contributions of eros, agape, philia,
In lak’ech, love, and respect for art that mark this book as a starting point in discussion of works by people of color, mostly Latinx and women artists. . . . As beautiful as Pérez’s writings on the subjects can be, as rich with historical connections calling upon syncretism and community care, these analyses are primers for further work to be done." -- Helman Alejandro Sosa * Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xi
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxi
1. The Social Body of Love: Crafting Decolonial Methodologies 1
2. Eros Ideologies and
Methodology of the Oppressed 17
3. Long Nguyen: Flesh of the Inscrutable 24
4. Hidden Avant-Gardes: Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Art 27
5. Freedom and Gender in Ester Hernández's
Libertad 34
6. 'Ginas in the Atelier 40
7. The Poetry of Embodiment: Series and Variation in Linda Arreola's
Vaguely Chicana 52
8. Art and Museums 56
9. The@-Erotics in Alex Donis's
My Cathedral 70
10.
Con o sin permiso (With or without Permission):
Chicana Badgirls: Las hociconas 77
11.
Maestrapeace: Picturing the Power of Women's Histories of Creativity 82
12. Decolonizing Self-Portraits of Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez 91
13. Undead Darwinism and the Fault Lines of Neocolonialism in Latina/o Art Worlds 112
14. The Inviolate Erotic in the Paintings of Liliana Wilson 126
15. The Performance of Spirituality and Visionary Politics in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa 133
16. Daughters Shaking Earth 147
17 Fashioning Decolonial Optics: Days of the Dead Walking Altars and Calavera Fashion Shows in Latina/o Los Angeles 155
18. On Jean Pierre Larochette and Yael Lurie's
Water Songs 174
19. Prayers for the Planet: Reweaving the Natural and the Social: Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's
Welcome to Flower-Landai 179
20. "Undocu Nation," Creativity, Integrity 192
21. Writing with Crooked Lines 201
Notes 211
References 245
Index 263
