Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts by Juan G. Ramos (review)

Poetry, film, and music all summon revolutionary energy in particular historical moments in distinct ways. In his book Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America, Juan G. Ramos preserves the heterogeneity of these arts while simultaneously undermining the disciplinary boundaries that separate them. In this ambitious and stimulating volume, Ramos puts forward Jacques Rancière’s theory of aisthesis, or the idea that all sensory perception should be trusted as knowledge, as a way of re-centering the arts within the cultural production of leftism.

Ramos’s main argument is that we cannot grasp the networked, interdisciplinary political artworks of the 1960s using traditional epistemes handed down from colonially-driven academic disciplines. Instead, he uses the sensescape as a framework—something that, according to the Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo and the aforementioned French political theorist Rancière, bypasses the rigid structures of knowledge that are the West’s colonial legacy. Such structures, including Kantian aesthetics, exclude (and discount) the movement-galvanizing, world-changing power of popular entertainment forms like antipoetry, nueva canción, and the New Latin American Cinema. Ramos shows how these art forms created new sensory environments for thinking about what futures were possible. In four sections, Ramos reveals the poetic, filmic, and musical techniques across Latin America that appealed to the senses in order to locate “a certain indigenous spirit” in Latin America that was “the key to a future poetics of liberation” (65).

The most commendable aspect of the book is its willingness to combine seeing, hearing, and spoken dialogue into the central axis of a decolonial aesthetic program. Ramos reminds us, rightly, that the sounds, sights, smells, tastes and touches of decolonial movements across Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s were drawn from “other” places and times, such as vernacular cultural forms from these countries’ distant pasts. By focusing on how they were heard and received in the long 1960s, Ramos fashions a method for considering these entertainment forms—many of them meant for popular audiences—without “fall[ing] prey to nostalgia,” as many analyses of the global 1960s tend to do (19). In this sense, several groups stand to benefit from this book. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students might mine it for methods and bibliography for their own material on postcolonial cultural production, in an effort to expand the canon of Latin American literary and cultural history. Scholars of comparative literature, philosophy, art history, or film studies will find a methodologically adventurous account of popular arts production across Latin America. Broadly, the book also appeals to anyone interested in the history of leftism within Latin American lived experience in the long 1960s.

The text is not without problems. The first and most pressing is that, despite the book’s title, Ramos’s prose style frequently neglects the senses. Descriptions of how these poems, songs, or films might have unfolded in the moment are frequently sidelined in favor of quotations of other scholars’ work. While Ramos has done rigorous research to craft an energizing constellation of discourses—a challenge for a text with this kind of interdisciplinary scope—the book often tells rather than shows. Illustrations could also have done significant work in Chapter 3 to demonstrate how nueva canción performances might have been “sensed otherwise” (21), or in Chapter 4, to show how each of his chosen New Latin American films “engage . . . [the] other modes of sensing” that constitute a decolonial aesthetic experience (147).

Additionally, Ramos introduces gender alongside other identities and positionalities that were historically de-emphasized and subjugated under colonialism but does not directly set it aside as a framework for many of his analyses. This is surprising given that this book charts important new terrain in analyzing mixed-gender artistic networks of poets, performers, and filmmakers. An example is his discussion of both the musician and artist Violeta Parra and poet Nicanor Parra, who are brother and sister. Violeta Parra’s work in both music and the visual arts...