Introduction: Against Visual Coloniality
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Published:July 2024
The introduction locates the erasure, cultural negation, and historical voids of Central Americans within a broader system of colonial violence, which is theorized as “visual coloniality.” Visual coloniality evidences the concrete ways that colonization and its institutions, including the mainstream art world, have appropriated art, images, and creativity into a tool of domination in the service of colonization. The chapter elaborates on three mechanisms of visual coloniality—visual erasure, visual thingification, and visual extractivism—that facilitated enslavement, cultural theft, historical removal, and other practices of dehumanization for racialized and colonized peoples. Establishing how visuality has been used in the service of colonization and empire sets the stage for a discussion of visual disobedience as a tactic of resistance within a broader decolonial aesthetics, in both epistemic and ontological ways.