Global Coloniality Of Power In Guatemala

In this engaged critique of the geopolitics of knowledge, Egla Martínez Salazar examines the genocide and other forms of state terror such as racialized feminicide and the attack on Maya childhood, which occurred in Guatemala of the 1980s and '90s with the full support of Western colonial powers. Drawing on a careful analysis of recently declassified state documents, thematic life histories, and compelling interviews with Maya and Mestizo women and men survivors, Martinez Salazar shows how people resisting oppression were converted into the politically abject. At the center of her book is an examination of how coloniality survives colonialism—a crucial point for understanding how contemporary hegemonic practices and ideologies such as equality, democracy, human rights, peace, and citizenship are deeply contested terrains, for they create nominal equality from practical social inequality. While many in the global North continue to enjoy the benefits of this domination, millions, if not billions, in both the South and North have been persecuted, controlled, and exterminated during their struggles for a more just world.

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 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.

This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world. Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national citizens that are more susceptible to genocidal projects? There are powerful arguments within philosophy that in order to be the subjects of our own lives, we must constitute ourselves specifically as national subjects and organize ourselves into nation states. Additionally, there are other genocidal structures of human society that spill beyond historically limited episodes. The chapters in this volume address the significance—moral, ethical, political—of the fact that our very form of agency suggests or requires these structures. The contributors touch on topics including birthright citizenship, contemporary mass incarceration, anti-black racism, and late capitalism. Logics of Genocide will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, critical theory, genocide studies, Holocaust and Jewish studies, history, and anthropology.

This book examines the social construction and representation of ‘youth on the move’ in the context of the migration process, using El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as a case study to reinterpret the immigration process under the frameworks of coloniality and epistemologies of the South. The discussion surrounding Central American migrants has increased exponentially with the emergence of the caravans and the increased security measures along Mexican and US borders. Explicitly focused on the plight of children and young people, the examination of migration includes exploring the global context and dynamics that influence migratory trends and framing Central American migrant processes and youth strategies of survival and resistance. Contributing to existing conversations about the migration of people from Central America, this text seeks to understand the phenomenon’s roots. This book will interest scholars and students across the social sciences, particularly those studying the global dynamics of power, and migration and governance, as well as practitioners involved in decision-making with governments and international organizations.

What makes curating feminist organizing? How do curators relate to contemporary feminist concerns in their local conditions and the globalized artworld? The book brings together twenty curatorial case studies from diverse regions of the globe. Reflecting their own curatorial projects or analyzing feminist-inspired exhibitions, the authors in this book elaborate feminist curating as that which is inspired to challenge gender politics not only within but also beyond the doors of the museum and gallery. Connecting their wider feminist politics to their curatorial practices, the book provides case studies of curatorial practice that address the legacies of racialized and ethnic violence, including colonialism; which seek to challenges the state's regulation of citizenship and sexuality; and which realize the drive for economic justice in the organizations and roles in which curators work. The settings in which this work is done range from university art galleries to artist-run spaces and educational or activist programmes. This collection will be enjoyed by those studying and researching curating, exhibitions, socially and ecologically engaged contemporary art practices, and feminist transnational movements in diverse geographic contexts. The essays are of relevance to practicing curators, critical cultural practitioners, and artists.

Indigenous allies helped the Spanish gain a foothold in the Americas. What did these Indian conquistadors expect from the partnership, and what were the implications of their involvement in Spain's New World empire? Laura Matthew's study of Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala--the first study to focus on a single allied colony over the entire colonial period--places the Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec conquistadors of Guatemala and their descendants within a deeply Mesoamerican historical context. Drawing on archives, ethnography, and colonial Mesoamerican maps, Matthew argues that the conquest cannot be fully understood without considering how these Indian conquistadors first invaded and then, of their own accord and largely by their own rules, settled in Central America. Shaped by pre-Columbian patterns of empire, alliance, warfare, and migration, the members of this diverse indigenous community became unified as the Mexicanos--descendants of Indian conquistadors in their adopted homeland. Their identity and higher status in Guatemalan society derived from their continued pride in their heritage, says Matthew, but also depended on Spanish colonialism's willingness to honor them. Throughout Memories of Conquest, Matthew charts the power of colonialism to reshape and restrict Mesoamerican society--even for those most favored by colonial policy and despite powerful continuities in Mesoamerican culture.

The authors focus on the multidimensionality of gender in conflict, yet they also prioritise the experience of women given both the changing nature of war and the historical de-emphasis on women's experiences.

Drawing from long term ethnographic work and practice in Guatemala, this incisive and interdisciplinary text brings in perspectives from critical disability studies, postcolonial theory and critical development to explore the various interactions and dynamics between disability and extreme poverty in rural areas.

In the past few decades, indigenous movements throughout the Americas have become the cornerstone of popular mobilizations. These movements have made their mark in diverse institutional and political landscapes. Although this prominence has been considered a recent phenomenon, it is but the latest example of the ongoing creativity of indigenous peoples in their efforts to achieve civil rights and legal recognition as differentiated cultural entities. Their struggle has changed the makeup of Latin American nation-states to the point that these can no longer be conceived in conventional terms, that is, as culturally and linguistically homogenous. This book focuses on the emergence and political-cultural implications of Guatemala's Maya movement. It explores how, since the 1970s, indigenous peoples have been challenging established, hegemonic narratives of modernity, history, nation, and cultural identity as these relate to the indigenous world. For the most part, these narratives have been fabricated by non-indigenous writers who have had the power not only to produce and spread knowledge but also to speak for and about the Maya world. Contemporary Maya narratives promote nationalisms based on the reaffirmation of Maya ethnicity and languages that constitute what it means to be Maya in present-day society, as well as political-cultural projects oriented toward the future.

'Local Histories/Global Designs' is an extended argument about the '"coloniality' of power. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies.