Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present) (Volume 7)

Beyond the Pink Tide considers a wave of artistic and curatorial efforts and social movements that refuse national borders in an effort 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 US 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, this 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 everyday practices of queer communities, anticapitalist 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.