Research

“‘Dishumanizing’ Art History?” In The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History, ed. Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black, 342–352. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Recognizing that many extra-western peoples do not find “human beings” to be a useful semantic category, this essay deploys the term “dishumanization” to refer to a conscious decentering of “humans” as a universally agreed upon special category of being within art history and other disciplines as well. A dishumanized art history recognizes the role that other-than-human sight plays in visual culture. Moreover, “dishumanizing” art history acknowledges that the concept “human,” although aspiring to global applicability, has been used historically to exclude and divide groups of people rather than uniting them. Consequently, “human” is an excessively narrow term that ought no longer be both naturalized and universalized. Anthropocentrism, one consequence of human exceptionalism, stands in the way of serious efforts to decolonize the academy.

Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come

There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. In this book, drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. He argues that it’s as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as it is to defeat the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance.

How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency’s cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

“Indigenous Futurisms” in The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2024)

Dr. Nicole Furtado’s chapter “Indigenous Futurisms” in the The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2024) represents a critical contribution to the emerging field of Indigenous Futurisms. In this chapter, Furtado traces the history of the term inside and outside academic circles to discuss the stakes of a future-based orientation and framework to discuss Indigenous science fiction, film, and virtual worlds. Furtado argues that speculative fiction storytelling and aesthetic methods have real effects for the Native communities that the literature and art comes from, as the praxis of world-building in sf generates radical decolonial/anti-colonial world-making.  

Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology

Jennifer A. Gonzalez is the chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Antology (2019) with co-editors, Chon Noriega, Ondine Chavoya, and Tere Romo. The anthology provides an overview of the history and theory of Chicano/a art from the 1960s to the present, emphasizing the debates and vocabularies that have played key roles in its conceptualization. Containing many landmark and foundational texts and manifestos by artists, curators, and cultural critics, the anthology traces the development of Chicano/a art from its early role in the Chicano civil rights movement to its mainstream acceptance in American art institutions. This teaching-oriented volume they address several key themes, including the politics of the U.S./Mexico border, public art practices such as posters and murals, and feminist and queer artists’ figurations of Chicano/a bodies. The essays also chart the multiple cultural and artistic influences—from American graffiti and Mexican pre-Columbian spirituality to pop art and modernism—that have informed Chicano/a art’s practice.

A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes

A vital reckoning with how we understand the basic categories of cultural expression in the digital era