Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future

Analyzes socially engaged art practices worldwide, linking them to decolonial struggle and critique.

Analyzing the confluence between coloniality and activist art, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future argues that there is much to gain from approaching contemporary politically committed art practices from the angle of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles. These struggles inspired a vast yet underexplored set of ideas about art and cultural practices and did so decades before the acceptance of radical artistic practices by mainstream art institutions. Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that art activism has been confined to a limited spatial and temporal framework—that of Western culture and the modernist avant-garde. Assumptions about the individual creator and the belated arrival of derivative avant-garde aesthetics to the periphery have generated a narrow view of “political art” at the expense of our capacity to perceive a truly global alternative praxis. Garrido Castellano then illuminates such a praxis, focusing attention on socially engaged art from the Global South, challenging the supposed universality of Western artistic norms, and demonstrating the role of art in promoting and configuring a collective critical consciousness in postcolonial public spheres.

"Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future is breathtakingly original in its proposal of a historically grounded decolonial lens; one that reanimates socially-engaged art practice as global, heterogenous, and context-specific." — Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, the Museum of Modern Art

"As neoconservatives and progressives vie over the shape of the future, Carlos Garrido Castellano beckons readers into an urgent, unfinished dialogue among active practitioners of decolonization. From sustained encounters with the 1960s anticolonial thought and praxis of Cape Verdean and Guinea Bissauan Amílcar Cabral and Trinidadian C. L. R. James to contemporary socially engaged Chilean, Indonesian, Latin American, Lebanese, and Ugandan aesthetic collectives, we enter into the unpredictable processes of specific collaborative experiments in radical Global Southern creative imagining. Giving material shape to how colonial 'pasts'—and those of brutal, civil conflict—haunt the present, such insurgent cultural workers refute empty claims to the demise of art’s potential for social transformation. They and Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future urge us to join in reigniting the collective, socially led aesthetics that framed producing radically emancipated culture, human relations, institutions, and networks as nothing less than the creation of a new society. A fascinating, galvanizing, and important read!" — Jane Anna Gordon, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement

"Boldly interrupting academic and mainstream art world attempts at normalizing socially engaged art, Carlos Garrido Castellano re-envisions its complex, historical narrative as an anti-colonial project that stretches from Beirut, Jakarta and Kampala, to Havana, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro. Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future points us to an important re-theorization of this influential contemporary art practice, making his book essential reading for all those seeking to map-out the transformative potential of cultural politics now, and in the decades to come." — Gregory Sholette, author of The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art

"Carlos Garrido Castellano's Art Activism for an Anti-Colonial Future is a groundbreaking work. Castellano's book points the way for the future development of socially engaged art scholarship, as it expands beyond the geographic parochialism of Europe and North America and comes to terms with the rich complexity of artistic practice, and resistance, beyond the institutional artworld. The question of the post- and anticolonial is one of the most pressing issues in engaged art theory today, and Castellano is clearly at the cutting edge of this important research." — Grant Kester, author of Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art

"Carlos Garrido Castellano's new book is both timely and timeless. Grappling in a most fluid and elegantly expressed way with social, aesthetic, and political problems of 'socially engaged art' across the planet, he is able to illuminate and suggest solutions to longstanding problems that have beset artists, writers, and intellectuals of all stripes in our globally connected world. He writes in a completely accessible way about deeply concerning issues. This book is a must read for anyone interested in contemporary art and culture." — Edward J. Sullivan, New York University

Carlos Garrido Castellano is Lecturer in the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies Department at University College Cork in Ireland. He is the author of Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere.