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University of California Press

About the Book

How can we create a model of politics that reaches beyond the nation-state and beyond settler-colonialism authoritarianism and neoliberalism? In Beyond the Pink Tide, Macarena Gómez-Barris explores the alternatives of recent sonic artistic activist visual and embodied cultural production. By focusing on radical spaces of potential including queer youth trans-feminist Indigenous and anticapitalist movements and artistic praxis Gómez-Barris offers a timely call for a decolonial transnational American Studies. She reveals the broad possibilities that emerge by refusing national borders in the Americas and by seeing and thinking beyond the frame of state-centered politics. Concrete social justice and transformation begin at the level of artistic affective and submerged political imaginaries—in Latin America and the United States across South-South solidarities and beyond.

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Overview ix

Preface xi

Introduction 1
Beyond the Pink Tide

1. Sounds Radical 22
Ana Tijoux Student Protests and Palestinian Solidarity

2. How Cuir Is Queer Recognition? 46
A Manifesto from the Sexual Underground

3. Art in the Shadow of Border Capitalism 68
Migration Militarism and Trans-Feminist Critique

4. An Archive of Starlight 88
Remapping Patagonia through Indigenous Memories

Conclusion 107
Rogue Waves

Reviews

“In amplifying the submerged undercurrents and inhabiting the radical spaces of queer youth and Indigenous resistances in Latin America and the Caribbean Macarena Gómez-Barris enunciates a timely call for transnational Americas studies beyond the violence of bordered nation-states. Dynamically rich and interdisciplinary, Beyond the Pink Tide examines the artistic sonic and spatial practices that shape South-South affinities and social activisms. It shows us that alternatives to the exhausted and exhausting limitations of liberal democracy are possible. In fact they are already here.”—Jodi A. Byrd author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism

“Beyond the lenses of dictatorships revolutions nation-states beyond area studies and contained geographies Macarena Gómez-Barris argues for submerged politics flows of knowledge and archipelagic understandings of the present. Deconstructing the Pink Tide’s imbrication in extractivism debt and social normativity she turns to contemporary forms of artistic activism that imagine other worlds.”—Licia Fiol-Matta author of The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music

“With laser-sharp writing Macarena Gómez-Barris provides a luminous and penetrating analysis of recent artistic and activist efforts across the Americas with an emphasis on political music film performance and visual art. Beyond the Pink Tide is a timely and compelling book that should be read by anyone seeking critical hope around questions of queer justice feminist justice anticapitalist justice and Indigenous justice.”—Julia Bryan-Wilson Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art University of California Berkeley