Beyond the Pink Tide ― Art and Politics in the Americas

Beyond the Pink Tide considers a wave of artistic and curatorial efforts and social movements that refuse national borders to think hemispherically. In modeling a transnational American Studies, the book considers recent art and cultural production that engage politics in the Americas. In the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Latin America experienced a shift toward left leaning and progressive politics that challenged U.S. neoliberalism and hegemony. The media dubbed this turn the “pink tide,” and by 2009, leftist governments were in power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela. But by 2010, the tide began to turn as several governments failed to implement their progressive agendas, leaving the structures of capitalism intact. Beyond the Pink Tide explores new ways of understanding social and political transformation, particularly through the every day practices of queer communities, anti-capitalist movements, decolonization, feminisms, and the arts. Macarena Gómez-Barris shows readers the possibilities beyond the limited frame of state-centered politics to achieve concrete social transformation beginning at the level of artistic and social imagination—in Latin America, the United States, and the world.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, Director of Global South Center, and author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Submerged Perspectives.